Musik i mörker
Ingmar Bergman (1948)
The title is exactly what you get in the first few moments as Erland von Koch’s score plays on a black screen. The fourth film that Ingmar Bergman directed is the first he didn’t also write. Dagmar Edqvist’s screenplay is an adaptation of her novel of the same name, about a promising classical pianist who loses his sight. This happens at the very start of Music in Darkness. Bengt Vyldeke (Birger Malmsten) is taking part in a military training exercise (he’s presumably doing national service) – shooting practice. When he sees a puppy dog wandering among the targets Bengt clambers up to rescue the animal. As he moves the puppy out of harm’s way, he’s inadvertently shot by another soldier and blinded.
The early scenes are among the film’s most potent. The golden labrador or retriever puppy, a small white form amid the black framework of the shooting targets, is a telling image of innocent vulnerability; so is Bengt, smiling with tender concern as he reaches towards the creature. Lying in his hospital bed with bandaged eyes, the injured man experiences what must one of Bergman’s first dream sequences – waking from it doesn’t restore Bengt to normality. There are plenty of good bits in the story that follows but that’s how you register them – as bits – and Music is Darkness compels attention chiefly because of what the film-maker went on to do. The sleeve of my Tartan Video DVD includes admiring blurb – ’Touchingly understated’ (Time Out), ’Beautifully lean and laconic’ (New York Times) – that puts a positive spin on a rather low-powered, choppy narrative. The film runs only 84 minutes: you get the sense that Dagmar Edqvist has drastically compressed her novel, that her script amounts to a checklist of key events in Bengt’s struggle to come to terms with blindness and the repeatedly interrupted progress of his relationship with Ingrid (Mai Zetterling), a servant of the relatives in whose house he lives after his accident. Music in Darkness is often melodramatic. It rarely has the imaginative intensity which transforms melodrama in vintage Bergman.
According to his memoir Images: My Life in Film, Bergman made the picture because, after A Ship Bound for India and It Rains on our Love, he needed a commercial success – and was in no position to argue with the producer, Lorens Marmstedt. This was a case of mission accomplished: Music in Darkness did make money and put Bergman’s directing career back on track. To some of the good bits … After being turned down by a conservatoire, Bengt gets work playing piano in a hotel restaurant: the scenes there and in Bengt’s lodgings are shot through with broad comedy and grossly insensitive behaviour which Bergman always had a talent for combining. Less characteristically, he illustrates well the theme of new educational opportunities opening up for, and being seized by, the likes of Ingrid, who has had a rural, unschooled upbringing. Bengt also spends time helping out in a school for blind children, who are evidently the real thing; this is striking and feels unusual in a 1940s film. The tensions between Bengt and Ebbe (Bengt Eklund), Ingrid’s boyfriend and fellow student, are encapsulated in two physical exchanges: first, semi-humorous arm wrestling, then when Ebbe strikes Bengt – who’s pleased to be treated, for once, just like a sighted person.
As Bergman’s leading man in his early films, Birger Malmsten was certainly in the wars – blinded here, killed in a diving accident in Summer Interlude (1951). Malmsten’s essentially gentle temperament isn’t ideal for the expression of Bengt’s furious frustration with his disability but it’s right for the young man’s persisting melancholy. Malmsten’s understated romanticism works well too. Mai Zetterling’s Ingrid is a much stronger (almost sturdy) physical presence and her face magnetises the camera. (She briefly appears naked, in backview. This is instructive since Harriet Andersson’s doing the same in Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1953) seems widely to be regarded as a kind of first.) On the face of it, it’s surprising that Zetterling didn’t appear in any subsequent Bergman films. Among those in the cast who did, Naima Wifstrand has a small role here as one of Bengt’s relatives and Gunnar Björnstrand makes a fleeting but incisively witty appearance as Klasson, the bitterly humourless violinist who plays alongside Bengt in the restaurant. They perform in matching sweaters with a ridiculous harlequin design. This intensifies Klasson’s bad temper and makes you feel this may be one instance where Bengt is better off blind.
28 April 2021
