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ratherhavetheblues · 4 years

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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘THE PASSION OF ANNA’ “Real security…Security…”

Why do the films of Ingmar Bergman concentrate upon difficulties so few people care about? Some might rush to claim that his genius was all over the most pressing dilemmas of modern life. But although the works do touch upon well-known malaise, what, I think, he was driven to show has never been a serious concern for very many.

Though I recently claimed that all three of the films in the “Island Trilogy,” comprising, Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna, could appear with no damage being caused in released or viewing at any order, there is about the third entry, namely, The Passion of Anna (1969), which does go significantly even further into the savagery of cultural venom than the other two. There, Bergman’s dramatic depth finds a hitherto hidden dimension of perversity to imbue us with an added weight going forward. And as we unravel this difficult construction, let’s face the facts about how many viewers are apt to find it compelling; and, therefore, what comportment is valid for these few and besieged seers who do find it riveting.

Andreas Winkelman (“winkel,” denoting a “corner” or “being enclosed by woods”) is a protagonist who, when we first encounter him in the opening scene, we could say that his name is very suitable. He lives in a farm setting, with neither crops nor salient livestock. (A few sheep is all we glimpse.) A voice-over gives his name, and his age, 48. Also, we hear, “He has lived alone for a while in this house on an island out at sea. His roof has been in bad repair for a long time.” (The metaphorical involvement here should not be ignored, particularly as a matter of invasion is about to spring forth.) We find him on that roof, with slate and mortar, clearly not being a gifted roofer. His face is contorted; and then another demand brightens his day. The winter sky delivers to his unsteady perch a sun comprising the fireball, but also a complementary flare involving a small cloud of rose and grey hue. We never again see him appreciating such a mystical moment. But we’ll have myriad opportunities to understand that Andreas, though a middling construction worker, is a devotee of the uncanny—unlike the easily distracted musician couple in Shame and the painter in Hour of the Wolf.

During the patchwork, there is a moment when Andreas uses a hammer to drive nails into the new material. This action is seen in extreme close-up, with the glint of the hammerhead catching the sun as the speeding thrust takes aim. Though he had set off, there, a topspin of some promise, the power-in-waiting did not catch fire. During the opening credits, faint chimes come to us; but they don’t do anything for him or us. On closing down for the time being, there are sheep bells, and he allows the pail of grout to slide down the precipice as he backs down his ladder. The contents spill over the building and on to the barnyard. He picks up the fallen pail, only to have it fall again. Right here, so early in the crisis that it seems a comedy—perhaps a tragicomedy in the spirit of playwright, Samuel Beckett—we are given to understand that Andreas is something of a bust as an acrobat. However, he’s far more adept in caring about an elderly neighbor, Johan (a sign of being a juggler of some skill, the second power of dynamics as revealed in the crucial Bergman film, The Seventh Seal [1957]), whom he catches up with moving a heavy pushcart. Andreas offers a bottle of cough syrup for his spate of bronchitis. (Once again, with Johan bending over, almost touching the ground with his head to resume, there is the grotesquerie of Beckett bemusement.)

On the other hand, as we proceed to the interior of Andreas’ modest home, one feature lifts our heart. Several stained-glass panels and windows grace the otherwise unremarkable house. The surfaces radiate modernist uncanniness, like diffident lighthouses. Where have they come from? And with this question we are thrust into the perplexing cadence of the proceedings of this film. There do appear, later on, references to a long-gone wife having left her pottery studio at a building nearby the main structure. But we’ll need to reconsider that idea. None of the several visitors in play there give the magic the time of day. But they are far from his sensibility. Dangerously far. And Andreas is not only the craftsman of those crafts, but his is a life of such solitude that, with the exception of farmers like Johan, he has for years instinctively (perhaps rather carelessly) kept a distance from mainstream, bourgeois cravings for advantage.

What, by another of those unspoken twists, could have breached his hideaway and his practices—an intruder aghast with such a difference? Not long after the wobbly climb to the top, a woman with a pronounced limp (which, twist-again, isn’t a serious injury at all) comes by to ask if she could use his phone—this being an era when phones had not yet become a test of being alright. While Andreas stands beside one of his non-representational reflections, she gets on the phone (a stage phone going nowhere, which suits here) and rattles through a hissy fit regarding monies, which we soon see she doesn’t need at all. In addition to being what he’ll later call her a “bad actor”—using her supposed (physical) cripplement to be a non-suspect—she’ll proceed to torture and kill many of the (disinterested) animals in the region, butchering a flock of sheep and locking and burning down a barn of horses and cattle. This is not, despite the various smokescreens, a whodunnit. This is a whydonnit. (And it raises—at a new level—the fascism disclosed in Hour of the Wolf.)

During the fake phone call, she mentions, “This is not an ordinary transaction.” As if to emphasize that point, she leaves behind her purse, the sole item within being a well-worn, type-face letter from her husband [whom she’d murdered], demanding a divorce. (Beyond the characteristic elusiveness here, we can clearly recall the note from temptress, Veronica, in Hour of the Wolf, seeming to be imparting a friendly bit of gossip when in fact a warning that unless the receiver mends his [unorthodox] ways death will occur. How’s that for announcing herself as a doctrinaire scourge, imagining to be a tower of power, when the opposite is in effect?) All this goes over the head of the talented but socially naïve islander. The widow lives with a wealthy couple on the mainland (he having been a college friend of the deceased), and in fact the latter using the near-castle for the fateful week-end break, and its “car accident,” close to where Andreas lives and where she had done some research on the subject of bohemians and remote areas to kill that troublesome husband, also called Andreas, and their young son, complicating her ardent priorities. (On another occasion, the remaining Andreas comes upon Anna sleeping in her car, not far from the home of the supposed iconoclast and in the mold of a safari apropos an exotic beast needing extinction. When he wakes her to be sure she’s as OK as she could be, she claims that she doesn’t sleep at night, and so needs such naps.) Her bivouac involves the dead husband’s college friend, Elis [as in Elite], cynical and nihilistic and a bankable architect, with a wife who can’t believe that bulging bookshelves, like those of the prey, could ever be more than décor.

Anna prevails upon her hosts to bring Andreas to dinner. (You’ll remember the more than rigorous “simple family supper,” in Hour of the Wolf.) And here, at last, this murderer’s row gets to show what they’ve got.

Along with the variable investigations of bourgeois presumptuousness, we have a very different self-exposure of Andreas’ being far more congenial in that arena than he should be. An ironist voice-over opens floodgates in terms of, “Without knowing why, he accepts and dresses up. The atmosphere is sincere, friendly and open-hearted. He feels a sudden affection for these people.” “You all look so nice,” he shouldn’t have said. “I’m not used to this. I’m not a hermit, as Elis says. I enjoy meeting new people… I only see the old neighbors…” (As often for Bergman, ironic features of the surround tend to comment silently upon how a protagonist is doing. Andreas, in close-up at the dinner table, is situated between a gold light at each side, and back a bit. Once again, the absence of a third synthesis aspect, portents something ominous.) He laughs easily at Eva’s generous remark, “It’s great having you here. Hope you don’t get tired of us.”

Elis, cutting off the saccharine, engenders some hard facts—recalling, in form, if not substance, the shift to assault at the dinner party of Hour of the Wolf. (Eva, perhaps far into the wine, had begun to talk about God.) “When I was girl, I thought God had a beard…” Anna, who was the inspiration of this night, and finding Andreas trite and passive, turns to her hostess for controversy where she already knows there will be no delinquency to speak of. (“Do you believe in God now?” Anna asks Eva, “Do I believe in God, Elis?”) Elis, a corporate panzer, delivers some carpet bombing for the sake of showing off to the stranger his version of fundamental ontology, or being. “When I go to Milan to create a cultural centre, I want you to come and visit. It’s a very interesting city. A huge city full of incredibly ugly, common, repulsive people… They will be given the opportunity of cultural activity…” In this early moment of the dinner, Anna had been completely offscreen; but the pronounced absence of sweetness and light puts her into a militant mood, and we await her bursting onto the scene. “How can you despise your work?” He, fluent with paradox, replies, “I don’t. I find it exceptionally important—I can satisfy your needs [both Eva’s and Anna’s] … especially the financial ones…” That doesn’t faze the semi-permanent lodger. “Why did you take this job?” Elis, drawing upon zeal while undermining it, argues, “I like designing houses. I’m a distinguished architect. I was flattered by the offer…” (Unlike the poverty-stricken, exhausted adversaries of world-history in the plays of Beckett, Elis siphons off the spiritual nourishment of his métier while sabotaging its functional development. Coherence, he well understands, being more trouble than he has the guts to sustain, he can play the easily liked and, as nearly everyone, respected mediocrity, while furtively sampling remarkable hors d’oeuvres on the run.) Anna perseveres, “What does a cultural centre involve?” The distinguished architect facetiously reports, “It’s a mausoleum over the utter meaninglessness which our kind of people live…” Only now does she appear onscreen, livid and pugnacious: “Why do you make fun of it? Why do you build it, without believing it? What’s the purpose?” (Could Anna’s passion include a sense of failure?)

After Eva’s ramblings and Elis’ provocation, there was the moment for Anna to show something better. Once again, Bergman’s theatrical dialogue, by which to penetrate the depths of this drama, is a most potent engagement for viewers ready to open floodgates. Elis’ last word here was to argue that unloved structures do, at least, stave off idleness. Anna, seeing a slam-dunk in the making, sneers, “Idle? I do what I believe in.” (This would not be the first clash with the host, who, for all her umbrage, clearly recognizes Elis as upholding a venerable, though essentially squalid, way of life. It is the tongue-tied real troublemaker at the table she sees needing a treatment, and provides her apologia therewith.) “I try to live in the truth…” She’s seated in such a way that two stylized chess figures at the back of her chair contribute to the general irony. (The figures seem to represent a bishop and a queen.) Elis, having reached this point often before, asks, “How do you know what is right?” And away we go, she declares, “You know inside what is true and what is right. We fail sometimes, but I want to strive for spiritual perfection.” Trusting profound emotion could have merit in this matter. But, without an extensive investigation the possibilities of errancy are huge. “Do you fail often?” the wag persists. This finds her flustered, not knowing how to strike a cogent tone. (Failing often, might not be something to be ashamed of, in the murky, problematic ventures of striking alliances with others and hanging on to one’s far from easy equilibrium.) Only one golden light shows behind here. Eventually going on, she declares, “I haven’t failed in what has been most important to me—living together with my husband, Andreas. Do you know why I didn’t fail? Because we lived in harmony by being truthful.” (The Andreas still alive, and listening to this massive deception, unaware, says nothing. But the embarrassment all round is in the air.) “We were honest. We believed in each other. If I had the same attitude toward my marriage [only one gold light to be seen] as you have toward your cultural centre, I wouldn’t have any beautiful memories. I wouldn’t believe in anything…” [the pull to Beckett]. Here, a cut to the magnified, mangled marriage, in the form of Anna’s husband’s letter telling her, in a zig-zag frenzy, “… because I know we’ll run into new problems which will result in a nervous breakdown and psychological and physical violence.” This disclosure comes with a tick-tock aural insistence, as if the passage of time and the reality of death reach into her fear, her cowardice, her phoniness and her murderousness toward earthy creatures whose disinterestedness put her to shame. There is a cut back to the four at the table, Andreas talking to Eva, and Anna watching him, another, less effective, but wild creature to attack. Eva invites him to stay the night, and he does. He’s wakened by Anna’s nightmare and her harsh yelling out, “Andreas!”

Next morning, Elis shows Andreas around the domaine. On arrival he had been struck by the large system of ancient stone walls, recalling a World War I battlefield. Now, he’s brought to a fine windmill which the cosmopolitan has revamped to a dazzling museum containing his voluminous photo collection from works around the globe, and his own accomplished productions. (The windmill action in Bergman’s, Smiles of a Summer Night [1955], would be a far less neurotic affair.) Andreas can only say, “It’s beautiful!” But his recommendation as a craftsman, despite technical carelessness, carries some weight, just as Elis—freed from swatting Anna—opens as much of his heart as he dares. “We have some privacy here.” However, instead of addressing the passion in his midst—so different from that of the serial killer he has been too obtuse to recognize—he turns to the noisy night and explains it as Anna’s (“accident”). That elicits from Andreas, “I understand,” which is more than a small error; but he has had a look at that letter and seems he’s trying to forget it. Thereby he dovetails, in an odd way, with Johan, the careless painter, in Hour of the Wolf.

When finally touching upon the concern for photography, Elis emphasizes that his output is “always about people” [a premium upon the powers of human presence]. The display and lecture, regarding a dynamic being somewhat imprisoned by the still camera— “Once I collected only pictures of violent acts…”—coincides with a classical sculpture, on several occasions and angles, eclipsing Andreas. Typically, the host wraps up the study with, “An irrational classification, just as meaningless as the collection itself.” Before leaving, the divided man asks the other divided man if he can take some pictures of him. “I would be flattered,” Andreas says. “I have all the time in the world.” Elis, going from bad to worse, initiates some hard-core drinking and tells the farmer that for a year Eva was the mistress of the dead Andreas. “He was a disaster for Anna…What was I going to say? Oh, yes, I want to tell you that Eva has extraordinary mental stamina…”

I want to tell you that the only one in sight here with extraordinary mental stamina is Johan. After wending his wobbly way home, Andreas, unaccustomed to expensive and beautiful wines and spirits (and feeling foolish when being forced to intensely understand what he approaches rather lazily), tries to prime the pump with Gordon’s Dry Gin. All he accomplishes is falling on the floor, trying to ride his bike with no success and staggering into the woods where he passes out at the base of a pine tree, after feeling sorry for himself that no agency arrives from the skies. This rather drastic lacuna is visible to the push-cart neighbor, who howls like a loyal hound. “Winkelman! Do you hear what I’m saying?” He shakes Andreas, gets pushed away—more Beckett—and tells him, “Get up! You can’t sit here. Do you want me to kick you?” Johan does manage to drag the younger man to his cart, where the latter flops back to be carried home. The neighbor makes coffee, Andreas falls on the floor, and his affectionate dog—which Anna tried to strangle with a noose—joins Johan as a breath of sanity. With Elis off to Milan, Eva comes by and extraordinary mental stamina is hard to find. “I’m bored to tears,” she says. “You can always tell me to leave.” Romance could not seriously cover this meeting, with Andreas trying more social climbing (having, in fact, made a meeting of minds with Elis, around the elusiveness of a soft approach to something very demanding). But a few stunning sights and her facility for epigram show that others, with a taste for risk, might catch fire.

On the pretense that Anna could not have joined the diversion at Andreas’ because she had to undergo more surgery (that never happened), her real diversion was to skulk around the laboring district, where she would feel unwelcome to the point of butchering a flock of sheep. The liaison between Andreas and Anna is put in place as an inevitable dribble of domesticity—he in a tepid move to taste “modern life” and Elis’ money; she in an experiment of tempering her pedantic spleen. A voice-over tells us, “Anna and Andreas have been living together for a few months. They are moderately happy, with no arguments or passions to speak of [Close-up of Andreas glaring.]” It is late winter. One day Anna [perhaps the boredom getting to her] starts talking about her marriage. “We lived in perfect harmony. We thought the same thoughts. We understood each other. Do you understand? I know it sounds silly and exaggerated when I tell it, but it’s very hard to describe [another trace of integrity while piling up tons of rubbish?]. How two people can grow so close [the same fantasy of Alma, in Hour of the Wolf]. It sounds so trite, and doesn’t really express what we had together. The boy was an amazing experience for us, and everything about him. I passed my finals and got a teaching job. And Andreas became an associate professor [of some area of science]. We bought a little house out of town and furnished it by degrees. We built something together. I don’t know what to call it. Real security… Security… Everybody thought it was a perfect marriage, but it wasn’t… We had violent fights, but we were never suspicious or cruel to one another. We were completely honest. There wasn’t a vestige of pretense in our relationship… Andreas was unfaithful once [Elis has told us something else]. He came straight to me and told me, and I felt how much he loved me and I forgave him…”

The desperate phoniness of this account, aligning with the most impoverished taste and craven fear, reaches an apex with the story of the “accident.” Anna shifts from the mawkish unbelievability sheltering her from adult struggle, to a smug, domineering menace. “The worst thing was when he left me. I found out where he was, then he changed his mind and came back to me [perhaps using the boy as a pawn]. And then we were closer than before. We stayed on the island one weekend with our little boy. Eva and Elis loaned us their house. On Sunday, Andreas took a nap after lunch. I wanted to take the car and see the church ruins. I got my way. Andreas asked me to drive [sure he did] as he’d had a couple of drinks [tests on the corpse, were it done, would probably show something else]. I didn’t drive fast at all” [more of the same]. (Her predatory eyes in close-up. Not a whit of sadness.) “We were all in high spirits [she was]. The road was slippery and the car began to skid.” (In Wild Strawberries, the brawl in the car did not result in any deaths.) “Andreas tried to take the wheel… but the car shot off the road [it was supposed to be a slow drive], down into the ditch and smashed through a stone wall and into the trees.” (No sadness in those hard, close-up eyes.) “When I woke up, I saw the wreck of the car… and a man in it [a man in it? You mean a military target] with his throat cut and half his body through the windshield. A boy [a boy?] lay farther away… He had been thrown out of the door, and his head was in a strange position [Would someone who loved the victim have made an issue out of that?]. I remember thinking, ‘What a horrible accident’ [as if she were a passer-by]. I wondered why nobody came to help those poor people [could be she chose a very remote place]. I made my way up the road and began to feel a pain in the side of my leg [having successfully killed her family while coming up roses]. I found myself dragging one foot behind me [as an effective fake leg injury]. Then I saw that I was covered in blood [lots of blood to smear over herself]. It was everywhere. My shin bone poked through my stocking [must buy a new pair of stockings]. They found us a few hours later [with her optics rocking]. I never thought life would be like this [requiring courage and very hard work]. I never thought life would be a daily suffering [no pain, no gain].”

Unlike the fanatics torturing Johan in Hour of the Wolf, there is no explicit religious animus within Anna’s campaign. Her mantra of, “Real Security,” appears to stem far more from a field of femininity, from an ideal of domesticity working on earth and its sentimental consensus. Anna would be positioned in the lunatic fringe, and therefore dovetails with the murderous imperial clique in the German castle and its wolves. But if we can get past her almost total foolishness, a far more formidable and interesting malignancy—somewhat like Elis’ ambiguity—comes to bear. The wry double entendres of her cold heart-to-heart, about the “accident,” are a self-satisfied, personal bitchiness, not a far-seeing program to rule the world.

The frustrating and melancholy denouement runs to absurdity in the style of Beckett. Our challenge comes down to understanding whether the filmic construction buys into the Nobel Prize celebrity’s wit, or whether Bergman—towering over most such prize winners, without the slightest attention—has other fish to fry. Are we to acknowledge the cowardice of Anna, along with the cousins of the Wolf, being paramount? Or will we be shown, in this last phase of the presentation, how a twisted non-entity—in heat about house and home securement—fails miserably to shut down the vectors of love and power?

After the bloodbath of the sheep, Johan, convicted, unfairly, long ago, of abusing his then livestock (wolves always active), becomes the most likely suspect in a small but volatile population. The first moments of the killing of Johan are conveyed by aural narrative from a policeman who rattles off details about the suspect. “He’s been in a mental institution, and that alone is suspicious. He’s totally isolated, never speaks and he has no pets.” (A cut from Elis, the camouflaged student of human nature, provides a homage-cum-mug-shot: “He was quite sociable back then, but got involved in a lawsuit, which he lost. Since then he lives like a hermit.” [The photographer also regarded Andreas as a [likeable] hermit.]) With the now suspect seen struggling with his cart, there are Andreas and Anna giving him a push in mucky terrain. We have, moreover, the supposed invalid showing as much strength as the others. Arriving to Johan’s cabin, he, feeling grateful for the assistance, opens up about his fears which a real friend would attend to. (Neither of the guests is capable of being a real friend.) “They’ll kill me… Because of cruelty to animals. This came through my window. ‘You damn animal killer. We’ll do to you what you did to the animals.’ [A close-up of Anna shows her with minimal discomfort. What would a nesting, effete pedant care for someone like Johan?] Me, cruel to animals?” [Johan adds a strong drink to his coffee. Andreas is nonplussed. He knows he’s got a nutcase in his house; and he can’t make a move.] He says, “Surely something can be done…” Johan, a superior thinker and superior human being, asks, “What?” (A cut to the farmer’s television allows us to ironically extend the sense of casual mayhem. A news program sends our way the execution of a soldier during a war. “What was that?” she asks, as if beyond her ken. Rushing from the kill she is in the midst of effecting, she pretends there is trouble outside. “It might be hurt… I’ll get the flashlight” [to leave an uncomfortable visit].)

Reaching home, there is a wounded bird, which Andreas smashes with a small stone. She had insisted, “You’d better put it out of its misery” [an echo of painter-Johan’s cold-blooded kill, in Hour of the Wolf]. She demonstratively wonders, “Could it have survived?”/ “No. It was too badly injured,” Andreas argues. As usual he has spared dealing with unpleasantness. The complementary, “What?” is both savage and uplifting.

Before the police pay a visit to the house of the forgotten glassworks, to hand over, to its shabby artist-in-residence, Johan’s suicide note to him, there was gabby Anna, as if she cared anything about animals, and her two-cents-worth, “I wonder why the bird was flying alone at night?” (Better to be alone than count on the populace?) Later that night, she has a dream indicating how she might become a heroine of a less bloody statement. Mysteriously, and as such, out of character, there is Anna in a recue boat, like the one Eve, in the Bergman film, Shame (1968), used to escape disaster. Coming to a port—a version of real security—she attempts to ingratiate the locals and finds them all intent on shunning her. A voice-over remarks, “The warning signs are beneath, and they manifest themselves unexpectedly.” She encounters a woman whose son is to be executed. Anna cries out. “Forgive me!” The mother is having nothing of that. Anna screams for attention to her discomfort (screams without sounds). A massive fire with black cloud rips the sky. Back to her default comfort of emotional cleansing, with the recent “relationship” going south, she has a reverie (sparked by the novel she’s translating, rejigging words coming naturally to her) of her adolescence. Her mother, surveying Anna going out to party, with those hard, dead eyes and a sneer, tells her, “You have cancer of the soul… You need an operation and radiation [particularly, in the form of a lift beyond her selfishness] … You have tumors everywhere. You’ll die a terrible death…” A little visit, amidst Johan’s passion, whereby the incurable jumps out at us by the billions. A coda, after that memory, finds Andreas fussing that he might have cancer. What, in fact, he has, is even worse.

An officer prefaces the contents of Johan’s last words with, “We found him today hanged. He had ugly bruises on his head and seemed to have been beaten up.” “Dear Andreas. A few hours ago, some people came by, and they told me I was a criminal and had to be punished. They dragged me by the hair into the yard. Then they beat me with their fists and spat on me. A younger one took a stone and hit me in the head. I was confused and told them I was innocent. They said that if I confessed, they would leave me alone. I said I would confess.[Andreas distraught.] Then they stopped hitting me in the face. They pushed me up against the wall and told me to talk. I said everything they wanted to hear. When I couldn’t think of anymore, they hit me again. One of them stood over me and pissed on my face. I couldn’t cover myself because I was too tired. They kicked me as I was lying there. They stepped on my glasses and I lost my false teeth and I couldn’t find them. I can’t recall what happened next, as I fainted. When I woke up, they’d left in their cars and I walked back inside. I didn’t want to live anymore because I could no longer look anyone in the eye. That’s why I can’t go on living. Dear Andreas, I’m writing this letter because you’ve always been good to me and always wondered how I was doing.”

The latter moments of this scene show Anna onscreen, performing, as usual, a sterile moment. As we now dispense of her and Andreas, with appropriate haste, the problematic of their destruction is eclipsed by the same kind of singularity as Jof, the would-be acrobat, in The Seventh Seal, who also had been repeatedly hit on the head by mob methods, and was far more fortunate in his enemies and also in having a rescuer, an almost resolved, irreverent squire. Having been out of sight from the lawmen, there is now Andreas calling out to her. As with Jan, the late-blooming psychopath in the film, Shame, she has to be found by carefully searching the premises. She’s seated in the studio and claims to be praying for Johan. Though he has the insight and nerve to nail her here— “You’re praying for yourself… Damn lousy acting! Damn acting!”—he lacks what it takes to combat a creature like Anna. (His passive implication in her murderousness being an added paralysis.)

We hear, by voice-over, that a year passes after Andreas’ gently touches Johan’s hand while he lies dead on his bed. By increment, Andreas becomes more hypochondriac and needing to be “free.” (Her barb, “It’s terrible being a failure,” is another escalation which finally results in a physical brawl in the barnyard where he beats her repeatedly. She burns the animals behind the locked door and he allows to be driven from the scene in her car. He rants about “humiliated at heart, I’ve given up.” (Their drive covers a Beckett wasteland.) She drives madly, but Andreas squelches her murder attempt. He gets out of the car, she drives away, and he proceeds to pace back and forth like a creature in a theatre of the absurd. During the jousting on the ride he tells her, “I want my solitude back.” The presumptuousness of both of them is breathtaking. (She shows up at that fire, and he questions why; and she says, “I came to ask your forgiveness…”)

Each of the four major roles—the hard-core bourgeoisie and the one soft-core bohemian—are asked about their persona, in brief, out-of-character “interpretations.” All miss the point, thinking themselves hermetic agents. Liv Ullmann, in a bright orange sun hat, ready for LA, says, “I sympathize a lot with Anna’s need for truth. I understand why she wants the world to be a certain way. But her need, this desire for truth, is dangerous. When she doesn’t get the response she demands, she takes refuge in lies and dissimilation. That’s why it’s so hard to be honest… You expect others to be the same. We see that today in thousands of people.”

Bergman, with his ironic “island” campaign coming to an end, leaves us more aware of war and warriors being our destiny. Johan, the brave soldier, shines pretty brightly in this dark trap. The tale is extreme; but the story is very common.

#ingmar bergman

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ratherhavetheblues · 5 years

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INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘SHAME’ “There isn’t much that gets through…”

With many Bergman films now having thrilled us by their confrontation of distemper and ecstasy, we could conclude that a standoff has reached its outer limits. But we would be far off the mark. Our film today, Shame (1968), has something very new to impart. But it doesn’t come in a straightforward way.

As we’ve often found in these treasures of semi-theatrical drama, the very endings turn out to divulge the marvel, and here again it brings to light our foothold in a slippery terrain. A former musician, Eva, finds herself, with civil war rampant, in a small fishing boat crowded with escapees (including her husband, Jan), where the seas are strewn with corpses. She tells Jan of a dream she’s just had. “I was walking down a very beautiful street. On one side were white houses with flowering arches and pillars. On the other side was a leafy park. Dark green water flowed beneath the trees lining the street. I came to a high wall overgrown with roses. Then an airplane came and set the roses on fire. But it wasn’t all terrible, because it was so beautiful. I looked down into the water and watched the roses burn. I held a baby in my arms. It was our daughter. She snuggled up to me… and I could feel her mouth against my cheek. And the whole time I knew there was something I should remember. Something someone had said. But I’d forgotten what it was…”

Neither ecstasy nor distemper has enveloped her. What that was is the heart of this very strange film—a vision ripping the constraints of not only cinema (the first seconds entail a reel of film shredding), but also theatre and every kind of art. In many ways, this conundrum looks to Bergman’s early film, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), where physical triumph is a drug and machination and advantage have saturated the landscape. (However, the death march there would be a Rose Bowl Parade beside what’s in store here.) A second ingredient to consider is the aura of goofiness and malignancy being a specialty of the suspense films produced by Alfred Hitchcock. (Hitch, however, would be Violence Lite in light of Shame.) To cast some light upon this virtually incomprehensible phenomenon, we should remember that the term, “shame,” covers many degrees. Mainstream morality is never at a loss to hammer a roster of the “shameful.” Mainstream morality and the reflections of Ingmar Bergman have nothing in common. Maybe someone had suggested to Eva (that name being about the primal) that the crowning shame of world history, a factor reducing social and scientific action to childishness, is the fakery of immortality and its compensatory assaults in lieu of fully creative power.

Along a trajectory of the pair, in single beds, being woken by an alarm clock—Eva, Hollywood-style (with a Swedish supplement of her nudity), quick to get into action, while Jan remains inert, has trouble finding his slippers and fusses with a wisdom tooth—Jan gives us the other bookend of a dream. He gets going, at last, with, “You know, I had the strangest dream last night. Know what I dreamed? We were back with the Philharmonic, sitting side-by-side [she being the Concert Master, he being a second fiddle], rehearsing the 4th Brandenburg Concerto, the largo tempo [slow and dignified style], and everything happening now [the orchestra having been shut down, due to the sporadic deadliness] was behind us. I woke up crying…” Eva’s only response is to wonder if he’s going to shave this morning, in meeting a delivery of two flats of loganberries for the mayor of the town across from the island where now they own and work a small farm. Before they hit the road, Jan has a panic attack. As he huddles by a window, she reasons, “You mustn’t be so sensitive. Try to control yourself. I do.” Tearful Jan replies, “Can’t you ever shut up?” Soon he apologizes, and nothing is right going forward, toward excitements you’ve seen many times before; only, you’ve never seen what this excitement brings your way. On the ferry to the client, they encounter him and his wife, and bourgeois patter clicks in like a nice brunch. “We just went out to check on the summer cottage… We won’t be home today, but Mrs. Almberg should be there… Why don’t we get together for dinner sometime and make some music? I’ve missed our soirees…” Thrilled by the generous transaction by the leading lights’ servant, they visit an antiquarian friend, Fredrick, who also sells wine they can now afford. He’s been drafted and is very unhappy about it; but he counters his anxiety by showing them, “the finest piece I own,” a rococo ceramic music box which his mother left for him. “I’ll never sell it!” Eva and Jan furtively smile at the indulgence, never noticing that the practice of their musical energies have dwindled to music-box proportions. Or, was this regime never more than about correctly following others’ initiatives to secure cozy elegance? While they clamor for wine and chat about civilized overtures, they feel no need (or no hope) to counter the plague of domination on the move. (And yet the essence of music–a carnal action illuminating problematic dynamics and against facile conclusions–invokes a significant rejoinder against the mayhem having its way.) The mayor’s wife had remarked, “My sister was evacuated to a transit camp, and they’re bombed almost daily.” A cut away from the precious music machine reveals a clock face with Hercules struggling to support it. Herculean effort, seemingly not for mortals. Also in view, an old photo of a royal family, prominent by way of mass murder.

The little stopover does allow something else, from out of the forgotten wisdom Eva presumably brushed past, lost forever within her shabby recollection. Fredrick’s homage to his mother’s taste (perhaps deeply felt) does involve, for the wide-awake, the modesty of reaching out to others who may not derive the real deal, but a facsimile from which to be brushed and to constitute a player, of sorts, in the motion of primordial creativity–involving a transaction with the cosmos itself, a transaction of disinterestedness, the antithesis of the savagery having its way and bragging about it. During the early moments of the protagonists’ resembling forgettable movies, Eva nags Jan for failing to repair their radio. Fredrick, asking them, “Do you listen to the radio?” poses an exigency to be fully alert about what the rest of the world is doing. The conscript spoons out, “Yesterday, our side threatened to take the most atrocious measures. And the other side congratulated us on our imminent destruction…” Slipping, it seems, Fredrick calms himself with, “I suspect we needn’t take it too seriously… Taste this [wine]. It’s quite good… Cheers!… When I sit here all alone among my things, I start feeling so miserable. I’m not sure why. [A tug in the dark, like Eva’s forgetfulness.] Maybe because no one would miss me if I were gone.” Jan would have to say, “You’ll be back before you know it.”

Of course, that miasma would presage some kind of downfall. The descent to their disaster here is not at all confined to the register of bemusing coincidence. Back home, there’s an al fresco dinner with that lovely, head-turning wine, comprising new (but dubious) frontiers, ranging from her supposed resolve to take up Italian again (“You have to tell me every night to study”)/ He promising, “I’ll be very strict”); to, “practice our instruments a half hour a day” (Did anyone say, “music?”); to, have a baby (her idea)–in fact three, before she’s 40: “It’s not something one can explain” [another wisp of errant essence, with the addition of his seeing a doctor to discern if during their separation Jan’s promiscuousness may have compromised the plan]. She ramps up the pressure, by questioning his knowing what love is–“Self-love, you know a lot about that!” He tries, “I’ll be a better man next year, next week! I believe one can change completely if one wants to… I’m not a determinist, you know…” (As she runs amok with the term, she manages to look about 13.) He ends the discussion with, “Let’s not do the dishes, now.” She sails him to bed with the knowing smile, “What should we do instead?” During the chores with the chickens and such, next morning, several deafening air force jets dive close to the yard of invention, and one of the heroes of a parachute drop lends up in a tree close to their property. (Bourgeois plans on hold.)

The fantasy converts have, in the midst of that crude show of shock and awe, commenced to deal with each other and the world on a basis of obliterating every irritant. The sighting of the man in the tree, subsequently dead, elicits sharp opposition. Jan, seeing Eva racing toward the casualty, asks, “Where are you going?” Her response is, “He’ll die hanging there.” He argues, “It could be the enemy…” “You coward!” she cries out, after his holding her back, and her slapping him. “Then go!” he screams; and despite qualms he does want her gone, as she wants him gone. Precious gestures notwithstanding, their patience with each other–requiring sharing of mature objectives–has ended, replaced with sporadic and desperate damage control. Soon he’s fetched his rifle and she, now again an ally (for a bit longer), tells him she’ll phone for an ambulance. Seeing that the invader has died, Jan returns to the house where the skies scream with more planes, more pronounced troubled kinetics. A partisan unit arrives, and the officer asks him if he was the one who shot the sitting duck. (Not then, but soon, Jan becomes a mass murderer.) “I suggest you clear out,” was how the leader of the supposed security force left them. That figure wears a contraption on his head, resembling a helmet of mail, a medieval throwback, bringing the era of jets back to burning witches and invoking Death to give good news, as in Bergman’s film, The Seventh Seal (1957). Also prominent in that film are the crusades and the plague.

Car trouble, on the part of the semi-gentle and inept farmers, lands them in the midst of the forces who wield machinery to deadly effect. The other parachutists of that day are particularly galvanized by the cheap shot; but they also get down to making the best political (machinational) outcome for the world at large. (The preamble had Jan proposing, “I’ll put it in gear, and you push. It’s downhill, anyway.”) One bright aspect of their capture is the flashing of their headlights about to hit what they think is the open road, after they actually repair the vehicle, but only as the enemy arrives to stop their escape. The play of lights, all-round, affords a topspin from out of an execution. But the process to particularly watch is the instance of ugly mobs appointing themselves to crush their like and the unaffiliated. The commander of the aerial unit uses Jan, and especially photogenic Eva, to dish out special insult to those they, the invaders, love to hate, and contribute to the sense of impossibility of anyone choosing integrity. Jan and Eva, bereft of creative traction, cannot, unlike protagonists and secondary figures in many other Bergman films, carry us to viable, though outnumbered, illumination. Smallish touches–like that flare of light, and the medieval helmet–dimly guide us. But the heavy lifting must entail an incisive renunciation of the mantra of advantage, by which disinterestedness may come to bear.

The clever jumper has brought along a movie camera to bring about a propaganda coup, whereby irresistible Eva is encouraged to put out inane personal facts to be dubbed over by a seeming cri de coeur against the homeland. The klieg light bathing her in the night catches her blonde presence in such a way that she emits an instance of uncanniness which has force, while being entangled in a cheap fraud. After the soldier/ director has enough fodder to swing the trick, he asks Eva about her “political affiliation,” and learns that she doesn’t have one. “Don’t you care what political regime governs you?” the pushy one asks. Though her discernments are shabby, her vague skepticism from out of the world of music gives her some room to move, if she has initiative beyond wine. As the politician turns to Jan, the latter cries out, “I have a weak heart,” and then faints. This prompts the ugly documenter to order, “Keep rolling! Get him passing out.” (This moment being a couplet with the clever and malevolent actor/ prize fighter slaughtering the ringmaster in Sawdust and Tinsel.) The locals then rebound and run the strangers away. And the patriots catch up with the pacifists regarding the bogus hatred to the home team. (In the interim, that same night on the silver screen, they are wakened by a blazing bombardment all around their supposed sanctuary; and their abortive escape finds them operating on empty. Before the shattering of their sleep, Eva agonizes, “It’s good we don’t have kids…”[vapid Jan smoothing over, “We’ll have kids when peace comes”]. “We’ll never have kids,” she ripostes. The bombs scare them, but (Hollywood-style–Hitchcock’s Tippy always immune to those damn birds) they’re spared to provoke us to imagine what real trouble looks like. Eva initiates an evacuation, while Jan holds his head. (This being a stage before that self-sparing protagonist turns out to be a Psycho, for our edification.) Her move is to head for the seaboard–Jan insisting, “as long as you drive;” but before that Jan proposes killing the chickens during the paucity of food. But neither of them has the nerve to slaughter the hens. On their junket, they see many corpses. Eva stops to regard a dead toddler in a farmyard. At this, she realizes there is no leeway to avoid a steady assault of Byzantine madness. (Its impossibility comprises a clue to a never-ventured range of logic.) Once again, her demand, “Pull yourself together,” hasn’t a hope. The surface of their vehicle has become encrusted with the industrial-level detritus, as if an ancient wreck, an ancient poison. Back in their dining room, Jan remarks, skittishly, “It sounds that they’re at the crossroads…” The complainer complains, “I can’t stand it!” And Eva goes to the window that does not constitute a window of opportunity. He suggests hiding in the basement, and she tells him, “I won’t be trapped like a rat!” (Easier said than done.) After a bomb blows open their door, their barnyard becomes fiery but not fiery enough for their plight. (Jan crazily commences to babble about the provenance of his violin, which he might touch one day, for half an hour. And yet, such a seeming cop-out, regarding a soldier/ artisan–serving in the Russian army against Napoleon and his stunted vision of power–and that soldier’s loss of a leg and return to musical machinery to the point of majesty, may have been the coward’s brush with lucidity. From there, he lobbies for a declaration of love from Eva. Do you care for me a little? She, now fully cynical, replies, with no warmth, “Yes, I care for you a little…” He proceeds to have a cramp in his leg. The busy, but fragmentary, day ends with her command from her bed, “Get over here…”

They’re rounded up at a grocery store. Then, along with other suspected traitors, they’re trucked to an elementary school being used as a detention centre. Along with other “intellectuals” en route, the protagonists nearly disappear in the public hubbub of the event. (Their being loaded into the truck is filmed from an abstract distance.) In their case, we eventually come to realize that the mayor, doubling as the last word for military order in this pocket of stress, would have realized from the first that Eva’s declaration of “longing for liberation” was a crock. But within the sadistic talent pool of amateur or semi-amateur soldiers, intent upon crushing some supposed evil ideology, the opportunity to rough up rather recent and rather odd arrivals gets legs. Those, including the vicar, who were misinformed that the other side (very rich in aircrafts) had won the war, and went on to welcome the neighbors, receive savage beatings. Eva (and Jan), along this current of paranoia, are made to hear her heresies–“We’ve been suppressed for too long, etc.”–and the projectionist relishes spewing “Lights out!” and fondles her breasts in dumping her into a holding room, where a corpse and someone dying from torture are seen. The officer of the division has argued, “How do you explain the fact that paratroopers liquidated every civilian within almost two square miles of you, and spared the two of you?” Her response was, “I don’t understand any of this.” Soon Jan is tossed into the room where she is trying to make some sense of her homeland. (A jailer makes light of the vicar’s dislocated shoulder. “No tennis for a few weeks.”) Jan’s typical complaints do ring an important bell, namely, Jof, in The Seventh Seal, being beaten up by an ugly mob in the 12th century; and reporting, “They hit me on the head…” Eva notes, “I don’t see anything.” Jof and his wife, Marie, go on to hold the powers of acrobatics and juggling–as hopelessly far from the goons as you can get. And hopelessly far from Jan and Eva. Later, after Jan misbehaves abominably (as we’ll soon set out its timbre), they find themselves in single file on a ridge at twilight, the echo of the Dance of Death, in The Seventh Seal. (The holding room displays multiples of two patterns which the kids had colored-in: a three-leaf clover; and a bull’s-eye.)

Their music associate, the mayor, shows up, in the courtyard, where all the suspects have been herded. He addresses the disappointing by pointing out a figure having been dragged to a stake and covered by a cloth bag. “This man collaborated with the enemies and caused us heavy losses. But the government has pardoned him and commuted his death sentence to life at hard labor. The rest of you will also receive more clemency than you deserve.” The chief, not completely on the same page as the “government,” points his cane, as if effecting a benediction, to indicate those who can go home immediately. He announces, “Some of you will be freed immediately and transported home.” “Transported?” (Just as the execution was to go off unofficially, Eva, now in his office, was to be made a bogus example to dilute the tyrant’s massacre. “I gave orders not to touch you.” Eva replies, “They behaved… almost correctly.”

The mayor, one Jacobi, now has Eva as his mistress (another event shimmering under the radar). Also down there, Jan has figured that out. Digging potatoes and looking like medieval serfs, they quarrel in such a way you’d think they’d never been exposed to the chance to love music in its dynamics in the form of mortality being also a vital correspondent of the cosmos itself. Jan, fed up with the work, announces he’s going into the house to listen to the radio Jacobi has given them. “You do that,” she sneers. “It’ll be a relief not to see you.” He recalls, “Just the other day you said that it was good we had Jacobi as a friend…” She declares, “I’m going to ask Jacobi to stop coming here. Filip [a friend and source of fresh fish and another loose cannon having put together a gang] says it could make things worse for us.” For the nonce, Jan, implicitly often drunk, goes out of character: “It’s none of Filip’s damn business who comes here!” She, finding transparent his insipid bravado, accuses him of being “such a suck-up” in dealing with both of the men. (Her also being a lover of Filip.) She threatens, “I don’t suck-up!” “Suck-up, suck-up, suck-up,” he disagrees. Eva says, “When peace comes, we’re going our separate ways. It will be heaven to get away from you and your childishness!” He sits down beside her and apologizes. “You say that, but you don’t mean it. The words just fall out of your mouth,” she pursues her hopeful attack. Root-systems shot, if ever they seriously functioned. Hence, Jan’s, “Can we be friends?” And her rush to embrace him. Jacobi knocks (now a daily drug). She opens the door and, to his, “Am I causing trouble?” she assures him, “Not at all.” “Jan!” he yells, “Where the hell are you?” [he had been hiding]. The Big Daddy of the North brings to him the score of Dvorak’s Trio in E flat Major. “An uncle left it to me” [a bid for a placid musicale?] To Eva he gives a ring, “an old family heirloom.” “Eva, talk to me… Don’t be sad,” he pleads. She eventually tolerates his embrace (as with Jan, not long ago), as the trio proceeds to get drunk on something strong. Before Jan collapses on the table, Eva suggests he not come anymore. He tells them, “I happen to like you two… I could have sent you to a labor camp… Jan Rosenberg, are you afraid? Are you an artist or a mouse?” “Oh, I’m a mouse,” he replies, in a non-mouse register. At that, Jacobi smashes his cane on the table. He goes on, unpleasantly, “The sacred freedom of art. The sacred gutlessness of art…” After a long and stressful pause, he goes out to take a piss. Eva reasons, “God, I wish I could sober up!” “We have to get rid of him,” the unimpressive farmer declares. (Soon we’ll see that the mild-mannered hanger-on has a reservoir hitherto hidden. As with his adversaries, Jan proceeds to short-circuit the phenomenon of force.) Before we see Jacobi, we hear him announcing, “The woods are full of people”–people following Filip’s lead. “I’d often wondered what they’d do to me. They have no reason to torture me. I have no secret information… But perhaps they just feel like making me suffer… Don’t worry, I’m just kidding. This part of the island has been pacified” [wiped out by the enemy]. (Fredrick had used a similar pacifier.) With Jan dead to the world, the militant mayor turns, sadly late, to introduce a new incisiveness with Eva. “Can you feel that I’m here? Touch my eyes. Can you feel who I am?” “No,” is her answer; and pragmatic Marie comes by, from the 12th century, by way of, The Seventh Seal. Jacobi keeps trucking, “It’s odd, you see. I’ve only felt close to others a few times… It’s not something you can talk about. There’s nothing to say. Nowhere to hide. No excuses. No evasions…” (An oracle, in the oddest way, within an extended work springing with rare direction.) He concludes with, “Just great guilt, great pain and great fear… Damn, it’s cold!” Prosaic Eva wants to shoo him out. He, though, takes her to the bedroom and gives her his life’s savings. (More instinctive discernment appears in his feeling the change in the weather hurting his lame leg. Power of a different species.) In face of Eva’s adamant hostility he perseveres with stories of his grandson and the death of his mother–each vignette endeavoring to open a new world. “There isn’t much that gets through…”

The preamble of his familiar lovemaking with her in the greenhouse posits a maelstrom of nonsense in both of them. He divulges that he accepted his leadership because he was afraid of going to the front. She jangles drunkenly, “I’ll never be unfaithful to Jan. Sometimes it frightens me to think about it. So I don’t.” Jan wakes up and drinks more firewater. He rushes to the bedroom, sees the wad of money and puts it in his back pocket. (A Hitchcock touch, for a shredding purchase upon the cosmos per se. Implying a whole different [mundane, advantage-drunkenness] direction of cogency.) He holds his head. He calls out, “Eva!” Church bells ring. He sees them emerging from the tryst. He experiences a silvery atmosphere, recalling Alma’s intensities, in Sawdust and Tinsel. He cringes in the dark stairwell. Eva fetches Jacobi’s cane, and then he leaves. She sees Jan crying, and tells him, “Cry if you think it will help.” As she prepares a pot of tea, that throng noted in the woods materializes as Filip’s rebels apprehending Jacobi and demanding all of his money to finance a stand against the expensive armament of a superior (and yet pathetic) force. Filip and Jacobi enter the house (at which Jan retreats to a nook). Jacobi explains, “Filip says I can buy my freedom because their organization needs cash. So, I’m asking you, dear Eva. Lend me the money I gave you.” “Jan has it,” she tells him, from out of a precinct of careless contempt. Jan, now with a coward’s advantage, declares, “I don’t know anything about money…” Eva, in shock, sees a hard setback, in the making for many years. Thus ensues a futile search, the removal of her recent present, and Filip’s commanding Jan (all now in the yard) to shoot Jacobi. The troopers proceed to trash the house in the mode of a tornado (depths going nowhere), the end of the farmers’ supposed haven in the wake of a feeble grasp of music. Jan cradles his violin of a noble craftsman, while soldiers slaughter the chickens. The house is firebombed. On the first wave of his molten assignment he aims the handgun, and then throws the weapon to the ground. But the juggernaut of humiliation clicks in and he discharges several volleys into a Jacobi who screams and crawls under a wagon where the execution continues. Eva leans upon what’s left of a wall.

The soldiers leave and the soldiering of Jan and Eva crashes into the realm of metaphor. Eva asks where he hid it. Jan tells her it was in his back pocket. (Amateurs? Hollywood? Too much, to continue in that vein?) Next morning they leave their retreat and stage a retreat to death. Still unconvinced that Jan wasn’t a pushover, she demands, “Why didn’t you hand over the money?” His shot is, “They’d have shot him anyway.” Her feeble, “That’s not true,” is followed by a roar of crying. “Stop it! he commands. Then he smashes her face, sending her to the ground. (An itinerant not wise enough to beware of a killer, as in Sawdust and Tinsel.) Now it is she who covers her face with her hands. Along a war-blasted road, he pushing their effects in a wagon, Jan marches jauntily and menacingly. She is slouched over and far behind him. She falls down, being heavily disoriented. He doesn’t miss a beat. (Killing becomes him.) She catches up. At a charred farm, someone shoots in their direction, in fact an adolescent in uniform who has deserted in seeing his war not ending happily–that latter term seeming hard to place for a youngster with a mind of his own. Jan claims to be peaceful. Eva asks, “Are you hungry? We’ll give you food…” He’s in another greenhouse–another point of transport, another coincidence stemming from a Mad Hatter. She asks, “Did you hurt your hand?”/ “A dog bit me” [He’s lucky]. “Shall I have a look? I’ll bandage it up… I’ll get you something to eat…” He’s not hungry–the atmosphere sucking up all taste. Jan, quickly getting past the boy’s name (Johan; music), wants the location of “Hammass” (where a boat, for hire, plies). Over tea, they learn that the boy hasn’t slept for days. His alert having flagged in the vicinity of Eva, Jan strikes like a rattler. Now holding the gun, he hunts the stranger along the coastal path, as if the kid were a rabbit. And, with Eva onscreen, the fatal shots come very easily to the killer. Her eyes are beyond horror. They trudge to the port and they coincide with the Dance of Death on a ridge not without powerful beauty they can’t read. Jan’s shapeless (Death) cap goes medieval. The prime of the neighborhood has convened. On embarkation, fine hors d’oeuvres are distributed. Jan seems to be seasick. and thereby he doesn’t share the rowing. But he hops to it in using an oar to push away the hundreds of corpses in the still water, comprising another link of lostness. In the same vein of this vision of absolute dead-end, the skipper quietly steps overboard, joining the drowned. Trouble in Paradise. Jan covers his face. There is beauty in the texture of the harsh sea. And then Eva musters her feel-good poem, with its forgotten theme.

That tincture of another direction holds for us a new twist, in lieu of very poor sports: one is obliged to generously shore up and celebrate little, and maybe big, overtures.

#ingmar bergman

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