Once upon a time, the quintessential arthouse experience was seeing Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and arguing about it afterwards. These days, college students are more likely to have epiphanies watching The Matrix on DVD, while hardcore cinephiles tend to get their metaphysical fix from Robert Bresson or Andrei Tarkovsky. Bergman's sky-high reputation in the '50s and '60s may have contributed to a backlash.
Criterion has chosen to launch its new subdivision, Eclipse, with a five-DVD box set of his '40s work. It's a good idea, since these films offer a glimpse of a period when he was still a filmmaker like any other, rather than an iconic culture hero. The packaging is rather bare-bones — its only bonus feature is a page of well-written liner notes accompanying each disc — but this austerity suits the films.
Judging from Port of Call, Bergman's reputation as the master of Prozac cinema is well-earned. A bleak tale about Berit (Nine-Christine Jonsson), a troubled woman with a reform-school background who falls in love with a sailor, its most memorable quality is its depiction of female self-loathing.
A final burst of optimism does little to leaven the mood.
If Bergman's oeuvre is suffused with depression — perhaps more so than any major filmmaker aside from Rainer Werner Fassbinder — its empathy is less often discussed but equally strong. To Joy begins with a tragedy and then flashes back seven years to show the start of an unhappy marriage. Its anti-hero Stig (Stig Olin) cheats on his wife and even slaps her around, yet the film never portrays him as a villain. Instead, it takes care to show how his problems are rooted in insecurity about his credentials as a
musician: he fears mediocrity and takes it out on his wife. As glum as it is, its emotional landscape feels three-dimensional and realistic.
You can sense Bergman trying out various voices and genres in these early works. His directorial debut, Crisis, proves that he didn't emerge fully formed as a great filmmaker. Even Eclipse's liner notes are apologetic about it. Most of its weaknesses stem from its trite narrative, which emphasizes the virtues of small-town life over Stockholm decadence.
Thirst is the artiest film in this package, but it too is grounded in melodrama. Bergman was neither the first nor the last director to realize that cross-cutting parallel storylines added a sense of gravity to his work:
Thirst contrasts the decaying marriage of a couple traveling across Europe with the troubles of the wife's friend. Port of Call dabbles in neo-realism, pointedly depicting the struggles of working-class life by including near-documentary scenes of labor on the docks and a daring-for-the-time subplot involving abortion.
A love triangle between a boarding-school student, his vicious Latin teacher and an alcoholic woman, Torment, made in 1944, marked Bergman's debut as a screenwriter, although Alf Sjoberg directed it. It's the best film in this set. Drawing on '20s German Expressionism, Sjoberg and cinematographer Martin Bodin created a moody, shadow-filled look. While not a film noir, it feels like a product of many of the same influences and stylistic tics that fed '40s American crime films. Although its grim tone suggests the dominant mood of later Bergman work, one doesn't need auteurist hindsight to see the film's merit. Without denying Bergman's contribution, Sjoberg's direction, which alternates patterns of light and dark as visual counterpoint to the characters' tangled emotional manipulations, is the real star here. — Steve Erickson