2000: 
2013: 
written and directed by Ingmar Bergman
Criterion #60. Autumn Sonata.
Find your porn name! Here’s how:
1. Take the title of the last Ingmar Bergman movie you watched.
(Summer Interlude. Wild Strawberry. Fanny Alexander. Saraband. And of course “Shame.”)
This is a through-the-wringer movie where people devastate one another. It belongs to the “interpersonal emotional exorcism” genre, one of the leading dramatic forms of the 20th century.
When I was younger I was cynical about the prevalence of this genre and its characteristic sights and sounds. It seemed like just so much crocodile angst. In 2000, walking out of the theater after True West, one of my companions dismissed it, annoyed, saying something like “it was just another one of these plays where civility devolves into histrionics.” That stuck with me as a succinct expression of the aesthetic skepticism I had always felt.
Well, that was a long time ago. In the intervening years, I’ve become a bit of an expert in adult angst. And it turns out it’s no myth. There actually is such a thing as needing help achieving emotional release. As a kid, of course, I could hardly imagine such a condition. The possibility of bawling was always all too close at hand; I was hard at work on being more repressed. The idea that anybody might need to be guided back to their pain and tears was as absurd as the idea that people might need to be guided back to peeing.
But sometimes that’s just what they need. So now I understand why there are hundreds upon hundreds of plays and movies about people peeing, peeing, peeing like they’ve never peed before. “Mother, look at me! Look at me! All my life you’ve denied that I have to pee! But look! Look at me go! See how you like it now!” It turns out that as one ages and tightens there can arise a need for assistance.
That, it seems to me, is the value of brutal, painful, dramatic catharsis. A movie is a safe way to have tears wrung from you, which creates an opportunity to smuggle out some of your own, the ones that have been weighing you down. At several points while watching Autumn Sonata my eyes were wet with empathetic pain and something like shame: the feeling that the hard emotions in the movie were awfully close to home for me, and embarrassing and/or therapeutic as such (the two are nearly the same thing).
But as Bergman’s anger and/or self-disgust ascended into more and more outlandishly vindictive extremes, I found my empathy and my eyes drying up. This was someone else’s catharsis, not mine.
In fact, for all its artistic nuance and obvious intellectual class, I’m not even sure it’s a particularly enlightened or purposeful catharsis. It seems like it’s made of private bitterness that hadn’t yet mellowed enough to be molded, tempered, countered, and thus turned into something useful to an audience. There are places where the self-pity becomes too pure, which is to say too grotesque, to see any other way.
Now, I should acknowledge that I personally have, in my adulthood, already managed to break the seal on my own pit of shame and resentment, analogous to the stuff unleashed by the two characters in this movie. So I am not necessarily in the market to be shocked into self-recognition by art; I’m already too familiar with this territory. And facing it is hard and a big deal, so for a movie to show it being hard and a big deal seems right and worthwhile. But for those who haven’t yet broken that seal, such a movie ought to encourage them to take the risk, or at least give them some sense of what it’s worth. Autumn Sonata is all about the ordeal of admitting your pain but seems quite pessimistic as to whether therapeutic change is actually possible as a result. The ending brings the audience to the question of hope, but scrupulously avoids answering it, remaining grim-faced. In fact it strongly hints that daring to express their inner feelings has only served to further alienate these characters, both as individuals and in relation to one another.
I, and I think the entire psychological tradition all the way back to Freud, would disagree that that’s how things work. People can heal. So why is Bergman insistent on keeping things unrelievedly bleak?
Answer: because that was the state of mind in which he made it. The screenplay is the expression of a single emotional state, not a development. The film’s universe is static: pain is felt, relief is speculated about but never realized. According to the Criterion essay, in Bergman’s original treatment of the script, he wrote that at the end of the exorcism, “the daughter gives birth to the mother.” That sounds like a much healthier vision. But he apparently couldn’t figure out what that would entail, so instead he ends it where it began. That’s a spiritual block as much as a creative one. And, you know, I can find spiritual blocks sympathetic as such.
But that’s behind-the-scenes information. Within the movie there’s no such excuse. The movie is following the playbook called “I Know You Don’t Want This But You Need It,” mercilessly harping on things that make you feel bad… but it climaxes in the extreme register of a revenge fantasy, and then abruptly turns aside, petulantly saying, “well, actually, maybe you didn’t need it.” Which left me feeling like, “well dammit, maybe I didn’t.”
It is exquisitely put together, with many beautifully sensitive details, and the acting is very fine. It is art, and no mistaking. But it goes over the top. It’s ultimately unfair, unkind to its characters, and thus to its audience.
That all said (!):
I got the sense that this emotional imbalance, this dysfunction of the cathartic pattern, was not actually precious to Bergman. I got the sense that what he really cared about was just the premise — a mother and daughter confronting one another — and the unkindness and pessimism were simply what his subconscious presented to him in the course of trying to work out the dramatic consequences. And this makes it easier for me to accept that it ends up wrong, because, in a way, that’s incidental. The movie is actually front-weighted. The exposition of the characters as they present themselves in ordinary life is the part it loves best. You can feel it. Despite the red-eyed melodrama of what follows, that stuff’s not actually the point.
Put another way: the subtler first half of the movie is excellent, and the noisier, more hurtful second half of the movie can be read as the mishandled denouement.
That’s what it’s about, by the way: 40-ish Liv Ullmann is the daughter, 60-ish Ingrid Bergman is the mother, and they vent at each other about how they’re each damaged. This Be The Verse.
Also on the scene is a sister with some kind of terrible degenerative disease, just to up the misery. Mission accomplished!
I guess it’d be fair to say that I’m very torn. Your response will depend on whether you can just let this stuff slide as a kind of poetry or are going to take it seriously. If you can let it slide, by all means watch. If you’re going to take it to heart, beware: this isn’t a happy person’s movie. I think I basically said the same about The Seventh Seal: “that’s aesthetically all well and good but how does this morbidity benefit anyone?”
Autumn Sonata is very beautiful to look at; at least on the new restored Blu-ray it is. The cinematography by Sven Nykvist is painterly, evoking Vermeer and probably other specific artists I can’t identify. The lighting is remarkably lovely throughout. Cutaways and flashbacks get dreamy expressionist lighting, with whole scenes swimming in red or brown or white, but where other movies handle such effects cartoonishly, here the dreamy scenes are just as tasteful and fully inhabited as the more naturalistic lighting of the main action. The movie is, just like a Vermeer, simultaneously modest and luxurious to look at. Its beauty makes the best possible case for its dramatic concerns. Maybe the beauty can stand alone.
Probably not the whole way through, but for a scene or two it can. The scene when daughter and mother play Chopin at each other is really wonderful and stands well apart from any of my reservations about what comes later. One of the best and most sensitive uses of onscreen classical music that I’ve ever seen.
While I’m on the subject: The “sonata” in the title refers to the form of the drama itself, not to any actual piece. (I thought to link to Wikipedia’s “Sonata Form” article here but it’s too confusing to be helpful. So just trust me.) I take Bergman to mean that there are the two subjects, daughter and mother, and a third element, connective tissue, in the form of the crippled sister. The two subjects get their exposition in a minor key, then everyone goes to bed and the nightmarish development starts, which of course complicates and troubles all the material and ultimately brings it to crisis. Then we have a brief straight recapitulation of the opening situation, with the two subjects now linked but unresolved and with a stronger feeling of tragedy. The husband provides a stately intro and corresponding coda. (The Chopin prelude played onscreen has a similar minor-key emotional trajectory but no second theme and no development.)
This is my own analysis; Criterion doesn’t help on this count, which they ought to have. You might argue that this strong formal conception contradicts my claim above that the ultimate trajectory isn’t really the point. But I think it bears it out: in looking for a way to make his movie work, Bergman took refuge in a fatalistic formal pattern, rather than have to resolve any of the emotional problems on their own terms. He just wanted the art to work out, not the characters.
In a way the movie arises out of the inherent natures of famous actresses Liv and Ingrid. The movie can be seen as simply a study of the tension between their two types. Both performances wonderfully live up to this vision, all the way up to the peaks of intensity, but especially in the more restrained passages. You could perhaps edit out some of the most extreme stuff and make a quieter and subtler movie, a less insistently painful movie, that I would admire unequivocally. (I mean, you couldn’t really. But close to it.)
Ingrid Bergman had a real actor in her, it turns out. It feels as though she is tapping into a level of honesty never previously called for. That alone could be enough to recommend this movie. Of course, I’ve only ever seen her in her most glamorized and impersonal Hollywood roles, so my surprise may be unfair to her. In a pleasant 1981 interview included on the disc (which seems to have been previously unavailable), she mentions how shooting Casablanca was completely infuriating because nobody had decided what the plot was: since nobody could tell her what her character felt, she didn’t know what to play; so, she says, when she watches it now she is dismayed to see her face with absolutely no expression on it. This gave me some thoughts about how Casablanca is a magical iconic film for exactly this reason, that it is an expressionless dream in which surreal Hollywood emotions, purified and unimpeded by any intentions, have complete sway — but that’s a thought for another time.
This disc has so much extra content on it you wouldn’t believe. I wanted to get this all down before I ventured into it and skewed my impression. I suspect that after spending 5 more hours with this movie I’ll be brainwashed into loving it. Well, I’ll be back after the horizontal line to report.
Kinda.
The three-and-a-half hour behind-the-scenes documentary was wonderful. It made me inordinately happy. It has nothing to prove and nothing to say and so for this long span of time – more than twice the length of the movie – one just gets a sense of the people, the atmosphere, the work to be done, the feeling of being there. All of which are so gratifying to me. It put me in mind of my most rewarding days working in theater. It had a very strong psychological effect on me; it’s a long low-key social immersion in another reality. I always enjoy making-of footage in this same way, and this was just an endless feast of it. I didn’t get tired. In fact at the end of nearly 4 hours I was still able to feel disappointed that there wasn’t more, that various other scenes from the movie weren’t documented.
I suppose it could be compared in scope to the giant behind-the-scenes documentary spread across the Lord of the Rings DVDs, which taken all together is even longer, but in that case the immensity of the production necessitated a more traditional editorial assemblage, with talking heads and a series of “topics” and background music and so on. Here we simply see the footage, in order, from each day. It seems to have been edited for interest, but not for structure.
I know that in reality I still haven’t actually met Ingmar or Sven or Ingrid or Liv. But I’ve done something. I’ve met them more than you have. (Until you watch it. Then we’ll be even.)
Spending this kind of time on set also revealed the answer to my question above about how this movie benefited me. The primary benefit is between the lines: the movie is wonderful access to the carpets and clothes and soft presence of this world. That includes the relationships, the conflicts, the personalities, the worldview. The light. It includes everything except for the scripted confrontations and lines of dialogue and formal aspirations of the screenplay. The action is just a framework on which this valuable space and time and feeling is hung, not the other way.
In a scene of rehearsal, we see Ingmar talking about subtext to the actors and then adding, “But I’m just a hack compared to Chekhov.” And that’s right, he is. The play is frustrating. The show is good.
Yes, the movie’s feelings, which is to say Ingmar’s feelings, aren’t quite constructive or fair. But they’re still feelings. Watching this film is to be surrounded by feelings, real ones, and that is a very valuable thing. While I’m in it I might be dissatisfied about the particulars, but I’m dissatisfied about lots of things all the time. How wonderful to be dissatisfied while immersed in feeling.
The set of an Ingmar Bergman movie is a particularly satisfying place for me to visit, but I probably would enjoy a continuous film festival of any strangers’ home movies. Can that be arranged?
(Oh right, of course it can! For a second I forgot how things worked nowadays. I’m not sure why they work this way, but they do.)
Anyway: going straight from that undeniable document to Peter Cowie’s standard scholarific commentary just throws into relief how cramped such stuff always is. Trying to work from Bergman and Bergman’s respective memoirs, interviews, etc., our commentator talks about stuff like “tensions on set,” in standard pat phrases that purport to be historically insightful. “But,” I think, “I was just moments ago on the set, and can report that whatever was going on wasn’t anything like what the phrase ‘tensions on set’ sounds like.” Admittedly, any really unpleasant moments had been edited out. But more important is that having been inside the reality of that space, I retained a strong intuition about how wrong that whole mode of talking about the creative process is. Our simple narrativizing minds want to hear that Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman either did or didn’t get along well, or that “there was an incident” or that “they fought over” something. But that reality of the situation, as of any social situation, is that no description of it can be completely true, and hardly any story is even true enough to be worth telling.
It was a real place with real people in it and we all know how big and sloppy a thing that is. What I saw was: Ingrid Bergman asked Ingmar a question and then he answered, and her eyes were down and then they came up, and then he smiled, and he slouched a little while he was strolling around to talk to the other guy, and so on and so on ad infinitum, mountains of actual evidence with no obvious significance or name, to interpret which is the business of life. This is the attitude that films invite us to bring to them; why can’t we bring it to the reality from which they spring? Why would I ever trust someone’s interpretation of a film if I can see how bluntly and presumptuously they interpret reality?
I’ve worked on theatrical productions that came out either good or bad, and sometimes people fought and sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes people felt tense and sometimes they didn’t. But I know that there is no simple way of connecting those dots, or even drawing those dots. The experiences are infinitely complex and come down to nuances of personality that great artists like Ingmar Bergman spend whole careers trying to shed even a little light on. Whereas academics try to corral “evidence” and “back it up” with “citations” and “argument.” Someone’s memoir is a terrible source of evidence about social nuance. Yes, often it’s all we’ve got. Let’s try to be frank in those situations and recognize how little it really is.
For one of those commentaries it’s a pretty good one. It comes from 1995, from the original laserdisc. The other features are new to the 2013 edition.
Apart from the monster-mentary, they also include the Ingrid Bergman interview mentioned above (I inserted those lines about Casablanca because they seemed to belong up there, even though it’s above my horizontal divider), which is a nice 39 minutes touching on her whole career. There’s a shortish Criterion-produced Liv Ullmann interview from just last year — she looks fine — in which she contributes a bit to the “did they fight or what?” storytelling but without overstating anything. It’s basically sweet. And then there’s an introduction to the film for TV broadcast as taped by Ingmar in 2003, in which he dwells on the question of Ingrid’s difficulty. Based on the other stuff on the disc I get the sense that he’s overstating it. It probably should come as no surprise that Ingmar Bergman seems like he might have been a bit emotional and potentially touchy. And maybe the rest of them were too. So big deal. Artists are like that; that’s their thing.
Sven Nykvist comes off as awfully calm and un-touchy. Boy, he was really good.
So, in sum: The disc is great, and I don’t know that I necessarily love the movie but I was certainly rewarded spending this time with it. Even if it is a Dagmar Downer.
There is no original music, just some classical selections. The choice here has to be the onscreen Chopin performance — not Liv’s, which is unsteady and anxious, but Ingrid’s, which is cold and fixed. This is the high point of the movie. Both performances are actually by pianist Käbi Laretei, Ingmar’s ex-wife, who can be seen advising in the documentary and holding everyone to very high standards for believability in the use of the piano. Bless her! It was worth it. Chopin: Prelude in A minor, op. 28/2.
Back at #30 (M, remember?) I declared “disc one” of the Criterion soundtrack anthology to be complete. 30 tracks later I think we’ve gone a bit over 74 minutes for disc two, but I forgot to keep track of this aspect of my obsessive project until now so what are you going to do. Some CDs hold up to 80 minutes, right? Sure. Anyway, 30 is a nice number so it’s time for a recap. We’ll do one again at 90, etc. Here’s the table for relistening convenience, like last time:
| 31. | Great Expectations (1946) | Main Title | Walter Goehr | 1:09 |
| 32. | Oliver Twist (1948) | “Oliver’s Sleepless Night” | Arnold Bax | 1:53 |
| 33. | Nanook of the North (1922) | Nanook and Nyla (1997) | Timothy Brock | 0:34 |
| 34. | Andrei Rublev (1966) | Finale | Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov | 7:14 |
| 35. | Diabolique (1955) | Complete | Georges Van Parys | 2:30 |
| 36. | The Wages of Fear (1953) | Main Title | Georges Auric | 1:59 |
| 37. | Time Bandits (1981) | Main Title | Mike Moran | 1:25 |
| 38. | Branded to Kill (1967) | “Killing Blues” | Naozumi Yamamoto | 1:17 |
| 39. | Tokyo Drifter (1966) | “Drifter Theme” | Hajime Kaburagi | 0:35 |
| 40. | Armageddon (1998) | End Credits | Trevor Rabin | 2:58 |
| 41. | Henry V (1944) | End Title | William Walton | 2:11 |
| 42. | Fishing With John (1992) | “Fishing With John” | John Lurie | 0:43 |
| 43. | Lord of the Flies (1963) | End Title | Raymond Leppard | 0:53 |
| 44. | The Red Shoes (1948) | “The Red Shoes: Ballet” | Brian Easdale | 15:12 |
| 45. | Taste of Cherry (1997) | St. James Infirmary Blues | [Traditional] | 3:11 |
| 46. | The Most Dangerous Game (1932) | Main Title | Max Steiner | 1:32 |
| 47. | Insomnia (1997) | End Credits | Geir Jenssen | 3:47 |
| 48. | Black Orpheus (1959) | “Samba de Orfeu” | Luis Bonfá | 1:01 |
| 49. | Nights of Cabiria (1957) | Main Title | Nino Rota | 2:02 |
| 50. | And the Ship Sails On (1983) | Clair de lune | [Claude Debussy] | 2:36 |
| 51. | Brazil (1985) | “The Office” | Michael Kamen | 1:07 |
| 52. | Yojimbo (1961) | Main Title | Masaru Sato | 2:26 |
| 53. | Sanjuro (1962) | Main Title | Masaru Sato | 2:04 |
| 54. | For All Mankind (1989) | End Credits | Brian Eno | 1:55 |
| 55. | The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) | Idyll: V. Adagio | [Leoš Janáček] | 3:31 |
| 56. | The 39 Steps (1935) | Main Title | Jack Beaver / Charles Williams / Hubert Bath | 1:18 |
| 57. | Charade (1963) | Main Title | Henry Mancini | 2:07 |
| 58. | Peeping Tom (1960) | Main Title | Brian Easdale | 1:13 |
| 59. | The Night Porter (1974) | End Credits | Daniele Paris | 2:25 |
| 60. | Autumn Sonata (1978) | Prelude in A minor | [Frédéric Chopin] | 2:30 |
Yeah, looks like your “disc two” is 75:18, so you’re going to need a pretty fancy CD burner. Oh well. Luckily nobody, including me, even briefly considered doing that. What an incredibly annoying and unlistenable CD this would be. Though there’s plenty of good stuff here.
Standouts are:
34. Andrei Rublev
44. The Red Shoes
48. Black Orpheus
49. Nights of Cabiria
51. Brazil
57. Charade
Yes, this was a long entry, but it was a serious movie and a really freaking long disc so that’s how much came out of me.