"Here, instead of choice, we had constraint. And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom.... It was one of the last times I fully got into a book, in this case Norman Mailer’s 1,056-page masterwork 'The Executioner’s Song,' so immersed that I forgot there was a pandemic in the first place. I mostly ignored dating apps, which are as awful as they are necessary because everyone else is on them. But now, for a moment, there was no real shame in being alone. For the first time, I didn’t feel guilty about feeling lonely.... I thought more deeply about my life, and how I wanted to live. But I also did things I always said I wanted to do but — short of a natural disaster — knew I never would. Like watch the films of the Swedish existentialist director Ingmar Bergman.... Yes, it was a bit masochistic, but watching 12 of his films in rapid succession ended up being an unusual highlight of an unusual year. I also live-tweeted the experience, perhaps as a way to make a solitary adventure less so...."
Writes Shadi Hamid, in "Missing the solitude of covid," one essay in a WaPo collection of 5 essays looking back on the lockdown — free access link.
1. "And in constraint I discovered a new kind of freedom" — reminds me of the line in The Book of Common Prayer, "whose service is perfect freedom." The "who" is, of course, God. The service is chosen. The lockdown was imposed from the outside and it wasn't anything like God. But it's interesting to contemplate the difference... and to ask Grok to sketch out an "Ingmar Bergman" screenplay on the subject.
2. "The Paradox of Choice" — yay! Glad to see that come up again. I've got a tag for it. I made that unusually specific tag because I could see this is what "they" have in store for us: a world without choice and with an induced and cultivated belief that the constriction of choice is the key to happiness. We practiced within the lockdown and "they" got to see how well we did.
3. "The Executioner’s Song" — I wrote a law review article about it long ago: "Standing, In Fluffy Slippers." That was back in 1991 when I believed I could find a new way to write within the genre of law review articles. Mailer's book is about Gary Gilmore, who, condemned to death, chose the firing squad. How's that for a "Paradox of Choice"? Oddly enough, just last Thursday a man was executed — in South Carolina — by firing squad. Could have picked lethal injection. Picked firing squad.
4. I like that the essay writer, locked down, eschewed dating apps but embraced live-tweeting. He didn't want to feel so all alone.
I was very skeptical about this project. Both actors seem way too old, and they both have to do accents to fit the characters. Kidman comes from Australia, and Bardem comes from Spain. Desi came from Cuba, and Lucy grew up in Jamestown, New York.
But that trailer overcame my resistance and — this is beyond my rational analysis — gave me chills. Did Aaron Sorkin do that? I haven't seen much of Sorkin's work. Of all his movies, I've only seen "Moneyball" and "The Trial of the Chicago 7" (and a little bit of "The Social Network"). As for his TV, I haven't seen any of it! Am I the only one who's never watched a single episode of "The West Wing"?
Bonus fact from Lucy's Wikipedia page: "Ball recalled little from the day her father died, except a bird getting trapped in the house, which caused her lifelong ornithophobia." She was 3. Her father was 27.
From that ornithophobia link, we're told Ingmar Bergman also had a fear of birds, and so do David Beckman and Scarlette Johansson. Eminem has a fear of a specific bird: Owls. We're not told the word for the fear of owls. (Strigiformophobia?) But we are told the word for the fear of chickens — alektorophobia — and the fear of ducks — anatidaephobia.
"[Hagai Levi, in the HBO remake of 'Scenes from a Marriage'] sees marriage as a way of navigating one’s place in the economic and social order. Child rearing features much more saliently in his characters’ lives, as does the management of a shared household. ... If marriage is composed of a set of tasks or projects—a career, parenting, keeping a home—its failures can be displayed as extrinsic to the question of how spouses connect. Levi’s diagnosis is something like: these people have different priorities.... What was, in Bergman’s hands, a horrifying picture of the limits of human contact becomes, in Levi’s, a set of increasingly independent journeys of personal growth.
By the end of the remake, Jonathan, Mira, and their daughter are flourishing, and even part of their house has been renovated.... For Bergman, connecting is the goal, and it’s not clear that we can do it.... Can you get close enough to any person for life to feel real? These are Bergman’s questions; Levi doesn’t ask them."
This article transcribes a quote that I'd half-remembered since I saw the Bergman movie in 1973: "I have a mental picture of myself that doesn’t correspond to reality... My senses—sight, hearing, touch—are starting to fail me. This table, for instance: I can see it and touch it, but the sensation is deadened and dry. . . . It’s the same with everything. Music, scents, faces, voices—everything seems puny, gray, and undignified."
That's said by an older woman to the main female character, who is a young woman under the impression that she has a fine marriage. I was seeing the movie when I was 22, and I had just gotten married, and those lines truly freaked me out. The feeling of being dead while alive — separated from life and unable to get back into it — is a terrible thing, and if you attribute that feeling to you marriage, how frightening. Marriage is what had seemed like the destination, an opening up into the greatest feeling of being alive.
ADDED: This seems to call for the song "Being Alive." Here: pick one.
I don't blog about it every day, but my son John has a blog — that he adds to every day — that goes year by year from 1920 to 2020 and gives his favorite movie (or movies) from each year. For some years, he isolates a single movie, but for other years, he lists a runner-up or 2 or 3. He hit 1968 today, and this is a year with 4 movies.
The top choice is "Monterey Pop":
Truly amazing. And you can watch it at home on 4K now (with the right streaming channels, about which John will always inform you).
The second choice is something I watched recently, Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet." I watched it as part of a project — my imaginary movie project — that I began in 2019 and stalled on in 2019. I was rewatching movies that I'd seen when they came out, beginning with 1960 and only getting up to 1968. My 1968 movie was "Romeo and Juliet," and I wrote about it here. I've watched the movies for the next 5 years, but somehow I never got around to blogging about them. How, when I blog every day, do a watch a whole movie, specifically meaning to write a post about it, but then I don't?! Maybe I expect myself to say so much that I end up saying nothing at all.
Anyway... John's third choice is the Ingmar Bergman movie "Shame," which I saw when I was in college, when I had so many Ingmar Bergman movies loaded into my brain.
John's fourth choice is something I haven't seen — Frederick Wiseman's documentary "High School." I'm so impressed by the approach of using nothing but film, with no voiceover or text explanations:
"... he rants like a combination of Grandpa Simpson and Archie Bunker about anyone under age 40, but when it comes to anything I’m up to, or how he or I are feeling? Crickets. I’m actually keeping a list of things he’d rather do than, well, me. The list is pretty depressing. I am less desirable than playing Windows Solitaire or watching BBC detective shows and The Seventh Seal (I’m less desirable to my husband than an overwrought, depressing Swedish movie, FML)."
From "My Husband Won’t Have Sex With Me!," a letter to the "Ask Polly" advice columnist at New York Magazine. If I can trust the internet, "FML" means "fuck my life."
Carl Adolf von Sydow was born on April 10, 1929, in Lund, in southern Sweden.... He was said to have adopted the name Max from the star performer in a flea circus he saw while serving in the Swedish Quartermaster Corps....
For all his connection to the land of his birth and of Bergman, Sweden became distant to Mr. von Sydow.... "I have nowhere really to call home... I feel I have lost my Swedish roots. It’s funny because I’ve been working in so many places that now I feel at home in many locations. But Sweden is the only place I feel less and less at home."
Did he really name himself after a flea?! From a 2012 interview (in The Guardian):
Is it true he named himself after a flea? "Ha ha ha!" booms Von Sydow, his laugh filling the room. "Yes! Ha ha ha! During my military service, I performed a sketch in which I played a flea called Max. So when critics kept misspelling my name, I decided to change it and thought, 'Ah! Max!'"
Ah, so it was not an actual flea "in a flea circus he saw," as the New York Times put it. He himself was in a show playing a character that happened to be a flea.
A flea circus is a show on a tiny stage that has real fleas performing (or tiny imitation fleas):
The first records of flea performances were from watchmakers who were demonstrating their metalworking skills. In 1578, Mark Scaliot produced a lock and chain that were attached to a flea. The first recorded flea circus dates back to the early 1820s, when an Italian impresario called Louis Bertolotto advertised an “extraordinary exhibition of industrious fleas” on Regent Street, London. Some flea circuses persisted in very small venues in the United States as late as the 1960s....
Here's Charlie Chaplin with his flea circus in one of my all-time favorite movies — "Limelight" (which I'll put up as a meditation on death alongside "The Seventh Seal," so please make that your double feature):
New York Magazine has the big story. The author is Daphne Merkin (her name has been commented on many times, so spare me) who has been friends with Woody Allen for 40+ years and pronounces herself "mystified" by his "almost Aspergian aloneness" and "genuine diffidence." Here's some material from the second half of the article, about the relationship between Woody and Soon-Yi. I'll get to
Both of them are vague on how and when their friendship turned sexual — “It was 25 years ago,” she says... "and to the best of my memory I came in from college on some holiday and he showed me a Bergman movie, which I believe was The Seventh Seal, but I’m not positive. We chatted about it, and I must have been impressive because he kissed me and I think that started it. We were like two magnets, very attracted to each other.”....
“I know this is no justification,” she goes on, sitting across from me, her back ramrod straight. (“Posture,” she says quietly to Allen whenever he begins to slump. “I married her for her posture,” he quips.) “But Mia was never kind to me, never civil. And here was a chance for someone showing me affection and being nice to me, so of course I was thrilled and ran for it. I’d be a moron and an idiot, retarded” — she pauses here, mindful that this is one of her mother’s words for her — “if I’d stayed with Mia.” She adds, as if to set the record straight, “I wasn’t the one who went after Woody — where would I get the nerve? He pursued me. That’s why the relationship has worked: I felt valued. It’s quite flattering for me. He’s usually a meek person, and he took a big leap.”....
“I was madly in love with him,” she announces. It sounds completely heartfelt and as though it just happened yesterday. “Completely attracted to him, physically and sexually. I know he’d said that I’d meet someone in college, but I’d already decided. I came to realize how understanding he was and what a sweet person he was. He grew on me.” In an email she sends me, she slightly revises the scenario, showing a different side of herself, one in which she comes across less as the vulnerable, virginal girl she was than as a charming flirt: “I think Woody liked the fact that I had chutzpah when he first kissed me and I said, ‘I wondered how long it was going to take you to make a move.’ From the first kiss I was a goner and loved him.”...
The couple have two adopted children (two judges investigated each adoption, as is routinely done, and okayed them) because of Soon-Yi’s strong convictions about the narcissism inherent in having biological children. “I could definitely have children,” she says, “but I was never interested. I find it the height of vanity and very egocentric. I don’t need kids out there who have similar traits to me and look similar to me and Woody. Why is one’s DNA so special? Why would one keep on breeding when there are so many kids out there who need a loving home?”...
Now that the girls are grown... the couple are more close-knit — you might call it symbiotic — than ever. Allen describes how they spend their time together as “parallel play,” which makes Soon-Yi laugh. “Parallel play,” she repeats. “Yes, I think you’re right..."
... I ask Soon-Yi whether she thinks she’s been reshaped by her husband. “Reshaped?” she asks. “I mean, he’s given me a whole world, a whole world that I wouldn’t have had access to. So if you mean that way, then yes.”...
Lots more in the article. I've skipped most of it. I'll go back to the get-Mia things later.
ADDED: Maybe I'll stick with my original skipping of the get-Mia stuff. I'm seeing this:
Here's the article, by Matt Taibbi, which has the subtitle "Donald Trump crushed 16 GOP opponents in one of the most appalling, vicious campaigns in history. His next victim? The entire Republican Party." I don't really feel I need to read that. I clicked over there because I saw the illustration, in cropped form, over at Facebook, and I wondered what the hell it was supposed to be. You have to scroll down for the illustration, which is very nicely drawn by Victor Juhasz. Rolling Stone just plopped some video at the top of the page, but I've got to say that I love where the freeze frame just happens to be on my browser:
Speaking of DEATH!!! Hell, man. The party of Reagan is like a big, gooey sandwich, sliced down the middle by Donald Trump and sadistically eased apart by his famously tiny hands so that the gloppy cheese that is the establishment stretches with agonizing stringiness and the delectable ham remains securely ensconced within the thick slabs of the well-toasted bread of the people.
Now, step away from the sandwich — you've had enough, Miss Piggy — and feast your eyes on the fine Juhasz drawing of Trump as the Grim Reaper. The reference is to the chess game with death in the Ingmar Bergman movie "The Seventh Seal":
From the above-linked Wikipedia summary of the Bergman movie:
Disillusioned knight Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his nihilistic squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) return after fighting in the Crusades and find Sweden being ravaged by the plague. On the beach immediately after their arrival, the knight encounters Death (Bengt Ekerot), personified as a pale, black-cowled figure resembling a monk. The knight, in the middle of a chess game he has been playing alone, challenges Death to a chess match, believing that he can forestall his demise as long as the game continues. Death agrees, and they start a new game.
So the GOP invited Trump to play the game.
The knight and squire enter a church... The knight goes to the confessional where he is joined by Death in the robe of a priest.... Upon revealing the chess strategy that will save his life, the knight discovers that the priest is Death, who promises to remember the tactics....
Trump learned how the GOP was playing the game.
After hearing Death state "No one escapes me" the knight knocks the chess pieces over, distracting Death while the family slips away.
#NeverTrump!!!
Death places the pieces back on the board, then wins the game on the next move.
Indiana!
He announces that when they meet again, the knight's time—and that of all those traveling with him—will be up....
Convention time. Here's the GOP on its way to Cleveland...
They go further away, away from the sunrise, in their stately dance to the dark country beyond the horizon while the rain gently washes their faces and cleanses the tears from their cheeks....
Among the "wins" for Sandler: Worst Picture, Worst Actor (for Sandler's work in "Jack & Jill" and "Just Go With It"), Worst Actress (as "Jill"), Worst Supporting Actor (for Al Pacino's cameo as himself), Worst Supporting Actress (for pal David Spade as "Monica"), Worst Screen Ensemble (for the entire cast), Worst Director (Dennis Dugan for "Jack and Jill" and "Just Go With It"), Worst Remake, Rip-off or Sequel ("Jack and Jill" for ripping off Ed Woods' camp classic "Glen or Glenda"), Worst Screen Couple (Sandler and Katie Holmes, Sandler and Al Pacino or Sandler with himself) and Worst Screenplay.
Yeah, Sandler won in both the actor and actress categories, but I think the funniest thing there is that Al Pacino won Worst Supporting Actor when he was playing the role of himself. How can you screw up playing yourself? Ah! That seems like a deep and metaphysical question. It reminds me of the notion that made André Gregory cry, as described by Wallace Shawn in "My Dinner with André":
The reason I was meeting André was that an acquaintance of mine, George Grassfield, had called me and just insisted that I had to see him. Apparently, George had been walking his dog in an odd section of town the night before, and he'd suddenly come upon André leaning against a crumbling old building, and sobbing. André had explained to George that he'd just been watching the Ingmar Bergman movie Autumn Sonata about twenty-five blocks away, and he'd been seized by a fit of ungovernable crying when the character played by Ingrid Bergman had said, "I could always live in my art, but never in my life."
But let's check YouTube for what Pacino actually did in the movie "Jack and Jill." Here:
Pacino's got the perfect lines, revealing that Sandler, et al., knew their movie was perfectly bad:
"Burn this. This must never be seen... All copies! Destroy them!"
... and 42 minutes later, he's still not speaking?
It's really irritating to be put on watch like this. He goes on TV too much to say too little, and making us wait for it is... well, maybe there's a good reason.
UPDATE: Speech done. I didn't hear anything new... except that Warren Buffett would like to say we have a "quadruple A" rating if only there were such a thing. Beyond that, I hear the usual blather about how we need a "balanced" approach. In the end, he attempted to tie his economics homily to the terrible helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The 2 things aren't really connected, but he needed to give a speech on the financial markets and it would have been unseemly to appear and not say something about Afghanistan.
[Michelangelo Antonioni's] “L’Avventura” gave me one of the most profound shocks I’ve ever had at the movies, greater even than ... “La Dolce Vita.” At the time there were two camps, the people who liked the Fellini film and the ones who liked “L’Avventura.” I knew I was firmly on Antonioni’s side of the line, but if you’d asked me at the time, I’m not sure I would have been able to explain why. I loved Fellini’s pictures and I admired “La Dolce Vita,” but I was challenged by “L’Avventura.” Fellini’s film moved me and entertained me, but Antonioni’s film changed my perception of cinema, and the world around me, and made both seem limitless. (It was two years later when I caught up with Fellini again, and had the same kind of epiphany with “8 ½.”)...
I crossed paths with Antonioni a number of times over the years....
But it was his images that I knew, much better than the man himself. Images that continue to haunt me, inspire me. To expand my sense of what it is to be alive in the world.
I'm in the Fellini camp -- can we go to a place called Fellini Camp? -- where the images continue to haunt me and inspire me and expand my sense of what it is to eat an egg or a banana.
AND: Right under Scorsese's piece, Woody Allen writes about Antonioni's death partner, Ingmar Bergman:
To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”...
I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.
Because, among other things, size matters:
That's from "Sleeper," and note that Woody Allen also made a film called "Bananas."
Now, let's compare two men -- Woody Allen and Marcello Mastroianni -- as they encounter the banana:
It's true that Woody has the bigger banana, but I'm going with Marcello!
On seeing this news, I literally break down and cry for several minutes. The man was 89 years old.
ADDED: Let's look at the list of his films. Talk about the ones that meant something to you. I'll list the ones I remember seeing:
1. "Autumn Sonata." It's the subject of a wonderful discussion about art in (my favorite movie) "My Dinner With Andre." There's a line, something like: I could always live in my art, but never in my life. Ingrid Bergman says it to Liv Ullmann. Mother to daughter.
2. "Face to Face." Isn't this the movie in "Annie Hall" that Alvy Singer refuses to see because it's already started?
3. "The Magic Flute." Mozart! In Swedish.
4. "Scenes from a Marriage." I think of the scene with Liv Ullmann, playing a therapist, as she's listening to a patient describe her marriage. The patient talks about how the world has come to feel unreal to her. Perhaps she says it feels like paper, and we see a closeup of her hand trying to feel the edge of the table. Then we see a closeup of Liv Ullmann's eyes, with just enough terror showing.
5. "Cries and Whispers." Perhaps the best of them all. I think of the scene where they read "David Copperfield" to each other for some reason. And the broken glass and the blood.
6. "The Touch." Elliot Gould! In English!
7. "The Passion of Anna." I remember being bored. Sorry.
8. "Shame." Another one I saw and couldn't appreciate at the time. I should try again, I'm sure.
9. "Persona." This one is very sharp and simple. Great to rewatch.
10. "The Silence," "Winter Light, "Through a Glass Darkly." Hard to remember which is which now. These were the movies we saw in college and thought precisely exemplified what serious movies were.
11. "The Virgin Spring." Another one we saw in college days, but this one stood out as different.
12. "Wild Strawberries." This is the one they showed us in the dorm -- East Quad -- practically as soon as we arrived as freshmen in 1969. The message was: This is greatness in film. If you don't see why this is great, you have a problem you'd better fix!
13. "The Seventh Seal." Loved this at the time. Loved Woody Allen's spoofing of it in "Love and Death." Have it on DVD but only watched part of it. Let's watch this one tonight. It is about death.
14. "Smiles of a Summer Night." Beautiful, funny, and not that Bergman-y. Woody Allen has a beautiful tribute to it: "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy."
“I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”
The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm.
“While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”
His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:
“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.”...
“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”
Much more at the link, including how he suffered from the fear of death and what completely cured him of that fear.
IN THE COMMENTS: My ex-husband Richard Lawrence Cohen writes:
Ann, after reading the NYT story my first impulse was to come here and find out your response, which is as perceptive and lively as I'd hoped. (I typoed "livly," which is a nice pun for the occasion!) My earliest Bergman experience was stumbling upon The Magician on WOR-TV in New York as a high school student. It was unlike any other movie I'd ever seen and it made me want to see every other movie like it -- movies that enchanted not only the senses and the emotions but the intellect and the aesthetic. Then Wild Strawberries during freshman orientation as you've noted: I thought I remembered that it was shown in the courtyard of the Quad, but maybe that was King Kong instead and maybe they showed Wild Strawberries in the little auditorium. Then several of his classics at Cinema Guild: among them, Smiles of a Summer Night thrilled me with its laughter-filled ideal of romance, and Virgin Spring with its sagalike bright medieval starkness. Just two weeks ago I rented Seventh Seal for my preteen kids because they were fascinated by the idea of playing chess with Death; they liked that scene well enough but it ended too soon for them and they kept asking, "When are they going to show more of the chess game?" before losing interest altogether. For me, the style of the movie felt a bit old-fashioned at this point but many scenes were still powerful, and I was especially taken with the character of the church artist who kept up a cheerful commentary while painting gruesome pictures influenced by the reality of the plague that was all around him.
A corollary memory: seeing Liv Ullman as Nora in A Doll's House on Broadway in the 1970s, with Sam Waterston as Torvald, Sam on crutches after an accident but still pacing back and forth across the stage, unrealistically, so that he could hit his marks.
Yeah, that was an insane Sam Waterston performance. At least he had historically accurate crutches.
"Wild Strawberries" was shown indoors in a fairly small room, where we had to sit on the floor -- which was one of the reasons I didn't enjoy it as much as I was supposed to.
AND: Richard, if the boys like chess movies, here's a list of 1,715 of them.
AND: In today's vlog, I talk about why reading about Bergman's death made me cry.
MUCH LATER: Having collected my "post-of-the-month" for each of the months of 2007 and chosen this for July, I settle down a reread this post, then go back to the top and read the first sentence and break down and cry once again.
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