Vargtimmen
Ingmar Bergman (1968)
Not for the first time, Bergman opens with devices that place himself and his audience at a remove from the film to come. Text explains that Johan Borg, an artist, went missing, some years ago, from his home on Baltrum, one of the Frisian Islands; that Borg’s wife ‘later left me his diary’; that a combination of diary entries and Alma’s account are the basis of the film. On the soundtrack, accompanying the opening credits on the screen, are the noise of people talking and the racket of hammering and other objects in movement – before a voice (Bergman’s?) commands quiet and ‘Take’. The first part of the narrative proper consists of Liv Ullmann, as Alma, speaking to camera. These distancing effects and pseudo-documentary touches aren’t, however, a taste of things to come. Once Hour of the Wolf is underway, it seems to move inside the mind of Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) and the viewer is no more able than Borg is to escape the flow of often fantastic and nightmarish images. (Unless s/he walks out, as one person did at the BFI screening I attended.) The various settings – the interior of Johan and Alma’s cottage, a castle, a forest, the sea – become psychological as well as physical realities. One of the film’s most memorable shots is of the small boat that has brought the couple to Baltrum moving back out to sea and out of view. From the point at which the boat drifts away, Johan Borg is unmoored from the quotidian world.
Hour of the Wolf follows immediately after Persona in the chronological sequence of Bergman’s features. (The title refers to the nocturnal hour at which, according to the insomniac Johan, most births and deaths occur.) As in the preceding film, Bergman and Sven Nykvist create many compelling (black and white) images; Nykvist’s lighting of people’s faces is masterly. The success of the piece depends, however, on submission to its visual flair and momentum. Interpreting the images makes them less exciting because the themes they express and some of the details are too familiar. There are recollected childhood traumas and a battle between the protagonist’s child and adult selves: in a dream sequence, the man Johan kills the child (Mikael Rundqvist) inside him. The baron (Erland Josephson) and his wife (Gertrud Fridh) invite the Borgs to a party at their castle on the island: the other guests include leering ‘cannibals’ (Johan’s word), who mock and threaten the artist. While the pregnant Alma is determinedly loyal to her husband, he remains obsessed by a former mistress Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin), whose portrait that Johan painted hangs on a bedroom wall at the castle, and who is a guest at a subsequent party there. The sinister Lindhorst (Georg Rydeberg) presides over a puppet show and later makes up Johan’s face and dresses him for a performance – making love to Veronica. Johan looks up from doing so to see a derisively laughing audience of other guests enjoying the action.
Max von Sydow, with his hair darker than usual and backcombed to give the impression of a more receding hairline, calls Bergman to mind. Of course it’s interesting to watch von Sydow in what isn’t an obvious role for him though you can’t help feeling he’s better suited to playing an individual than an archetype. Her opening interview is a shade too ‘acted’ but Liv Ullmann goes on to give the strongest performance in the film, as Alma tenaciously tries to keep a hold on reality as well as faith with her husband on his surreal, paranoid psychic odyssey. The self-contained, black-clad figure of Erland Josephson registers: he’s just as discomfiting in an unobtrusive movement like walking away from camera with his hands folded neatly behind his back as in the baron’s supernatural stroll across the ceiling. Similarly, the cadaverous Naima Wifstrand (who died a few months after the film was released) is extraordinary to behold even before the scene in which her ‘Old Woman with a Hat’ removes not just her bonnet but the whole of her face. The dissonant music by the modernist composer Lars Johan Werle expresses rather obviously Johan’s disturbed, unstable mind.
17 March 2018
