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End Game:
Bergman's Saraband
by James Quandt
The form of a director’s final film depends
on how conscious he is of the impending end: distillation and summa
(Bresson’s L’Argent, 1982), inadvertent requiem
(Monteiro’s Come and Go, 2001), ritualistic leave-taking
and commemoration (Dreyer’s Gertrud, 1964), fond
farewell (Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon, 1962), a last
act of self-castigation (Pialat’s Le Garçu,
1995; Visconti’s L’innocente, 1976) or auto-exculpation
(Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, 1956). There are oddities:
Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), for example, which
seems haunted by mortality only with afterthought, and Tarkovsky’s
The Sacrifice (1986), which reportedly transformed into
valediction during the course of its making. (The evidence regarding
whether Tarkovsky knew he was dying is conflicting.) And the ever-elegiac
Godard, whose recent films and videos all seem to be a wave goodbye
or suicide note, has made of his late work an endless threnody.
Ingmar Bergman’s television feature Saraband
has both the benefit and the burden of having been announced as
his last film, just as his recent mounting of Ibsen’s Ghosts
was officially proclaimed his last production as a theatre director.
It is perhaps churlish to point out that Bergman has announced countless
films as his last, going back to The Serpent’s Egg
(1977) and, more decisively, Fanny and Alexander (1982).
He has found ways to position subsequent films, such as After
the Rehearsal (1984) and In the Presence of a Clown
(1997), as “mere” television works or addenda, or to
have his films made by proxy (Ullman’s Faithless
[2000], August’s The Best Intentions [1992]). As
a Swedish colleague recently joked, Bergman has been on an eternal
farewell tour, like Cher. Now nearing the age of 90, largely sequestered
on his beloved island of Fårö where he watches movies
and talks to the local fishermen, Bergman is unlikely to make another
film, though even the most rhapsodic of Saraband’s
champions, Jacques Aumont, hints at uncertainty in his Cahiers
du Cinéma review: “Saraband is, in a
certain sense, his greatest masterpiece. At any rate his most beautiful
last film” (italics his). And to obviate expectation, Bergman
first demurred in having the work transferred to 35mm and released
theatrically, wanting to preserve its intimacy and diminutiveness.
Though Saraband is sized for the small screen, its effect
is immense.
Aware of his own imminent demise, Edward Said used
his last essay to muse on the subject of “late style,”
and to contend with the expectation that an artist’s vision
inevitably mellows when facing the prospect of death: “The
accepted notion is that age confers a spirit of reconciliation and
serenity on late works, often expressed in terms of a miraculous
transfiguration of reality.” Said’s instances are primarily
literary and musical, but one can think of cinematic examples: the
seeming serenity of Buñuel’s last films, the blithely
senescent works of late Renoir, a couple of de Oliveira’s
recent films from 2001 (I’m Going Home and Oporto
of My Childhood), the final trilogy of Satyajit Ray, which
intensified his critique of materialist India but increasingly neglected
his graceful visual style, so that the films’ very stasis
embodied the director’s growing debility. Said invokes Adorno
to offer an antithesis to the calm, conciliatory oldster: the artist
who, like Beethoven, “is fully in command of his medium, [but
who] nevertheless abandons communication with the social order of
which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship
with it. His late works are a form of exile from his milieu.”
Pasolini’s Salò (1976) leaps to mind, an abandonment
and alienation so utter that it had to be tamed by moralistic hindsight
as a chronicle of death foretold. (Pasolini clearly did not intend
Salò as a late work, much as Mozart did not design
his requiem as adumbrative lament.)
Saraband hews to neither of Said’s models
of late style. (The plump and plummy Fanny and Alexander—still
officially considered Bergman’s “last” film—does
that; its Gemütlichkeit is so labourious, the film
ends up false and exhausting.) Saraband’s musical title suggests
something courtly or formal, perhaps in the mode of his Mozartian
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), and Bergman was initially
drawn to the eroticism of the renaissance (and then baroque) dance
from which it takes its name. “The film follows the structure
of the saraband,” Bergman told Stig Björkman, “there
are always two people who meet. In ten scenes and an epilogue.”
The director has also called it, puzzlingly, a “concerto grosso
for four soloists” (in which case where is the orchestra?),
but clearly had in mind the spare, arduous intensity of Bach’s
cello suites; it is worth remembering that Bergman used the Sarabande
from the fifth suite in Cries and Whispers (1972). Like
Cries, Saraband harrows hell; there is nothing
burnished, stately, or serene about it. But neither does it ever
risk, like Adorno’s alienated late artist, a break with its
order or audience. Life is and always will be an inferno, Bergman
tells us once again, but he delivers it as an ameliorative truth.
Returning 30 years later to the tale of Johan (Erland
Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullmann), the combative couple of Bergman’s
Scenes from a Marriage, Saraband presents itself
as a work of memory. Marianne spreads her photos of their previous
life for us in the framing sections, and we are not so subtly asked
to remember the earlier film. (As with late Godard, there is a sense
of revenance in this return, and a predication of cultural memory.)
When I first read about Saraband, I quailed at the thought
of another of Bergman’s recrimination fests, a two-hour picking
of psychic scabs, but Johan and Marianne turn out to be somewhat
secondary characters in their own “update.” After the
initial setup, in which Marianne decides to visit Johan, after three
decades of absence, at his home in the northern county of Dalarna,
it becomes apparent that the main battle is not between these two
old antagonists but between the vain and venomous Johan and his
son, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), from a previous marriage, and
between the son and his own daughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius). Both
the latter are cellists, and though not quite an artist manqué,
Henrik is vicariously living through the accomplishments of Karin,
while tending both a ceaseless grief over the death of his beloved
wife Anna and the emotional wound of his father’s deep and
eternal contempt. (The pristine but typically disembodied digital
cinematography vitiates Bergman’s rendering of Dalarna as
arcadian asylum and pastoral hell; weightless pixels cannot anchor
this terrain of pain.)
There is a mighty whiff of Ibsen in Saraband’s
slow revealing of the anguished relationships among the film’s
quartet of characters—the fifth and ever-present one is the
saintly, dead Anna, whose name gave the film its original title—and
the film is blocked, shot, and played like 19th-century naturalistic
theatre, complete with devices like the sudden revelation of an
unlikely letter. (The surrounding forest sometimes seems haunted
by an army of dei ex machina.) Bergman’s tendency
to the schematic, which here extends to the musical (Bruckner’s
thunderous Sixth Symphony bespeaks Johan’s imposing, volatile
nature), and his reiteration of familiar themes—the humiliation
of the artist, the hold of the dead over the living, the torment
of marriage, the agonized love/hatred between parents and children,
the consolation and refusal of God in the face of death—are
emphasized by the film’s series of chatty “two handers,”
each carefully building on the disclosures of the previous. The
figure of Anna, impossibly good and luckily dead—what actress
could incarnate such purity of spirit?—proves once again that
Bergman does vituperation best, and that goodness exists for him
only as an abstract. The final truth about Henrik’s unhealthy
devotion to Karin carries not shock but dismay that Bergman would
resort to such obviousness, and the coda, another of the director’s
cries for human connection, will seem to some arbitrary, contrived.
How one feels about Saraband depends on
how one feels about Bergman. All his faults are writ large, exaggerated
by the film’s chamber modus, and those with an aversion to
his cinema of spiritual and psychological trauma may find it intolerable.
Indeed, Stockholm’s Daily Expressen said as much
when Saraband was first shown on Swedish television: “Everything
about it is strict and austere. Its language and manners are outdated...emotions
are on occasion almost mummified.” I have struggled with Bergman’s
work ever since seeing Cries and Whispers—the first
foreign-language film I encountered—three decades ago, alternating
between distaste and admiration, pitiless derision and passionate
defense. Why then did I find myself overcome, all but unable to
speak, at the end of Saraband, one early morning the final
day of the recent Bologna film festival? Why did it seem that no
one, perhaps not even Fassbinder, had so recognized and rendered
the cruelty and paltriness of human nature, its nurtured grievance
and pathetic grasping at solace? That no actors but these could
dredge up such fear and self-immured isolation, such ferocious loathing
and impotent or destructive love, and make us tremble and flinch
with their every flaying revelation? Gaze now upon this achievement—which
is great—for it is not only Bergman’s last film, but
also the last of its kind. As a final expression of a certain kind
of psychological modernism, Saraband is a treasurable relic.
“This is the prerogative of late style,”
Said writes in his essay: “it has the power exactly to render
disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction
between them. What holds them in tension, as equal forces straining
in opposite directions, is the artist’s mature subjectivity,
stripped of hubris and pomposity, unashamed either of its fallibility
or of the modest assurance it has gained as a result of age and
exile.” And so Saraband.
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Saraband
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Saraband
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