June has arrived. Here are a few more films.

A Woman’s Face (1938), directed by Gustaf Molander. This is an early Ingrid Bergman Swedish film, and it was remade a few years later in Hollywood with Joan Crawford. The story follows a young woman whose face has been badly burned and disfigured in a fire when she was a child. She is embittered and enters a life of crime. Events transpire that bring her to the attention of an accomplished plastic surgeon. This doctor operates on the woman and restores her beauty. She then becomes a governess in the home of a wealthy consul; her intention is to participate in the murder of the young boy, the consul’s son, in order that her criminal gang can benefit. As you might expect, things do not work out the way the gang hopes they will work out. Near the end, we have a magnificent set piece, a sleigh chase at night through the snow and across a frozen lake. The film is suitably dark for this season of noir. Although Anna (Bergman) leaves a life of crime, she also leaves the possibility of marriage behind as she embarks for a life of helping others in China at the end of the film.

 

"Not a film, but a two-hour study of sofas and pianos." That's how one critic described Carl Theodor Dreyer's final film, Gertrud (1964). The film does have pianos and sofas as part of its sparse settings. It also has a mirror, a statue, some paintings, a table, chairs, and a fireplace. All of these bits of furniture and art are placed carefully, deliberately, in order to serve the emotional intensity of the film. This is a slow burn of a film. The opening scene lasts just over twenty minutes, and another long take of Gertrud and her young lover lasts some ten minutes. The characters move slowly; they appear enervated. And yet they are insistent, stubborn, focused, intent on their desires. This is a film about desire. It stirs below the placid surface. For the eponymous character desire is everything, and as we know, desire cannot find satisfaction, completion, fulfillment. Amor omnia perhaps, but such a slogan only reminds us of melancholy, the melancholia of a world in which everything is unattainable, just out of reach, but always beckoning, leading one on. This film might remind us of work by Ingmar Bergman, or by Lars von Trier. It has light swallowed by darkness. The sets are spare and articles stand out as symbols. The mirror with its rococo frame is a reminder of illusion as well as vanity. The statue in the park is a reminder of both modesty and the pleasures of the flesh Gertrud talks about. Indeed, this is a film that talks. Scenes give us two or three people, moving slowly if at all, talking to each other, not looking at each other, confined in their own circles of desire. The principal characters are artists and politicians, a mixture sure to find trouble. Gertrud, unable to find the happiness she longs for, travels to Paris and joins a group of intellectuals who sublimate their desire in intellectual pursuit. Still, in the end, amor omnia.

 

Cold War (2018), directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. The first third of this film is dazzling in its cinematography. Well the whole film, shot in monochrome, offers superior beauty in its compositions and lighting, but the first third is especially impressive. Shots are reminiscent of photographs by Brassai or scenes from Tarkovsky. Just to look at this film is to have an experience worthwhile. The story spans the years 1949-1964 when the Cold War was growing colder. The two main characters are a pianist and composer/arranger who at the beginning is traveling the countryside looking for raw folk talent and music, and a young woman who hopes to find a place among the many other young people from the countryside looking to enter a folk group under the tutelage of the pianist and his company. These two fall in love, and the film follows their strained and complicated relationship over the next 15 years, taking them, separately, to Paris, Yugoslavia, Italy, and finally back to Poland where they had begun their journies. Along the way, the cold hand of authoritarianism grows colder and as it does the lives of these two become less and less workable. The cinematography and the music also change becoming less shining and more cacophonous until we are back where we started in a ruined church. In the beginning we saw this place in winter, but it had striking beauty; at the end we see this place in another season and the beauty has diminished, just as the lives of these two have become less capable of moving forward.

The Passion of Anna (1969), directed by Ingmar Bergman. In Swedish the title is "A Passion," a more apposite title because the film explores passion or its absence in not one, but at least four people. Each of these people is played by a familiar Bergman actor. This is Bergman territory we know well, intense inner drama. The backdrop of images - water, snow, dead animals, fire, alcohol, photographs, the island, a sun dog - keep reminding us of rage and anger and desire and accident and generally existential hollowness. These are people out on a limb hacking away at that limb heedless of the fall once they have hacked through that limb. One sequence shows us famous footage from the Vietnam War on a TV screen, footage that captured the attention of the world. It shows the shooting of a young Vietnamese person. Just what this piece of historical actuality is doing in the film is worth asking. Here we have the savagery of human interaction as starkly evident as possible. This is a film replete with dislocation, loneliness, aimlessness, and anchoress desire. As the film's final shot indicates, the film is about disintegration. If the film has to do with passion, then it is passion on the wane, passion unable to find purchase, unable to find fulfilment. It is lots of fun.

 

The Serpent's Egg (1977), directed by Ingmar Bergman. The most noteworthy aspect of this film for me is the cinematography by Sven Nykvist. It is crisp, sharp-edged, and stark, a perfect expression of the film's dark message - the coming of social and political darkness. The centre cannot hold. This is Bergman's only Hollywood film, the one film he made while on self-imposed exile from Sweden. It does not work for me, partly because David Carradine seems somehow in the wrong environment. However, the echoes of such German films as M, The Blue Angel, Pandora's Box, and Lang's Mabuse films catches the viewer with what those films missed, the serpent lurking in the Germany of 1923. The only reality is, indeed, fear. Touching on the dislocation caused by social division and xenophobia, this film resonates today in a way, perhaps, not available in 1977. It may not be the Bergman we associate with spiritual turmoil and psychological angst, but it does serve up its share of angst. Constant images of bars and narrow labyrinthian hallways and crowds and police/soldiers remind us of entrapment. The hospital archives are reminiscent of Kafka, and of course the medical and psychological experiments evoke the period's interest in eugenics, and mind control. The more I think of it, the more terrifying this film becomes.