© 2020 by James Clark
We live in a time when there are many who bid to confound the orthodox. Great gobs of rebels roam the town, threatening to install jurisdictions putting an end to the easy days for what is left of a mainstream. Our entertainments, for instance, smack of concussion. All these game-changers never doubt that their look and ways are destined to happily rule.
There is the possibility, however, that all of that critique will slip back to the defaults of religion and science (and their minions of humanism). It’s one thing to feel that something very important is not in play. It’s quite another thing, it seems to me, to define and embrace what that elusive phenomenon is.
One remarkable effort in that area is the output of the films of Ingmar Bergman (1919-2007). The latter’s career was not without renown and homage. But looking for responses, in such a direction as we’ve mentioned, have not found cogent takers amidst film enthusiasts.
There was a quite unique showdown, as to this silence—within the trilogy of three extremely violent films, namely, Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969)—which embedded itself on the heels of the production of Shame and the overtaking of The Passion of Anna, namely, The Rite (1969), with its remarkable emphasis upon deploying the motions of hands and fingers to open the elements which have been imprisoned for so many centuries. The Rite was a prototype, and yet a rich study of the vagaries of depending upon exotic and flawed rebels. A subsequent film, having more completely delivered the imperative of taking upon one’s self to find the riches of sensibility, namely, The Touch (1971), our film today, runs a gamut for all to see, while being doubly ignored within its drama and being known to the world as the worst film Bergman ever created.
The Rite would be validly recognized as an avant-garde film, drawing upon Theatre of the Absurd, particularly, Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros (1960), and Jean Genet’s The Balcony (1958). (In The Passion of Anna, Samuel Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot [1954], rides pretty high.) And although, in The Touch, a protagonist does reprise Rhinoceros (1960), nearly, all the viewers believe Bergman has produced a soap opera. Soaps galore, there are; but what you don’t want to get suckered with, as to the tedious narrative of “unique David,” the American archaeologist and his “ardent” student, Karin, finding small-town Sweden far from enough, is that Bergman would waste time on a vehicle of domesticity.
Start with the title. Our helmsman, as good as it gets for theatrical dialogue, has put the viewer’s feet into an absurdist fire which might deliver not only a drastic migration but a wise one. Humankind on earth, being what it is, however, another resource becomes paramount. The forces of anxiety, in which Bergman excelled, becoming, as viewer ignorance piled up, demanded a more visceral presentation of cinematography, in hopes that a more powerful physicality would cotton on to the communications. Not that inventive cinematography had not already been deployed in films twenty years before, but now requiring a sort of shock treatment to catapult the attention to something very different. At the era where Bergman was now intent upon radical disclosure, he was blessed with a cameraman, namely, Sven Nykvist (1922-2006) who, along with Bergman’s drive to the uncanny, constituted a long parade of optical strangeness at the infrastructure of our film on tap. Not only would Nykvist fit the bill as to unearth incisive visual mood, but he and Bergman coincided in their range of history and priorities in significant ways. They were born in Sweden about the same time—right after World War I—and their parents were intensely involved with the clergy. Nykvist seldom saw his parents, who were based in Africa as missionaries; and Bergman was far from tolerant toward his pious parents. Coming of age during World War II, they both found film work under the Axis powers—Bergman’s first screenplay being produced in 1944, and Nykvist doing cinematography in Italy. Bergman’s ambiguity about Hollywood would be a long-term collision with the Jewish owners of the heyday of American filmic drama. On casting his male protagonist for this blow-out of a movie, he chose the hyper-Semitic, Elliot Gould. Why? Because wordy self-promotion and desperate virtuousness are the farthest contrasts needed to elicit real lucidity, a lucidity of touch. On casting his other two protagonists—long-term Bergman stalwarts, Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow—there was their recent outings, in The Passion of Anna, bemusing and troubling. The Andersson role finds her married to an internationally renowned architect, tasteful, sensitive and cynical to the self-serving portal to nihilism. At a dinner party, Andersson, named Eva, is asked if she believes in God. Her reply is to ask of her husband, “Do I believe in God, Elis?” The von Sydow role is that of a passive artisan being pushed around by a pathological brute of a wife. Now it’s Bibi, once again asking for direction, in the person of Karin; and Max, a sensitive physician in the person of Andreas—also his name in The Passion of Anna—left shattered and angry.
The outset, as always by Bergman, is elegant and primordially engaging. Karin parks at a hospital, and the lush foliage reflects upon her windshield, a trademark more calming than thrilling. But now we do have a major figure, despite her having died a few minutes before, and Karin enters this stage as an extra, more distracted than touched. The blur of the coat room during the rush of the emergency upstages her emotionally pat mission. While the doctor assures, “It was very peaceful”—she strangely distancing by way of, “May I go in”—we know by the inflected sensibility that she and her mother were not very peaceful together. Karin slowly walks toward the bed, and then there is a cut to her mother, her eyes open and showing a calm, handsome visage. Then a close-up of the lady’s hands and fingers. The inertia stages a rally of sorts in the form of her handsome portable clock and its showing 5 to 3. (A playful, dialectical hope in the midst of possibly carrying on to a sort of dance, a roundelay consisting of two opposing forces reaching a synthesis, a special truth.) Then a glass of water, half-full, on a table, along with a wristwatch and jewelry. Her daughter comes to the bed, sits rather gingerly on an edge and then she holds her mother’s hand. She touches her cheek, her forehead and her hair. A nurse suggests, “But perhaps you’d like to take the wedding rings now…” She closes her mother’s eyes with her fingers. She suddenly, in a sort of panic, kisses her. The tone, the touch coming across, in this, amounts to more a formality than compassion. She quits the room as if having escaped from a chore. (At the end of the film, Karin will cancel an affair on the basis of duty to her husband and children, who by that time hate her. In a flashback the now deceased is visiting her daughter’s family. Her mood, her body language, emits of not being welcome, a somewhat annoying foreigner. Karin and Andreas cherish their garden, but the love becomes eclipsed by its technology and show of advantage. During a slideshow, Andreas, losing control of the jist, blurts out, “That’s my mother-in-law, she’s dead.”) Back at the hospital, the camera lingers on the mother. A field of light nuance presents. A pan down to her hands, and a delicate embroidery.
The nurse delivers the jewelry in the corridor, without eye-contact. Karin begins to make some formality pertaining to the attentions of the recent patient. “Mother was…” The busy nurse cuts her off with a dry, “You’re welcome.” On the way out she cries for many reasons. A cut to her hands and fingers, caressing the jewelry. By the time she had placed the two rings on her finger, in a dark exit, there were loud footsteps approaching. The newcomer turns on the light, disclosing his very overweight presence, having arrived as if an oncoming rhinoceros. In fact, Bergman, now intent upon the ins and outs of avant-garde endeavor, nails him as a version of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a figure of anger and destruction and soft self-pity, becoming a wake-up delivered toward myopic bourgeois carelessness. His hard eyes become soft. “Can I do something for you?” She tells him to leave her alone. He races along with, “Oh, I’m sorry,” now in the register of the nurse.
They meet again, but their faring means nothing. We have reached a home of the dead—soap opera style. All we can do is notice that there is so much more trailing them. Nykvist, come on in!
It turns out that our “reckless lovers,” supposed paragons of the new and the deeper, generate a sea of emotions, going nowhere for them, but going somewhere for us. Their first extensive meeting is on the ramparts of an ancient fortification, more than inert in seemingly overwhelming the river far back in the scene. As they perform their walkabout in a world of ancient stones a slight view of that sea appears, a portion of the kinetic. A ship in the distance. The known and the not wanting to know more. While this encounter mounts quiet motion wasted, the new man, bizarre as a troupe of pornographic superstars in the film twinning this film, has become a mysterious, unearthly monarch to Karin. She brings that David to her almost palatial home one sunny weekend, in hopes that her passion for gardening could meld somehow with her treachery. “We work in the garden every spare minute. Andreas adds, “Our garden is actually our pride.” Then she goes on, “Oh, you must come here in the spring or early summer… We’re both very fond of flowers and trees as you can see.” The many blossoms and trees in view surely reach a facsimile of magic. But, when delivering their understanding of the boon, all of their fund of majesty, disinterestedness, rapidly withers. This feast running to famine puts, for the one and only time, an entry to Karin’s sense of more than one magician. David delivers the routine praise, and she therewith lets her hobbyist priority take over. “And all winter we dream about what we’re going to do next summer.” Andreas is called away on the phone by his medical duties and, when David iterates, “Everything in the garden is lovely,” she touches upon a major challenge: “You know it’s very difficult to talk about that kind of thing.” Her malaise at that crucial point, instead of initiating a hard and solitary investigation, finds her leaning on a flashy but weak savior. On to a “confession,” from the guest, “I suppose it’s hardly the thing to tell you, but I fell in love with you…” (The little judge, in The Rite, comes to a confessional to supplement his generally solitary researches. He comes to grief in consulting a mob of useless nihilists. The two, pledging love here, do stand as looking for a change. But not a brave change. Bravery being a rare instance, where so much is obsolete, or at least hugely overrated.) A glowing Karin rises to, “Please have some raspberries.” Bergman’s raspberries being a broad hit. Moreover, a feeble dialectic leans upon what should be fluent. A grey, skinny candle near the window; yellow roses unfocused. The great lover, saying, “No, no, no, I couldn’t eat anything more. I’m stuffed…”
Andreas having settled the phone emergency, he takes up an undisclosed earlier conversation, pertaining to David, of a mysterious wooden sculpture of the Madonna, hidden in a long-forgotten chink in a small minor church in the vicinity where he was carrying out one of his archaeological duties and loves. The two technicians find easy-going pleasure therein, and David actually musters a sense of singularity about how the craft and care had come to such a resting place. But Andreas cuts short the “mystery,” with, “Would you like a whisky?” and then it’s off to the less than interesting slideshow and the carelessly addressed deceased—another locked away treasure. The medic trots out some blossom highlights—one being an orchid named “insectaria.” “It attracts the interest of the fly.” (David being an incubus curiosity to Karin’s fly.) The jiggling show, being something else, unnoticed. “Are you sure David is interested?” she cautions. Another hit to the easy-wise, is the portrait of their donkey. “It died two weeks after this photo was taken…” Long before the mother-in-law’s death, there she is, onscreen (as having noted), sharply different from that of the others, in being seriously poised and reflective. That touch being, arguably, all this film seriously amounts to. (“Uh, she’s also dead,” speaks volumes about this family, and also the newcomer-insect he’s found to be jagged to his liking.) Scotch helping along, the visiting pedant blurts out, “Have you a picture of your wife nude… I would like to see a picture of Karin nude.” Andreas/ Max (having a long history of Bergman films being shocked and embarrassed) laughs it off. But this little bomb marks the end of smooth sailing for that family, left to settle into forces of sensibility apparently without accommodating the beauties of blossoms. The coda of that night is optically and viscerally firming. A close-up reveals a rambling kiss curl for David, Bergman having broached a similar ripple in the film, Dreams (1955). His hands are shown, tightly locked. (“Don’t worry, there won’t be a scandal.”) David refusing Andreas’ offer to drive the Scotch bomb home, the man of the house settles for, “I’d love to see the church.”/ “Yeah,” is all he gets. Before bed, we see a limp dialectic having squelched any mystery: Karin along a wall; a gold lampshade; and, beyond that, the non-magical film screen. An errant prayer. Here’s the night, as they would have it. He declares, “I’m glad he didn’t stay too long.” She asks, “How did you like him?”/ “A damned nice fellow, I thought. But he drank a bit too much, didn’t he?”/ “Did he? I didn’t notice, actually.”/ “Foreigners, you know…”/ “How did you meet?”/ (His friend, Jacobi [a long-term name and desperate signal of trouble in Bergman] directed David to Andreas. The diagnosis given, to her, was a kidney stone. As we will hear later, the “Rhinoceros” had attempted suicide. Andreas’ hands are seen to be tightly held.) In bed, he holds her at her shoulder. His fingers are stock still. Then their hands are locked in profile. A flow of bedding looks as if he has a large flow of mucus.
The preamble of the budding lovers comprises her at home doing domestic chores, with the lightest and most tedious play-list on the radio. She tells her young son, “Let’s get a move on!” She hears staunch church bells at their rendezvous. He would show up with a corn-cob pipe, perhaps imagining being as tough as General MacArthur, but in fact just corny, a ludicrous excuse for getting a move on. Now he’s at left, she at right, and between, a painting at the altar. Making such a trio of magic needs more than corn, girlie sentiment and gloomy piety. The disinterestedness and love, of the presence of the statue on this site, being light years away from our shabby protagonists. David’s flashlight plays over the major figure and a smaller one, as to companionship. Far more than our protagonists will ever know, there is a touch capable in their own hands and fingers to convene a consummation truly astounding. He directs Karin to the subtle smile of the figure. Easy subtle. While there is a world of subtlety to engage. On reaching the façade of the antiquity they come upon a stone figure, a sort of map or warning. A trail, in the manner of a serpent, conspicuously showing a vise or wall. A serene church being only part of the mystery. She returns for a second look of the trail. She runs an ignorant hand over the point of contention. He lifts her hand from the pictograph, simulating the snag. From the depths to the soaps. His hand, lifting hers, describes a knot. He rushes a finger over her palm. A logo on the cuff of her shirt is a pussycat.
There are many moments of Andreas’ career and Karin’s matrimony. They mean little here, beyond the ironies of their distractions. He, once again, on the phone at home: “I think so, too. But the symptoms are kind of vague, don’t you think? If only she wasn’t so damned hysterical. It might be just nerves.” She tells him, on the subject of her adolescent daughter, Marie, “She’s going out with some friends tonight. Mind that she’s home by midnight.” Then Karin, about to invade for the first time, the supposed lair of the vague and the perfect, changes clothes many times, perhaps a habit of Marie. The hurricane of bourgeois seductions finds, beyond hysteria, a policy of simplicity, namely, an old woolen number. (The judge, in The Rite, also hoping to strike the perfect tone in face of questionable priorities, frequently changes his clothes due to a medical weakness. Woolens speak to the issue of desperate Anna, in her film, The Passion of Anna, where sheep become butchered.) Karin’s apologetic gambit when being late here, “It’s one-way streets all the way from where we are,” becomes an unintentional disclosure of deadly childishness. Her one-way involves ticking off his one and dying plant and his filthy apartment. But then, perhaps not so out of the blue, the rendezvous begins to sound like a Hollywood charmer. “You’re nervous, David.”/ “Yes, I’m nervous. My pulse must be 690. Aren’t you nervous?”
Whereas the “exotic” mob, in The Rite, were truly pathological mercenaries, David, as now revealed, is a humanitarian softy with an animus toward the likes of Andreas—modern, technically conversive and rather cold. That he doubles as a rhinoceros—a primeval poster boy—has fooled Karin into thinking that heights are just around the corner. (A lovely touch of dramatic irony occurs with David, having been working abroad, arriving on the same night Andreas was staging a gala at the end of a medical conference. Karin skips out of the techies, only to confront her “something else,” being dressed and coiffed exactly like the medics at play. Eventually he’ll tell her that his ideal is attaining an assistant professorship at a rural university. “We could live a settled life on your conditions.”)
With so much bilious churning to the fore, their supposed breakaway is a redundancy, a screwball farce. He asks, “What should we talk about now?” She suggests, “Shall we take our clothes off and go to bed and see what happens?… But we must close the curtains. I’m shy.”/ “Oh, so am I!” he assures. Karin’s one-way nude becomes a study of quirkiness so lost as to be a sort of sign of a plague. “I want you to look at me first. I’m 34. You can see that in my face, especially around the eyes. I have a scar here on my stomach. I’ve had two children, and Anders [their boy] was very big, you know. My breasts were nicer before… I’m not an experienced mistress, etc.” David, in this blizzard, feels, “I’m afraid I can’t today.” This somehow brings her to the point of duplicity. “I’ve no idea why I’ve come here to you… I don’t even know if I’m in love with you.”
The next time they meet, David kisses her till her lips bleed, and he rapes her, in a similar way to the rape of Thea by the judge, in the other experimental ball of fire, The Rite, chasing most of the viewers out of contention, while subsequent fireworks get down to smaller bits of delight. A short time before, she had, in the course of Andreas’ leaving town for a conference, found herself behind a light grey transparent curtain as she waved to him leaving from the carport. In her profile as she moved along the window, the curtain became animated, a ripple effect came to life, whereby she became active in an uncanny way, at a volume too weak to matter. In The Rite, Thea provides a credo of startling dynamics, only to provocatively turn her back on it. Now it’s Karin’s turn, having never been exposed to anything but domesticity. Heavy feeling, but merely destructivity, on tap. She attempts a rational experience. “What just happened? Don’t you think you were very childish?” (Childish [and more] when she comes to realize, on encountering his sister, that his story, about his Jewish family all killed by the Nazis [but him], is a fabrication. Advantage, and not a trace of disinterestedness.) His apologia runs as follows: “I don’t know what to do with my churned-up feelings. Isn’t it absurd? After all, I’m grown up.” (Even beyond the absurd.) The four candles behind them, obviously lacking the real deal of three. At the medical reception congress, six candles blaze. Overkill. Karin is a model of being in her element. Other elements are stillborn. On leaving there, for the supposed truth, an adolescent quarrel flares up. She tells him she’s a little tipsy from the zone of chemistry. Viewing herself in a mirror she lifts up her hands and her fingers are playful. He, on the other hand, proceeds to trash the apartment, rhino-style. As things get even worse, she’s heard to remark, “No one has ever struck me.” Impetuous Americans, right? Before the standard American movie redemption on the staircase, he ploughs into, “I hate that goddamn Andreas, that fucking, hypocritical idiot. He can go to hell!” (Here we could mention that his sister in London, while debunking the family war crisis, does float the idea that she and David are doomed by an incurable disease. What we do see from her is a lot of alcohol and cigarettes.) Karin places her hand and fingers over his obviously stupid mouth. Back at the love nest, a little bird is seen quickly passing by their window.
Back home with Andreas, their chess game shows her between two dim lights. Another arrangement features a small fireplace. Their son comes by and berates the film being played by him. “Just a lot of romance.” Andreas notices the split lip. She remarks, “Could it maybe be vitamin deficiency?” (That little ironic joke has a serious side, pertaining to comprehensive resilience. At this juncture of making waves amidst slugs, transcending cinema while cherishing its daring, our film—as with the coda of The Rite—must recognize and reveal the reflective imperatives integral to these meta-actions. We have to make the best of these two transcendent demands, in order to appreciate the range of the “vitamin deficiency” of the narratives, past and present, and why they still matter.) Bells are quietly heard. Before going to bed, Andreas does some reading of a favorite Swedish poet. Beyond all reason, could he actually collide with the uncanny? Next day Karin, an unlikely user of such vitamins, reads one of the poems to David, feeling the need of some couth. “I think he’s the best. ‘Wake me to sleep in you/ Wake my words to you/ Light my dead stars nearer you/ Dream me out of my world…/ Give birth to me, leave me/ Kill me near you/ Nearer the hearth of birth/ Take me warmer, take me nearer you.’” (A testament like Thea’s. What’s up?) During a long absence while David is currying advantages for his career, both of them know well that the excitement was bogus. (Nowhere near do there expressions recall the poetry.) A blur of his fingers touching his writing page to her. [Typed and sterile.]. Her report of interest: “We’ve all had colds. I was absolutely streaming…” Followed by, “David, dearest friend I have in the world, can you forgive me for not writing to you for several days. We’ve been spring cleaning…” He writes, “One day I stopped dead in my tracks and said to myself, ‘We’re painfully united!’”
On a brief visit after many months, the flat filthy, and she announcing she’s stopped smoking, her positions in space steal the show. There is a lineup—David to right, she in the middle and a mirror showing her. His preoccupation upon smarts well established; her presences lost. She invites him to lie on the bed with her. She becomes rigid, as if having been shot. He avoids her hungry mouth. She goes on to give him a hair wash, and then Andreas comes by, wanting to talk. With Karin ensconced in the bedroom, like a naughty adolescent, the doctor touches upon people beginning to talk about her cheating. David thinks to be helpful in recommending the cockold appreciate what he remains to have, his work, his children, his plants… Then, the host, garbed in dressing gown rhinoceros grey, rips up some turf with, “You’ve humiliated us both long enough with this ridiculous visit.” The husband replies, “I don’t understand why you’re so aggressive, David. I like you… I liked you at the beginning already, when I took care of you after your attempted suicide.” David’s entitlement-hunger rips up again, with the retort, “It was an accident with that ridiculous gas oven.” Andreas, not as liking the brute nearly as much as he claimed, crushes the wimp with data. “We were never to speak of it,” the born lawyer maintains. Well aware that Karin is on hand, he leaves, holding an advantage of feeble satisfaction. “She has to make up her mind for herself. She hates any form of decision.” Her, “Do you think he knew I was here?” puts her in her place, unequivocally. David’s use now of “touch” reflects how averse he is to the magic of touch. “Wasn’t that touching? That was too goddamn touching…”
Other touching moments prove to stage modest but memorable rallies. The two dwarfs observe that the Madonna is doomed. The specialist tells the seeming dare-devil, “Something peculiar has happened, something no one can explain. Before she was walled over, she was the home of some insect not known today. The larvae have been sleeping inside her in darkness for 500 years. And now they’ve awakened and they’re eating the image away from within.” (Her finale, small, quirky and magnificent.) His finger amidst the insects. Not a rite, but the unintentional makings of a finite true love. He opines that the insects are at least as beautiful as the image itself. He would, of course, discount the touches being integral to this death, and this creativity. Karin looks down. “I’ve lost my footing or whatever it is. I used to be fairly secure in my world.” David mocks, “That’s too bad!” Prefacing her bid to turn things around, she wonders if something is wrong with her. She envisages, “It’s possible to live two lives, becoming into one wise and good life that could benefit other people and make them happy.” (Irony, of course. But the inchoate effort to touch the elements. In that vein, she slams the rhinoceros, not particularly effectively. “I know you are going to leave me, because you hate yourself.”) She takes another look at the frieze on the exterior of the place of love. Next day, dressed in chic black leather, befitting an international power of coherence, she discovers that the indispensable man has left town. She smashes a glass, takes off her gloves and presses her hands into the shards.
When desperation takes over, complication races. She’s pregnant and Andreas, one night, now in separate bedrooms, refuses to help when contractions become extreme. Then, sometime after the birth, David resurfaces to announce that he can’t live without her. They meet in a plant conservatory, where birds of paradise are in great supply, and where neither of them notice. He woos her like a Junior High, a filibuster going nowhere. He bitches like a Junior High on realizing he’ll have to find another sucker. Karen explains, “I feel it’s my duty to stay where I am.” Staying where she is, she’s roundly hated.
And yet, the population being what it is, there’s good times ahead. Marie, the caution, is something else. Before the deep freeze, she joins her mother for a safari to find a new outfit. David, in an orange, woolen jump suit, had stalked them and was rapping on the store window. Marie backs out of that fun. She glares at David, knowing very well that the fix is in. Addressing the girl as if she were a duchess of long ago, the supposed new deal gushes, “Do you mind if I talk to your mother for a minute?” She has no time for that prowler. I like to think she’s about to become like her grandmother, which is to say, like the middle-aged lady arranging a divorce, in the film two years appearing after this (prototype) film, namely, Scenes from a Marriage, where a shallow, bourgeois lawyer, Marianne, cocooned in a mob of that sort, could piddle away a lifetime of schemes and never have a clue, never have love to give and receive.
As this second, and last, test drive of the frontiers of contemporary sensibility, comes to an end, there is, I think, a need to disclose how Bergman’s endeavor dovetails with other investigations. His title, The Touch, emphasizes that a locked away treasure of disinterested loving action calls for us to press open, by a touch, the full dynamic of not only human life, but the cosmos itself. That the forgotten crypt has reached its last phase does not undermine the process of greatness per se. A heart becoming lost forever in such a bid is a heart having delighted in playing a part of mustering the primordial heights. The host, therein, is far from simply delivering a mystical enjoyment. The host, in fact, teems with players, but to a test, a test, as we’ve just revealed, to be nearly completely lost in action. The Swedish Madonna had a career of serenity. Few of us are so lucky. But, on the other hand, where the going is very rough and swift, the pathology of advantage can prompt intensities to the liking of the true. Those truly on the go are equipped for shooting rhinos. Their range is their fortune. There are many masterful hands. A solitary play between immortal and mortal has its validity, as well as its blessings. On that note, however, there is full liberty to carve careers wherein the quick and the dead can be engaged for infinite permutations. Joiners being a doubtful policy, but, as we’ve indicated, rare moments do surface.
