Ingmar Bergman | En Passion (The Passion of Anna) / 1969, USA, 1970

cruelty to animals

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (writer and director) En Passion (The Passion of Anna) / 1969, USA, 1970

 

An isolated 48-year-old man, Andreas Winkelman (Max von Sydow), lives on an island to where he has escaped after being arrested for forgery and hitting a policeman. He is visited one day by a beautiful woman named Anna Fromm (Liv Ullmann), who asks to use his telephone; her call—which he intentionally overhears—is a frantic one to a lawyer or friend about her dead husband, in which she asks for money supposedly left her, but which evidently does not exist. She is understandably distraught, and leaves Andreas’s house without her purse. When Andreas discovers it, he explores its contents, reading a letter from her husband in which he pleas for their separation, insisting that if they continue their relationship “We’ll run into new problems which will result in a nervous breakdown and psychological and physical violence”—a phrase repeated in words and letters throughout the film almost like a mantra. Indeed, in this second scene of the movie, Bergman reveals several of the major themes of this film, not only the “psychological and physical violence” suggested by the letter, but the intrusion of privacy and deceit typified by Andreas’s acts.

    Returning the purse to Anna, Andreas meets others of his neighbors, Eva and Elis Vergerus (played by Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson), a beautiful and discontented woman and her architect husband who have a summer home on the island, and with whom Anna is now staying. The meeting results in an invitation to dinner with the three, and the revelation that, in his spare time, Elis is a photographer, attempting to catalogue various “catastrophes” centering on the emotional conditions of his subjects’ faces. Like Andreas’s determined listening to Anna’s telephone conversation, there is something voyeuristic in his acts.

      The conversation at the dinner table in this scene, which apparently was ad-libbed by Bergman’s cast, is one of the most interesting of the film, as Eva describes her belief in God, despite her parents' agnosticism, through her childhood reading about God which described his long flowing beard, a belief she still holds. Queried whether she would teach her children about God, she admits she might not attempt to pass on her faith. Anna, meanwhile, describes her values as being centered in the notion of honesty (“I try to live by the truth”), and cites the harmony and openness of her relationship with her dead husband, also named Andreas (“We lived in harmony by being truthful.”). Winkelman and we know something else of that relationship. Is she lying or is she deluding herself?

     Clearly, there is something evil going on in this small island community—modeled upon Bergman’s own island home, Färo—for innocent animals are being mutilated and slaughtered. Andreas first discovers the animal cruelty when he finds a small puppy hung from a noose near his own home, and soon thereafter, a neighbor discovers that the throats of eight of his sheep have been cut, the animals left to die. The final act of this island madman (or woman) results in a horse burning to death, all of which end, later in the film, in the murder of a hermit-like friend of Andreas. 

      As Elis travels to Italy to bring Milan a new cultural center, Eva visits Andreas, who offers her a couch on which to sleep. A brief romantic tryst, during which she reveals her love for Elis but also her own sense of failure and emptiness, ends in him presenting with the small puppy he has saved to comfort her on her sleepless nights

     Halfway through his film, accordingly, Bergman has established all his major themes—issues at the center of so many of his films—the love, fear, deceit, and violence which his characters can neither contain nor resist. And we recognize that, as in Greek drama, they now have no choice but to play out their emotions. Anna begins an affair with Andreas, destroying his “splendid isolation.”

 

    Although Anna has, in some senses, “killed” her husband and young boy—she was driving when the road became slippery and the car crashed—she continues in her delusions. And we soon are soon forced to associate, at least, the violent acts of animal cruelty on the island with her lies. Bergman never reveals who commits these atrocities, but they are part and parcel of a larger world (revealed occasionally through grainy television images of brutal acts in the Viet Nam War) that has confused acts of love with hate. The passion of the title, indeed, is not only Anna’s pretense of passion, but everyone’s (in the original Swedish the film was simply titled En Passion). Bergman reiterates this “pretense,” pointing up the theatricality of our lives, by having each of his major actors speak improvisationally about their characters and the roles they are playing.

     According to the director’s later statements and his commentary in Images: My Life in Film, the women did in fact speak straightforwardly in their own words, while the men had no idea what to say, forcing him to write their supposedly “improvised” lines. Accordingly, he argued, the experiment led to “two different films”: “The interviews should have been cut.”

      Yet even as staged events, these four brief scenes, spread across the span of the film’s actions, force us to remember that these are, after all, actors, not realist beings, and like most of us, their so-called “real” lives often resemble “staged” events. Perhaps the cruel acts directed toward the island’s innocent animals are also “staged” enactments that cry out for attention and help.

      Predictably, as Anna and Andreas’s relationship begins to fall apart, Winkelman, like the first Andreas, seeks an out, desiring a return to his solitude. They fight, and he beats her before escaping the house. As he encounters the remains of the burned horse, Anna reappears. He joins her in the car, admitting he knows the truth of her relationship with her husband, disparaging her for her determined deceit; in her anger, she swerves off the road, nearly repeating the earlier “accident.” Andreas’s reaction, “You’re crazy. You’re out of your mind,” calls up the narrator’s earlier observation that a madman has been loosed upon the island. Her statement that she has returned for Andreas’s “forgiveness” only reiterates our association of the animal atrocities with the “psychological and physical violence” between this couple.

       As Anna drives off, Andreas walks forward in the direction of his home, stops and turns back, moves forward again, turns back, moves forward and falls to the ground as if immobilized, trapped in indeterminacy as the camera seemingly pans in closer and closer, nearly washing away his existence in the grainy texture of the clip.* The narrator informs us, “This time they called him Andreas Winkelman,” forcing us to realize the strange wrinkle of time at work in The Passion, that everything has been repeated, the first Andreas replaced by a second, the only difference being his last name.

 

      I first saw this film with my then new companion Howard in the summer of 1970 in Washington, D.C., and it profoundly moved me. I presume it was because Howard and I were daily working out our own terms of how to live together and often endured similar “psychological and physical violence” as that described in the film. Returning to this notable Bergman work at the age of 60—at a time when living together may be just as difficult but when the daily horrors of violence have worn away—I now recognize just how intensely Bergman’s characters seem to have lived their lives, as if every second were an instance of great spiritual and metaphysical importance. Yet Bergman, only nine years younger than me today at the time he filmed The Passion, was still battling the demons of the young, as he had divorced (in 1969) his fourth wife, concert pianist Käbi Laretei, and ended (in 1970) his long relationship with actress Liv Ullmann. Bergman writes of his feelings at the time: “I was scared. You are scared when you have, for a long time, been sawing off the branch upon which you sit.”

 

*Reportedly, Bergman actually gradually blew up the image of this scene, thus achieving the grainy effect I describe.

 

Los Angeles, October 20, 2007

Essays reprinted from International Cinema Review (October 2007).