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ratherhavetheblues · 4 years

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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN’ “I wonder why I love you as I do…”

In 1997, at the age of 80, Ingmar Bergman saw fit to return to his 1980 film, From the Life of the Marionettes, in order to disclose the further range to be found in its turmoil and small triumph. That would have been long after those “in the know about films” had figured out and concluded for others that the maestro had nothing new to show. But those very small numbers ignoring their “betters,” could be beneficiaries of exciting times, far surpassing our many masters of the viral.

From the Life of the Marionettes, telescoping, in fact, back an eye-opener of a film from the days when Bergman’s numbers were not meagre, namely, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), the crux of the matter becomes “speaking the same language.” Most invested in that action would be the language of patricians (white-hot pedants), not nearly as bright and constructive as they think they are, but knowing where the money and dominance are. The 1980 blood-bath studies what can happen when couples dare not to speak the same language.

In the film, In the Presence of a Clown (1997), there is dissonance so massively distributed that clarifying its true conflict becomes quite a struggle, a struggle worth mastering. One way of cutting to the heart of our work is the Bergman standby of optical, dialectical apparitions, wielded marvelously by a remarkable roster of great cinematographers, in this case, Tony Forsberg. The first moment gives us a murky setting and a hand moving a stylus to a vinyl disc. Two agencies awaiting magic. The label is a rusty-red. In the Bergman film, Dreams (1955), the first scene involves a hand, in semi-darkness, pressing upon a sheet of paper immersed in a photographic solution, by which to disclose a large image of a woman’s lips. Coming into play with this nocturnal effort is Salvador Dali’s creation of, “Mae West Sofa,” a surrealist icon. At the outset of, From the Life of the Marionettes, a prostitute in a brothel, showing pronounced red lips in close-up, dies horribly, but not before disclosing a surprising gift for beauty and verbal expression. You’d think each film, therefore, might implicitly be about not speaking the language of sharp advantage, daring to have a go as an innovator of sensibility. And yes, it does. But, oh, what tiny steps being made! In the film, In the Presence of a Clown, we have permission to untangle the death throes of those being imprisoned by cowardly partners, and their own backsliding.

Whereas the protagonist in the latter film, namely, Carl Akerblom, is a patient in a mental hospital when first we meet him, he also (somewhat) belongs to three lamps shining from the ceiling of his confinement. Each light has a function within a strange and essential logic: one for survival; one for ecstasy; and, the third, a synthesis of the other two. To make those lights become everything, special actions are needed. Our film is resolved in getting what is needed. At this moment, Carl seems to be clueless about the sophistication peeking in. He inhabits a large room, painted grey, where he is the only inhabitant, along with many other empty beds. We soon learn that he had attempted murdering his fiance, Pauline (she being a Peril of Pauline, in the mold of Marionettes’ Peter, as in Peter Pan). That could account for his isolation. But, in an interview that morning (the doctor interrupting his vinyl) the thrust of narrative becomes Carl’s verve for music, in face of a blotto of a specialist (like the blotto of the mental specialist in, From the Life of the Marionettes), putting him in the driver’s seat of being a candidate of making that dialectic click. (The wintry scene out of two tall windows is supplied with a lovely tree in the snowy grounds. With the patient lying back on his bed, we see, on a little ledge, three small flower pots. Two support tiny flowers. The third is empty. The doctor’s surname is Egermann, that being the surname of Peter the effete butcher in the brothel.) As Carl digs into the woeful biography of Franz Schubert, by way of a rather hostile challenge to the doctor to admit he’d have a “sinking feeling,” were he such an artist, we are directed to his hands and his shaking fingers. (Hold that last thought.)

Just as we become rather skeptical of Carl as having the right stuff, Pauline, whom he had refused to see, breaches the blockade to an upshot of increased confusion. Wearing a smart Louise Brooks hair style—the year is 1925—her sylphlike presence is a contrast to Carl’s many pounds. But her arrival, coinciding with his being unable to offset a bowl movement, must seriously become an even greater impediment to future interplay. She has three buttons across her coat. On entry, she found room 2A (without a third). She lights up a cigarette, the first of many, reminding us of unfit Harry and his chain-smoking, in the 1980 film. (Does she flounder like Harry?) When Carl returns, in some array, and she tells him, “You can’t escape me,” you wouldn’t place any bets on her. She has a bandage over her forehead, and he declares, “It was your fault…” (What happened to poetry?) The musician declares, “If you’ve come to reap my contrition, you’ll get none of it… What can you have come for? The cheap triumph of seeing your future husband’s total humiliation?” She retorts, “I certainly didn’t need to come here to see your humiliation. That’s been a daily bitter diet…” Carl’s shifting the patter is something new and, at the same time, something old. “Here comes the bit about my stepmother and her jealousy…” (Here, also, is the time to realize that the rich theatrical component of Bergman’s effort—however non-readers would bridle—offers drama, not only thrilling, but unprecedented, in any field. Along, therefore, with dazzling cinematography.)

While this vague reprise of Hollywood screwball comedy, being impressively brought to life by the Bergman film, A Lesson in Love (1954), settles in, we are blindsided with Carl’s dotage upon the supposed sanctity of Schubert, to the outcome of putting together a homage whereby a silent film would be supplemented by actors speaking and musicians playing, a roadshow hopefully plumbing marvels of creative taste and power. There has been much more at the asylum between the doctor’s visit and Pauline’s visit, and now is the time to dispense with screwball comedy and begin to broach something even Bergman had never attempted before. First of all, there is a bit more craziness in the form of another of Carl’s shut-ins, one Osvald Vogler, a retired professor of exegetics (exegetics being a critical explanation of a written work, especially the Bible). Where he sits there are, in Carl’s big domaine, there are two empty flower pots. The name, “Vogler,” has a spotted career in Bergman films—pertaining to fakery, as with Persona, The Magician and Hour of the Wolf. Carl immediately takes an aversion to the academic’s vanity, and threatens, “I’m sicker than I look.” The lecturer peppers the protagonist (and us) about “inner freedom,” and though he’s another Mad Hatter, he has a sensibility to, like a tornado, dig up random gems along with the garbage. “Subjective by self-conceived… by self unfortunately destroyed… What we call inner freedom as it is so complex that can’t be codified, analyzed or classified… For freedom is the most elevated characteristic in the human spirit… the ancient source of the Sacred One and the literal immortality of Life.” Carl tries to talk about Schubert, but Vogler is now buried in a book. He does remark, “My wife is a deaf mute. She is also rich, and I live well on her wealth” [the source of the supposed new arts]. Vogler, now troubled, comes up to Carl where he is lying on his bed. The latter takes the troubled man’s wrists to calm him; and Carl’s hand and fingers are once again featured. Now back to his confidence, Vogler asks the new friend, “What kind of ill-health forces you to dwell in these depressing premises?” And our bemusing protagonist chronicles the violence: “The person who tried to help me out of a terrifying difficulty was rewarded with a murderous blow, so that the skin on the forehead split and blood spurted…” He goes on to claim that the incident is nothing to him; but that Schubert is. (Much more dialogue is in store here and in many other contexts. But we must distinguish between the saga’s need to convey to the film audience the crushing deadness of the situation, which affords a cue to some positivity; and our essay’s need to focus here upon a kernel of very rare and very difficult and very crucial need, which will never register to many.)

Carl bribes his motherly nurse to forego his tranquilizers, and then he makes her listen to a bedtime story she’d rather not hear. “Sit here and I’ll tell you everything… In the old days, they used to punish criminals by sticking a sharpened wood stake into the delinquent’s arse.” (Peter the patrician meted out a similar punishment to the prostitute in Marionettes.) He adds, “The point gradually comes out, at the back of the neck… Then they raised the stake by the river, and there the wretch hung. That’s what it’s like, Sister Stella. I’ve threaded on a stake… I’ve become a sight worth seeing…” (“The person who tried to help me out,” would have been a “delinquent,” exposing a shaky bourgeoisie to depredation.) Therefore, the rally, “Don’t think I’m asking for pity, like Jesus or Mahler…or for that matter, Swedenborg [an eighteen century, Swedish mystic, and Vogler’s hero], that sentimental old whiner… Schubert Franz, he’s my friend, my beloved brother…”) He thinks to end the night smugly with, “What theatre! What an audience!” But something shoots down the arrogance and hate.

Carl (and also Vogler) want to believe that the many hours they have put into their obscure repertoires must result in a better world. That they have landed in a place implying incompetence would not necessarily rule out a singular power; but the tenor of their explications are so transparently shabby, they now stand exposed as pathetic and virulent menaces, as with the half-wit doctor in Marionettes. Therefore, after boring the nurse with his bravado, he lies alone in his bed and ushers in a phantom not trammeled with soft lies. In the 1980 film, a murderer’s wife is far more concerned with the dead victim-prostitute than a live husband in a mental hospital. Her emotive make-up becomes a compass to take off as a free-lancer, a free lover. That compass returns to Carl’s bedroom, to haunt his cowardice (Vogel’s filibuster on behalf of “freedom” never giving a thought to courage). Emanating from the snowy atmosphere outside, we find that a strange presence has lingered after his Ted Talk. His spent candle has formed an angry-looking head. The apparition, all white with a white clown hat, focuses down to her fingers, very long and with very long fingernails. She turns out to be an expert in producing an odd kinetic residue from out of those fingers. Panning back to disclose her face, we have a huge ear [picking up what mediocrities like Carl and Vogler refuse to attend to, which is to say, being tone deaf] and an elaborate eyebrow [involving what the celebrated geniuses of our planet refuse to recognize]—one of the surrealist touches in Bergman’s film, Dreams. By contrast, she has lost several teeth. (When close to killing Pauline, Carl’s frenzy included grinding out many of his teeth.) He asks, “Have you been here long?/ “Quite a while… Quite a while,” she recalls. (In fact, thousands of years.) He tries to rationalize by asking, “Am I not quite awake, sir?” Her emphatic, “No” does nothing to calm him. Her sprightly dance to come close to him is rapid and graceful, recalling the hooker’s surprising homage to the smells of the seasons. She shoves the pitcher from the little table by the bed, and curls up on it with a smile implying her few years of problematic action. Her suppleness and equilibrium announce a dimension which fat, awkward Carl knows nothing about. The stab-wound on her chest becomes apparent, but she, disregarding it from out of a twilight-reservoir no longer human but having done her part, cordially asks him, “How are you?” He admits he’s bored (something he’d never have admitted to a person), and she follows with, “How are you, Mr. Torneman?”/ “Torneman was my cousin,” he reports, “who died. He was a clever clown. He scared the life out of me when I was little…” She laughs, “For that matter, I’m no mister,” and she happily shows her breasts and adopts a come-hither attitude, a residue of her former job. (She and Torneman, having done their tiny part in an infinite and perverse cosmos.) She fiddles with her nipples; and in so doing she lines up far to a side of the luminous windows. Carl finally comes to the crux of his nightmare. “One says that one is not afraid. ‘Why should I be afraid? As there is no life after death. For there isn’t, is there?’” She replies, “I don’t go around with secrets. Is that clear?” (Maybe it should be put as, “There’s a paradox,” a paradox which Pauline will approach slightly more effectively than the Clown.) Be that as it may, the flighty Clown, replying to Carl’s, “But aren’t you all alone at the actual moment?” by nodding yes and saying, “Alone. Inevitably,” may, for all her grace, be missing something, something Pauline, “The person who tried to help me out,” might see something very rare and very necessary. The Clown teases Carl for his apparent mania about fast and shattering locomotives. Both voices cover the cliché. She covers one of his eyes to calm him. Then she stands in that blue light and her fingers look like candles. The rendezvous collapses, as did the show for the nurse—the clown drawing Carl to approximate the savaging of her, “Inevitability.”

Despite her solid insight that Carl was, and always will be, a Lost Boy, in the mold of Peter Pan, the killer of the Clown, and the enthusiast of speaking the same language of advantage and nothing more, Pauline, in face of the mute’s monetary wealth and the boys’ garrulous showiness, gushes, “It sounds revolutionary!” Despite her soon having second thoughts—the fiancé intent upon quality pens and writing paper—she allows herself to be persuaded by his, “Let your young heart be enthused, my darling. Just for once.” Amongst the launch, one statement is too jarring to overlook, being quintessentially ironic. “New ideas produce new money!” While emphasizing the happy days just around the corner, he mimes fingers counting all that “new money.” So close to activating a true “revolution;” and so hopelessly lost. An even more pointed action within this tizzy wells up from Pauline (now recognized as the main protagonist). “I wonder why I love you as I do [when recognizing he’ll never reach heights she can demand of herself]… What do you want with other ladies… when the clear-sightedness that afflicts me quite often these days strikes? I don’t understand why I actually love you…But now, as you sit there, holding forth on your living, talking film and all we are going to do together, I just want to cry and fall to my knees…” (Later we’ll better understand her passion. His woolen sweater has spilled beyond his jacket, recalling the sheep being killed by a passion of cowardice, in the film, The Passion of Anna [1969]. She completes a frieze of a squire, kneeling to her king. [Don’t take it naively. Wait till the last scene.])

The tour is, of course, stillborn. But where we catch up to the disaster, at the village where Carl sort of grew up as a descendent of an uber-bourgeois family, the spotlight is upon Pauline and the nature of her peril and accomplishment. The wordy two, being rank amateurs, have produced an incoherent and saccharin waste of time in homage to Schubert. But Pauline’s endeavor, at a snowbound but canny locale, is a drama of the highest stripe.

The ingenue of the film (and Carl’s current squeeze) bitches once too often about the lack of majesty, and our real protagonist, having been doing the ironing, opens the subject of placing the hot implement upon her pretty face. Exit the talking ingenue. In the midst of that unpleasantness, Pauline explains, “There comes a point where nothing is of any importance.” (That happens to be a serious mistake which she’ll have to work on. And she will.) In contrast to that rather farcical disappearance, the cinematographer is magic itself, namely, actor, Robert Atzorn, who played the role of Peter, the skittish murderer, in Marionettes. His “Petrus” is a disinterested craftsman and well aware that the spectacle is rotten. During the long night of bathos in the snow he countenances Carl’s stupidity and dangerously using coins to juice up the electrical power, a state of affairs soon wrecking the night’s flicks and placing the technician in serious danger. (Twice along this flop, Petrus is left bleeding and writhing in pain, while putting out the inevitable fires. Carl, the artiste, had left the cameraman with the slogan, “The worst that can happen is that the Temperance Hall blows up.”)

Actually, the theatrical blow-up begins hours before the talkie does a U-turn and becomes a salon. (Here Pauline’s pointless alert, that she had been outnumbered in trying to establish coherence amidst almost complete folly, establishes her lack of grip in face of a peril requiring serious ruthlessness.) Carl’s step-mother announces (Carl roaming the snowbanks), “I have come to take my foolish stepson home…I care for this careless old child. I want to give him a little security…” (Security being the watchword of Anna, the bloodthirsty fascist, in The Passion of Anna. Here, though, as was another possessive mother, in Marionettes, the passion and depth of feeling of the younger woman transcends hard advantages of law and culture, and goes on to somewhat annul the relationship in her preferred way.)

Even more stunning a reversal of the hard-wired clowns are the patrons that night, seeing unbeknownst, the final show. You’d never know from the rich stepmother that riches of sensibility burn in those frozen wastes. But, with the new, brave Peter taking the tickets, and Carl providing little bios for the crew, we come to realize that hard lives can be lovely comets. A teacher from another town has skied to the theatre. A lady whose husband committed suicide looks for enlightenment. A man who can barely walk can would be always counted in the audience, “if it’s a question of culture.” “Superintendent Larsson… comes for the new…” “Fredrick Blom was a cantor and took to drink. He has a small pension and does research into chorales from the area.” (Where the latter sits, a delicate, undulating pattern appears on the wall. Such alertness is not to be gratified by the show. But its traction is a gift to Pauline, going forward.)

The approximation of the illiterate nonsense, in lieu of the broken technology, appalls the reflective gathering, and appalls Petrus and Pauline—the latter having her backside spanked, not to be missed by the supposed wit; along with Vogler, completely breaking down and having to be taken back to where he belongs. (“Your entrails will come out of your shameful orifices…”) At an interlude, one of the less sophisticated souls, comes up to Pauline and asks, “Are there many acts? I was supposed to be home by 11… I wasn’t asking because it was dull…” Over that coffee break, the teacher, seeing fit to provide a touch of maturity and class, asks, “I would like to read something… I found it long ago in a book. It’s the story of a man seeking his way. It’s as if seeking had become the main thing… and was concealing what he was seeking. The author writes, ‘You complain that you cry out, and that God doesn’t reply. You feel imprisoned and you’re afraid that it is a life sentence… [a painted backdrop of hills and verdancy is in view]… although no one has said anything. Consider, then, that you are your own judge and jailor. Prisoner, leave your prison! To your astonishment you will find that no one will stop you. The reality outside prison is indeed terrifying, but never as terrifying as your own anguish down in that locked room…’ [She continues, knowing by heart, since she is in fact the writer]… Take your first step toward freedom. It is not difficult. The second step is more difficult; but never allow yourself to be defeated by your [puny] jailers, who are only your own fear and your own pride.” The applause that follows is rudely interfered with, by Carl (one of those fearful jailers), causing a distraction by urging the folks to have some coffee, and thereupon ordering, “Now we must begin Act II.” Act II has one non-bilious moment. While relating Schubert’s demise, Carl, the careless old child, frightens his baby-soft gut and the Clown and the surreal blue light reappear to glare him down. He says, “I’m sinking.” Then he’s silent for a few moments, listening to the music. “I’m not sinking,” he declares. “I’m rising…” What can Pauline make of this? (He goes on to offer an elderly lady his help with early morning milking.) The dreadful entertainment has a grateful end. The viewers’ exits, however, are absorbing. The teacher comes over to Pauline (whose piano accompaniment in the piece is a rare aspect of seriousness), and tells her, “I want to give you this writing.” (Two glowing windows and the two women in between.) Pauline’s thank-you lacks weight. In many Bergman films, a remarkable effort of sensibility is met with puny response. (We’ll soon find out if the piano player has an A-game.) She’s a bit more touched by the researcher’s explicit praise, “Thank you for the lovely music, Miss. I interpret the Schubert sonata differently. No criticism intended. It was lovely, though somewhat feminine for my taste. But absolutely lovely. Thank you…” Near the end of the departures, a jumbled man, past his bedtime, tells the surviving performers, “This has been a great rendering of real art. Excuse me for saying so, but the play was greater than the film. Thanks, again!” Carl quickly figured out that the patron hated the dog, and enjoyed the story and the company of connoisseurs. His face shows him as, “my foolish stepson.” What can Pauline make of this?

It’s been a ragged night, after a ragged tour, and she makes a fool of herself before a bedtime she might have been able to be balance from. His sister (one of the theatre goers that night), having apparently the family instinct for avoiding any part of art (along with an estranged husband named, Mr. Bergman), invites the thespians (in the name of the stepmother) to stay the night at the estate. Pauline (a few hours before, having charmed the old girl and shared some sherry together) becoming viral, tells the breeder, “How very kind of Mrs. Akerblom. I wouldn’t grant her such a triumph…” The sister-in-law asks Carl, “Come and do some conjuring,” Carl having made far more progress as an uncle than an artist. It also seems that the uncle excels in diplomacy; but that, to our shock, is far from the facts.

In the night, in the busted theatre, with the spent wax looking like a monster, the spirit of a poetic outrage flares again. She steps beyond a curtain, close to the chair where Pauline was sleeping. Carl wakes up, the non-event with his stepmother festering like a mortal wound. She, now awake, and knowing she had been crude in the way the film was crude, she asks, “Are you angry about something?” His reply—“Are you going to send me back to the asylum?”—conceals an agenda of advantage and humiliation. In a flash, she guarantees that he can forever be a clown. “Come over here. Come…” Carl places his head on her chest. “You’re lying!” he blurts out, like a child. “You never know the truth!” Her, “Do as you like. Just don’t think I’m afraid,” bristles with her disgust with his personal superficiality and stunted, vomitistically precious family. He pounces, pressing his thumbs under her eyes. She asks. “Am I going to die now?” He melodramatically replies, “Perhaps we both are.” She then fires back, “That’s all right with me!” That leads Carl to take away his thumbs, and he shuts his eyes and breathes heavily. He falls to his knees. She looks outside for that wise light, only now having an incisive carnal taste of her antimajoritarian direction. He pouts, “I would like to say that my step-mother is an amiable lady” His legacy concerning wholesome and clever relatives must, from her, find a way beyond hate. Carl on the screen: “For Christ’s sake, it’s my nursery, Pauline… Then we would have sat for yet another while by the fire… She [the step-mother] would have taken you by the wrist and thanked you for having taken responsibility for me…” A Lost Boy. Would she always be his servant? The Clown makes a trio in the uncanny night. (A lost trio?) Katarina would leave Peter to his Teddy Bear, in Marionettes. What will Pauline do about Carl? Here, he would go on to approaching slashing his wrists with scissors. (The staff of the mental hospital where Peter ends up notes that the once-executive must be always under scrutiny against suicide.) She would use the chorus-cliché, “If you die, I don’t want to go on living.” On a more promising note, she declares, “You know you can wake me whenever you want.” But also she has to assimilate that this is a blow-up which has occurred hundreds of times. She gets up from the chair where she was sleeping. A face is imprinted in the cloth. She places her face upon his bended head. Her fingers move into a new site. How about the rest of her?

We have ample evidence to see that Pauline, like Katarina, will make a great change beyond the film per se. Whereas Peter had come to a point where he could not sustain any relationship with Katarina, it is possible that the “conjurer” has enough love on the ball to suit Pauline’s needs. Although, within the madhouse of Carl’s and Vogler’s drivel, she could not think effectively, there are agencies lovingly nudging her to her real presence. One, as already known, becomes a fusion of her moving fingers, with moving, dynamics, itself. When placed to perfection, a world beyond advantage (beyond religion and science) comes along. A third force having been subjected to mass nullity. Moreover, a towering power had been put into her frazzled hands that last night of the crazy promenade concert, by an out-of-the-way genius—in fact, an oracle, a skiing oracle. (Bergman’s last and most thrilling of a long series of oracles tolerating a poisonous, ridiculous normality. As a sidebar, though totally lacking serious reflection, Vogler and Carl [despite hiding their outlaw verve] knew that something important had been overlooked.) The backwoods teacher had given Pauline a map to the country of her true home, a country in love with disinterested “knack” (a best gift, in the film, Marionettes). The Clown, with her deadly and joyous knack of revealing that most of humankind cannot countenance its reality, never really registers (on film) with Pauline, while she drives Carl to near suffocation three times, during that last hopeless night. But with this lonely, beset upon woman-protagonist being a survivor as well as a victim, things can, in fact, happen for the best.

For the first and only time in Bergman’s career (this being his swan song) he encourages others to show what his protagonist could do, beyond reaching out to his partner and his family with civility. Carl, never to attain being a figure of personal love, perhaps would attain being a figure implicated in gusto along lines of her cosmic love. The oracle counsels a “first step,” away from cowardice, away from the norm. That coincides with the loaded hand (or other bodily features becoming a switch), the motion of elicitation from a cosmos needing finite love to fully complete the knack (that “menace” of creative, emotive force, being regarded as impious by the billions of religionists and being regarded as “soft,” frivolous, by the billions of smart, crude and intrinsically cowardly drones of science—well aware, on the fly, of emotive gratifications, but reflexively trashed as a secondary item). That loaded hand which we share carries two intertwined galaxies: a thrust of delight in dance with inventions of that play—as with the beauties of sunset, which happily dovetail to our eventual death, our eventual, loving, total disappearance; and a thrust to cue the myriad crafts to create the riches of sentience. Our option, therewith, to build when the vagaries of Lost Boys and Lost Girls permit; and a harbor of play, when they don’t.

Pauline, certainly knowing much about perils, could cull from Carl his range of conjuring. Could he appreciate her skills and her needs? Impossible! As impossible as Peter Pan in his cell, flitting hopelessly with his hands against a bright window in search of an adult traction, in From the Life of the Marionettes. Finding rich possibilities in others becomes a career for her, a career she very well might come to understand as impossible (despite fine pleasures), in light of all that has been already cemented on planet earth.

#ingmar bergman

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