Upon Bergman's death, Bernardo Bertolucci said that with Antonioni, at the end of the '50s, Bergman took the cinema in a direction not yet explored, toward territories in the depths of the human spirit until then reserved for literature. Bergman “made his characters fantasies for the audience and characters his fantasies.” An elaboration of this quote could be that Bergman's characters were visualizations of his fantasies that evoke angst and fantasies in each viewer.
After Bergman directed Fanny and Alexander (1983), he announced it would be his last film. However he then directed After the Rehearsal and scripted four autobiographical films—Best Intentions, Sunday's Children, Private Confessions, and Faithless. Saraband was billed as a 30-year sequel to the 1972 Scenes from a Marriage with Liv Ullmann as Marianne and Erland Jacobson as Johan. In Saraband (2003) Marianne's seemingly hopeful visit to Johan's country house provides the format for Bergman to continue to portray the angst of Scenes from a Marriage in Johan's three-generation family.
“No one leaves me,” protests Henrik, Johan's son from a previous marriage, repeatedly faced with the past threat that his wife Anna would leave him and a present threat from his daughter Karin saying, “I am leaving you.” This clarion protest against loss reverberates throughout the film as its central theme of unresolved mourning. The focal character, Anna, who died two years before is seen only in still photographs. She is Johan's daughter-in-law, mother of the 19-year-old Karin, and wife of Henrik. For Bergman she seems to represent Ingrid Kareblo, his most cherished and fifth wife for 24 years until her death in 1995. The film is dedicated to Ingrid, and it is her image that appears in the still photos of Anna.
Bergman presents an unusual and stately structure of 10 duets between the four characters in the film—Marianne, Johan, Henrik, and Karin whom Henrik insists on relentlessly overwhelming with his method of cello tutoring. When Johan climbs into bed with Marianne, his failure in empathy is displayed as he humiliates her by pulling away from her. Like Henrik, who shares a bed with his daughter, Johan's need for solace and comfort is exacerbated by the loss of his beloved daughter-in-law, Anna. As narrator and Greek chorus, Marianne initially beguiles the audience into anticipating a narrative of compassion and closeness that is soon dashed, typical of Bergman. She leads the viewer into a mournful narrative of angst, bitterness, competitiveness, and engulfment, replete with anguished revelations and lacerating confrontations
Saraband is Bergman's final filmic example of dealing with his childhood traumas, including exposures to dead bodies, and his terror of death by inflicting angst and destitution upon his audience through his character portrayals and disturbing images. The audience experiences a shattering helplessness and heaviness and thus becomes the recipient of Bergman's projective identification. The experience is harrowing and bleak, not cathartic. In Saraband, as in The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, Cries and Whispers, and Autumn Sonata, nothing is settled. Saraband culminates in Bergman's struggles with sadomasochism, fatherhood, mourning, and impending death.
In his last year Bergman tried to deal with his life-long fear of death by a denial of its finality as he speaks of a reunion with Ingrid in death. It is as though one motive for Bergman's making this last film was to assert a reassuring wish, as Henrik fantasized in the film, that he would find his cherished wife after death, another form of the protest, “No one leaves me.”
One way to describe this interdisciplinary journal is that it is “parallactic,” an astronomical term that means the displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object when seen from different places. The term also has specific use in film when describing the displacement of an object first seen though the viewfinder and then shot through the lens. The concept of parallax emphasizes that no single view can give us the sense of the totality of an object but that a series of perspectives will at least take us in that direction. This idea is parallel to that of overdetermination. This approach is exemplified by Kurosawa's extraordinary film Rashomon (1950).
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., is an associate editor of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
Esther Rashkin, a former fellow and now on the Fellowship Committee and professor of French at the University of Utah, revives a film classic about a five-year-old girl's trauma and complicated mourning in René Clement's French film, Forbidden Games (Jeux interdits). As the Nazis invade Paris in 1940, Paulette's parents are killed by a strafing. She joins an older farm boy in interring small creatures in a burial ground with stolen crucifixes and cardboard tombstones. In addition to her psychoanalytic approach, Rashkin explores other layers such as the influence of the Vichy government and anti-Semitism.
The issue also includes essays on “Sex Eros: The Sexual Politics of Antonioni's Trilogy” by Frank T. Tomasulo and Jason Grant McKahn, “Spatial Representation in Cognitive Science and Film” by Daniel Levin and Caryn Wang, and “Blendings of Real, Fictional, and Other Imaginary People” by Henry Bacon.
Projections is available at . Articles, review essays, book reviews, and letters to the editors may be submitted to . The Forum for Movies and Mind is open to new chapters and provides a bibliography about psychoanalysis and film. For information call 301-652-0889 or e-mail me.
I welcome information about past and present psychoanalytic film discussion for mental health professionals and the public for a future column in TAP.