© 2020 by James Clark
One could say there isn’t really “a Bergman film;” inasmuch as each constituent episode weaves into a very large and a very challenging reflection. Long before he began to produce films, the enormity of his concern had overrun his careerist attention.
However, within the corridors of that cosmos, several alarms flare up to concentrate an angle of dilemma. One of the most demanding and generous of these clusters involves three films separated by three eras, namely, To Joy (1950); After the Rehearsal (1984, our film today); and Saraband (2003). The first, To Joy, strikes the tone that professional musical absorption is a deadly disease of oversight, not to forget, however, that, as in many arts disciplines, there could be (but very seldom) an intent to counter mere “impressiveness.” Slightly more current there, was the bid to find a footing by which to stage counter attacks on the run against casual pedantry and reflexive advantage. The third film, Saraband, also about the perils of professional musicianship, reveals someone who has a remarkable clue about performance, transcending poisonous commonness.
Not only does the second of the deck, namely, After the Rehearsal, by and large lack the hopes just mentioned, but its principals act on the macabre premise of being herded into an act of incest. (All three of these films aptly being described as the “incest allegory.”) As such, we must be on alert for the magic we know will not entirely fail us. (The overt factor of rebelling here coincides with an extraordinary entry having been produced two years before our film today, namely, Fanny and Alexander [1982]. There, a well-to-do woman, Emilie, after the death of her husband, Oscar, who was the owner and director of a theatre, after much Sturm und Drang, takes up Oscar’s passion, and displays a sense of perspective, seeing more beyond a pedantic workload, beyond the snag of the workaholic. [Though workaholics come in many forms, it is only when artists stray that true disaster occurs.] Emilie chooses for her debut, the August Strindberg work, A Dream Play [1901], a forerunner to the visions of Expressionism and Surrealism. It is in the preparation of a performance of that play which constitutes this television-com-film of, After the Rehearsal.)
The first few minutes of our puzzler sends us over the moon, without any help from Disney. It begins with another theatre director, Henrik Vogler, asleep at his desk after working on his production of A Dream Play. His being asleep carries an ironic charge. (The conductor of the symphony orchestra, in the film, To Joy, is always seen awake, but he’s also asleep.) While Vogler naps, one of the de rigueur triads swing into action: Vogler at center, asleep; and at right, the Strindberg text, needing someone awake; and at left the lamp, not lighted. Then a rally for consciousness—which isn’t! Cut to the sleepy leader, his hand pushing down on the button of the lamp, and then pushing down to turn it back off. Finally vertical, he clears his throat and stages a fantasy interview. “After the rehearsals, I like to stay a while at the stage… to quietly think through the day’s work… It is during the hours between afternoon and evening, the large theatre is quiet and abandoned.” (Imagining rapt fans, while, in contrast, the visual is Vogler’s thick, silvery hair describing a cave man. The cave man must have fallen asleep at a level where he was no longer talking to his devotees.) “I have probably slept for a while. I’m not sure. When I look around, I don’t recognize the room… I don’t recognize myself…” “Myself,” for him, would be a giant among the feeble multitude. What he’s (fleetingly) awakened to is himself as a puzzle. “Something has changed… in a secretive and intangible way.” He turns a page of the Strindberg text, to resume a notion of being in control. A pearly light from the props becomes a sort of moon, being ignored.
Cut to a young girl walking amidst those props. In close-up we see a moment when a sort of steel weapon partially eclipses her face. She salutes him, “Hi!” He glares at her. Two forms of daggers. The “moon” experiences an eclipse. This opens an undeclared war. Now, in distant perspective, his fortress the desk, her domaine the bizarre clutter of props. From his ramparts, he calls out, “What are you looking for?” Her feint being, “A bracelet. I’m the kind who loses things…” To his imaginary followers, he flashes a version of distance and boredom toward the troublemaker. His words attempt to be decisive. “Distance and anxiousness. Distance and a sharp taste of iron on the tongue. I want her to leave…” (Here we feel again the dismissiveness of the holy conductor, in To Joy. Also, we have actor Erland Josephson here, who will pronounce, in Saraband, “I want you to leave,” to a gold-digger, once his wife.) Vogler adds, “Her search for the bracelet is obviously an excuse… I want you to leave. I want you to go now…” (The young woman is named, Anna, a name coming up in many Bergman films, meaning assault and bloodshed.) “I am free this evening,” she reveals. (Although, this far, we don’t know exactly where she fits [personnel or something else, or both?], we can discern from the tone that she belongs on that stage as an actor in A Dream Play.) “It’s really not my business,” the king of the stage sneers. “It was nothing special,” she insultingly brazens.
Within this trilogy of seldom noticed corruption about the powers of art, I’m of a mind here to commence with Bergman’s wonderful dovetail between Erland Josephson and the dictator/ humanitarian, Fidel Castro. Vogler’s first name, Henrik, directs us to the musician/ predator, in Saraband, being squelched by a forthright daughter benefiting from a significantly lucid mother. The daughter in today’s march has tons of cheek and smarts, but, unlike Saraband’s Karin, her parents stand to be highly volatile and suspect. Unable to get her to leave, Vogler shows off by accurately estimating Anna’s age. That the director could nail the number to great accuracy, involves Vogler’s being best friends for years to Anna’s parents, particularly Anna’s father, who had worked with Vogler long ago as partners producing very light films. The dad is named Mikael. A Mikael was, in the film, To Joy, a retired actor who saw fit to practise incest with his daughter who would also act as a prostitute by which their partnership would attain to a modicum of solvency. (Castro’s odd relationships bringing to bear.) Anna adds, “You and Dad had fun.”/ “Do I hear a reproach?” the director wonders. Anna also maintains, “Dad was always gone. Mom was always sad. Wasn’t she an especially talented actress?” Vogler agrees, “That she was, Anna, dear… She was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. Charming, talented, passionate…” (The Beautiful People.) Anna concludes, “You were in love with her.”/ “We all were,” Henrik was happy to confirm. “Did you have a relationship?”/ “Why not?” (The elegant upshot in the mix will subtly divulge that Anna is Vogler’s daughter. Somehow, “Why not?” becomes, “She and I kept our distance…”/ “ Mom had lots of kids she didn’t like, and died of alcohol poisoning.” An emendation will show that suicide was the correct choice. A correct choice perhaps questionable.) Anna imagines that she could comprehend fakery in her mother’s stating to have retired on the basis of her care for her children. “She claimed that she loved my father and didn’t want to squander her life. She was such a sham!” Looking closely, Rakel, the mom, would be a precursor of the Karin in Saraband, not a fanatic of the arts.
With those outreaches catching fire, it’s time to see how talent works, and doesn’t. After Anna’s mocking an old interview of Vogler’s dripping with condescension and ticket sales, he steels himself to more demanding concerns, nagging concerns. “The living appear like ghosts… listen to the silence on the stage… I imagine all the spiritual energy. All the emotions, real and make-believe… all the laughter, rage, passion, and who knows what else… It’s all still here… living its secret, uninterrupted life… I hear them sometimes… Sometimes I think I can see them…” (As with the gullible conductor, in To Joy, gushing about mystique on the basis of perfect musical reading and perfect musical delivery, some kind of marriage appears here between the strong and the ridiculous. Such a farce at the initiative moment, has its imperative to attain to a heroic change, where change almost never delivers.) Henrik alight with the easily entertained. “Ordinary people… intently going about their lives… Closed off, secretive… Sometimes we speak to each other… but just in passing. Whether they’re like in the dreams I create, entire plays with actors and dialogue, or whether they really have a life of their own, beyond my senses?” A skeptical Anna poses, “Yet you think my hatred hurts my mother, even though she’s dead…” Henrik insists, “Your hatred scares me. I think it reaches her…”/ “Then I’m glad.”
Despite his fear, Vogler imagines good things happening with Anna. I’ll do A Dream Play with Anna Egerman. He prefaces the exploit with a startling action, recalled when he was a child and being allowed to see rehearsals of that play. The Lawyer character of the play would show a hand jive pertaining to a hairpin, placed between his fingers (therewith the abiding dialectic of Bergman’s bid to push-back a travesty, consisting in a nascent form within the Strindberg work). “Look at this. It is two prongs, but one pin.” (Vogler models this form of knack.) “It’s two… but it’s one… If I straighten it out, it’s a single entity. If I bend it, it’s two… without ceasing to be one. That means the two are one. But if I break it…” (and he performs a noisy sound)… “now the two are two!” Vogler adds, “There was no pin, but I saw it! That’s how it all started. There I sat…” (A quick cut to Vogler as a young boy in face of two pink lights: immaturity then, immaturity now.) The man with a long past begins to babble about ways to stage the opus. “Why am I saying this? Tired cliches. Why do I suddenly embark on these ridiculous theatrics?” (Because it’s so easy, in comparison with the Lawyer’s complications. Like Castro, Vogler is a bringer of small truths which never reach the point.) “The blood pulses… When you were a wild little troll in your father’s lap, perhaps I thought, ‘She’ll become an actress…’ When I saw your eyes, you’re eagerness and vulnerability, it made me happy. I felt that with you I could set in motion the wheel that gets heavier every year… If I may hazard a guess, I think your tears may be tears of joy…” Her response is redolent of the Marta of To Joy and the Karin of Saraband. “Who tricked me into using all these fake emotions? It must start early… far back in childhood… The anxiety to please, the need to please. (Her ashtray, anticipating Freud’s deadly cigars, in Saraband. On the powerful other hand, Anna reasons, “Is it really so important to be precise with my feelings? How can I protect myself from the world without my little act?”)
Anna’s foibles are one, rather disappointing, thing. The failures of Vogel are something else. At this juncture of the memories of Rakel, the weak leader attends, as so often, to smoothing over his appalling approach to life, his intensities that don’t come close to balance. Fully back in Vogel’s mind, the hard to define subject, namely Rakel, evokes (in memory and person) her often bad timing for love. He opens with the premise, “I don’t feel like it.”/ “You feel like it,” is her inept insistence, the insistence of a long affair. “We have nothing more to say to each other,” the celebrity pedant dismisses. Her check-mate is, “We can still make love. We’ve never had any disputes in that area, have we, my friend?” The thrust of sensuality smashing upon the rocks of advantage will continue to fester until he, also, disappears entirely. The intensity of the crisis, the hunger for a valid logic to overcome the failings, in view of Henrik’s limited integrity, is apt to fade. For the moment, though, some rare and shocking news can join with the unthinkable in the films of To Joy and Saraband. The first premise after this, was to have Henrik reminding the apparition how patient and caring he was in face of Rakel’s shortfalls as an alcoholic actress. “You said you were extremely grateful.” (Always very much about self-promotion. His review of a twelve-year-old Anna hits some rough terrain. The “bad mother” tells Henrik, “She’s more and more like you.” That would be the step for him to caution, “You’re driving at something nasty.” Rakel has something else he doesn’t want to hear about. “Anna sells people out.” That would be the step for him to try to sell, to try to make stick, “I don’t understand” [my correspondence would be about her supposed maturation]. She states, “She sells her mother out to please her father [the perennial regular guy]. We’re at the dinner table. Mikael’s reading the paper. I ask him to stop. He gets up, folds the paper, comes over to me and hits me in the face. Then he puts on his coat and hat and slams the door. The next day I overhear Anna and Mikael talking. Anna says she feels sorry for her father. She understands that he can’t take it anymore…”[that her not regular mother—she of lacking their language, and being a student of another language—is a pariah]. Where does Vogler stand? Not so easily, then, we have the alcoholic pariah unaware [for refusing to think coherently], “With me you can do what you like, can’t you?… Anything you like?…” Vogler praises her, “That’s what’s risky about you.” / “I was the best, wasn’t I?”/ “You were the best…”/ “For 26 years I was the best.” Coming to a conclusion of this segment, can open avenues needing far more courage than Vogler can manage.) On she presses: “Even when I was 20, I already knew the score back then. The decay. It was already in place.” He: “Yes it was…” She, somewhat veering to brag, tells him, “My thighs and breasts are still remarkable.” His better move is to say nothing. She mocks, “Henrik is horny but ill at ease. He’s looking at my face.” She cries. He asks, as so many times before, “Why are you staying at the hospital? (A source of stress for his finessing the relationship. But also a relief.) “Your binges?” (She nods.) “I have a small apartment facing the courtyard, behind the theatre… It’s a beautiful courtyard with an old chestnut tree right outside my window. In the summer, the light in my room is green like an aquarium.” (Rakel’s capacity for lyricism and nuance being a red flag to the stunted proclivities of militant “common sense.” The hooker being murdered in Bergman’s film, From the Life of the Marionettes, evinces delicate strengths in the same current of that shown by the pariah here.) “Let’s go to my place… five minutes…” And here the calculations of Vogler’s raw and cowardly power feel right again. Therefore, he has no compunction for the brushoff, “I’m waiting for someone.” (Someone bloodless like himself.) In response she tells him, “In that case I must die…No! I’m only talking nonsense… I don’t want to die. I’m afraid of death… I couldn’t imagine doing myself any harm…” (The dialogue gripping and desperate into a meteoric paradox.) Then, “It’s a life crisis…” Met by, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Rakel, clinging to her range of sensibility which Vogler lacks entirely, admits, “I know I behaved badly. I screamed and cried, locked myself in the bathroom. I hit Anna. She started howling. I tried to console her but she broke away from me… and ran to Mikael for protection. Then I hit her again. I’m sorry I did that. Every single day I’m sorry I did that. Mikael called the police and the doctor.” Henrik, the voice of art, scolds her, “People dislike your demands for truth.” Rakel points out, “You were involved too.” Vogler alarmed. “Does it ever occur to you that the police and the doctor mean well?”/ “I’m absolutely positive they mean well…” The former fun-boy and his former colleague in the business of light fare (being either daddy’s girl or Vogler’s girl) petulantly intones, “Please stop provoking me… Your conspiracy theory is unreal…” The supposed uncapable woman describes her difficulty. “One of you alone couldn’t crush me. Not even two. But three of you could.” (Unspoken, but exercising a significant pressure here, is a demand to overcome a crazy, crushing majority of fools. Rakel failed to find a footing and a procedure. Others can, with generous assistance from nature itself.) Rounding off the hobby horse of Vogler’s tranquilizing, he imagines the pariah being excoriated by him in his supposed clever thoughts. “Rakel, why don’t you go to hell, where you belong. I never want to talk to you or think of you again… I want nothing more to do with you… I’ve obliterated you once and for all.” (Rakel covers her head and her face, like a naughty pet. The silent hectoring resumes.) “You don’t exist.” (Vogler stands over a cringing Rakel, his violent success has once again become paramount.) “We were your lovers. You raised us between your knees. Then you rejected us and moved on to new victims.” (Wonder why? Wonder why not taking a wider range?) “You were already drinking quite heavily when we met. You were so hard on me when you were drunk!” Vogler yells and then his head is bowed. The reflection ends with his recognition, “And you were so hard on yourself.”
There is a sequel to this hardness, but it functions more as Henrik’s being able to stand himself than any entry beyond what we’ve seen. The apparition of Rakel merely repeats, “Why can’t you risk it with me? I’m a splendid instrument.” But out of her fevered ontological researches, she adds the forgotten, “Through me, you hear tones you’ve never heard before…” (Tones the conductor from To Joy would never hear. Tones Rakel should not have cited about the obsolete Dionysian play of drunkenness.)
From there, Vogel [meaning, bird] stages a migration to a make-believe land of security, the land of Anna, in the film, The Passion of Anna, where one happily murders pariahs. Now segueing from Rakel to us (his supposed loyal supporters), he tees up the supposed madness of emotion (“tones”) presuming to shed light. Though she brings to bear a not so shabby question—“Does your own turmoil torment you so that you can’t bear the unpredictable”—Vogler only hears, “You’re getting unbearably theatrical… I hate turmoil, aggression and outbursts of emotion. I administrate, distribute and organize. I don’t participate in the drama, I give it material form. I hate all things spontaneous, rash, imprecise. I have no room for my own confusion except as a key to secrets of a script or a stimulus for actors’ creativity. My rehearsals are operations in an operating room, where self-discipline, cleanliness, light and stillness prevail. That’s the only way to approach the infinite, the pain and the darkness. The only way to solve the enigma… and learn the mechanism of repetition. It’s my job to make sure your work isn’t meaningless.” (Close-up of his pointer finger, emphatic.) “If I were to pull off my mask and show my true feelings, you’d rave at me, tear me to pieces and throw me out the window.” The residue of the director’s most resent contemplation pays homage to Rakel in this way: “Theatre is shit, filth and lechery.” Achilles’ heel all around. “I don’t believe for a second your theory about purity. It’s suspect. Typical of you… Henrik, my dear friend, do you think I’d have been happier if I learned to be cynical?”
The finale consists of Vogler, fresh from his struggle with Rakel, and Anna, plunging into the heart of cynicism. His first step is, “I’m amazed people take us seriously. Nurture your childishness. It’s a good filter against consciousness…I’m fond of you… In love if you like… I’m happy you’re sitting next to me here on the Hedda Gabler sofa” (evoking a rather tame, political melodrama). “I can touch you with my hand… I’m in love with you because you’re young and beautiful. Because you are an exceptionally endowed human being.” Here’s a version of what “exceptionally endowed human beings” do. Vogler suggests ditching Anna’s lover (“that flabby assistant director”). She has a bigger surprise: “We’re expecting a child,” which would kill the current production. “I knew it!” the precious pedant laments. She then adds to the fun, by admitting she’d already aborted the complication. In the run-up to the “cleanliness, light and stillness,” Henrik had mooted such an expedient—“the old theatre man in me speaking…” Breathing again, he remarks, “You got rid of it!” Aptly installed, Vogler and Anna present a sardonic scenario of their nuptials, being the golden talk of the theatre. He begins with intercepting her bid to have him put his hand on her breast. “No, a pitiful retreat. A ridiculous situation. On the other hand, very soon they are playing a fatuous seduction. His sanitized construction very soon comes to light as “We start meeting in my room… We sit far apart… One day we discuss your messy relationship… You look at me with an inscrutable smile… Your eyes, your beautiful eyes, fill with tears… A few nights later we go to bed for the first time, mostly for fun. It’s an experiment, just to see. The experiment leaves behind a sweet, exciting feeling of unfulfilled desire… We talk about the future… The scheming has left her late for a rehearsal of a radio drama. As she dashes off she hears church bells. Vogler doesn’t hear that, because his hearing is starting to go. Back in italics, Vogler reflects, a bit: “What worried me most [the safety-first- maven notes], was that I couldn’t hear the church bells…”
The arts occupy a very strange position. Be it reviled for lacking true logic or being haunted that its logic is superior, what is clear is that never enough effort has been expended in fathoming such a force. Ingmar Bergman—love him or hate him—pays the price. Many gaps does he leave. Gaps, I’d bet, he knew very well, but chose darkness.
Let’s go back to Rakel, who, you might say, deserved better. “Through me, you hear tones you’ve never heard before.” “Tones” of this type being akin to ripcords, “Why can’t you risk it with me?” The answer is elementary. Not worth swearing about. And not a case for suicide. “Tones,” to love having mined from herself; and, paradoxically, tones to love from nature itself. Does planet earth disappoint? Do junkyard dogs scratch? (And complicating the matter, that gusts of dignity are quite common and soon disappear.) Rakel’s wherewithal has had on her fingertips myriad plays very near and very far. Her demise needn’t have been a horror, had she continued the love and beauty all around (that light in her room, for instance, being difficult proof against gluttons raining upon the scene their smallness).