The Great Pretenders

I'm watching the supplemental materials on the Criterion DVD of Ingmar Bergman's Summer With Monika, a 1953 film about two teenagers who run away together for the summer.  One of the most interesting features is a 2012 interview with Harriet Andersson, the film's female lead and one of Bergman's actress-muses.  At eighty she still looks wonderful and vivacious.  The interviewer, Peter Cowie, evidently knows Andersson pretty well and wants to let her shine, which she does, but he asks two stupid questions.

First he asks Andersson if, when she first read the script, she "identified" with Monika, and thought that the girl was like her.  (Monika is a rather wild young woman, with a Bad Reputation, as they used to call it.)  Andersson says no, rather the opposite, but she was excited by the prospect of her first leading role and she thought it would be fun to play.  A little later, Cowie asks her if Lars Ekborg, who plays her love interest, was a "dreamer" like the character he played.  No, Andersson replies, he was a very serious and disciplined young actor -- nothing like Harry.

This is a long-standing peeve and perplexity of mine, though I suppose that like most movie watchers I'm not free of it myself.  On one hand, it's a commonplace that movies are the land of make-believe, that acting is fakery made of greasepaint and false beards; on the other, people want to believe that actors are the characters they play. I've noticed that many people talk as though they believe that actors make up their own lines as they walk through their scenes.  From the way Cowie poses the questions, I think it's obvious that he's not acting: he wants to believe that young Harriet was a wild (or free-spirited) young woman, impulsive and ready to run away from home, and that young Lars was a bohemian wannabe in search of freedom from bourgeois respectability.  So I thought, What the hell is this?

I haven't done much acting myself, though at times over the years I thought about getting involved in some of the local theater troupes.  I just remembered that a friend of mine and I went together to an audition for a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, probably in the early 80s.  Neither one of us made the cut.  I think both of us wanted to play Lady Bracknell, though I'd have enjoyed playing Jack or Algernon if given the chance.  This is not because I identified with any of these characters, but I loved the idea of speaking Wilde's brilliant lines on stage.  Playing the Gorgonly Aunt Augusta would have been tremendous fun, simply because I would never have dared to behave like her in real life.  (Not then, anyway; I think I may have somewhat grown into her as I've aged.)  It would also be fun to pretend to be someone I'm not, someone meaner or kinder or more assertive or more eloquent than I am.  That is what acting is, nu?  Pretending.  Trying on someone else's identity for size.  Behaving as you might like to behave, but couldn't offstage.

Of course, another aspect of this is that the actor playing the role turns the character into a version of him or herself, if the performance is successful.  Edith Evans, in the 1953 film version of Earnest, is imposing and indeed terrifying.  Some of the other grand English dames I've seen in the role (Joan Plowright, Judi Dench) seemed by comparison to be little girls wearing gowns several sizes too big for them.  I've also heard some of a version with Evans as Lady Bracknell but John Gielgud playing Jack, instead of Michael Redgrave as in the 1953 film.  Gielgud is fine, but he lacks the slightly manic comic style Redgrave has, and his Jack seemed dull.  This, by the way, is another benefit of stage performance as opposed to film: film actors often are associated with their parts forever, because the much-maligned remakes are relatively rare, while many different actors may get to play well-known characters on the stage, and it's interesting to see what each one brings to the characters.

But back to my peeve.  Do most people really want to believe that actors are the characters they play?  On the American DVD of Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, Chow is interviewed by a guy from a martial-arts movie fan magazine, who asks him shyly if he can really fight, like he does in his movies.  Chow dodges the question somewhat, since he's a choreographed movie kung fu fighter, not a street fighter.  I think I may have first become aware of the syndrome I'm discussing in connection with martial arts films, come to think of it, with articles trying to persuade readers that Jackie Chan is a real fighting guy.  But he learned his kung fu in Chinese Opera school, for heaven's sake, as did many stars of his generation. (The interviewer just mentioned must have started out watching Hong Kong videos of the classics, in which the sounds of the blows are obviously dubbed-in sound effects over very light impacts, as in old Three Stooges shorts.)  Even performers like Bruce Lee or Jet Li, who studied actual combat and can really fight, are performing carefully worked-out sequences of moves in their films, not fighting as one would off-screen with someone who hadn't been coached what to do and when to lose.  It's one thing to suspend disbelief, and another to believe that "gullible" really is being spelled with an R now.

The Gender or the Sex?

I've begun reading Daniel Humphrey's new book Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European art Cinema (Texas, 2013).  I knew there were gay and bisexual characters in some of Ingmar Bergman's films; already from reading Humphrey's introduction I've learned that there were more than I knew about, and the prospect of a queer-oriented reading of Bergman's work has promise.  I was also aware of the connection between European art films and sexual frankness in 1950s America, and that some "art houses" which specialized in showing such films later became porn houses, some of which harbored male-on-male cruising and on-site sexual activity.  But the mainstream movie palaces were also proverbial cruising places.  One thing I've begun to notice is that Humphrey seems unaware of this connection, of the overlap of the cultural uses to which film and its temples were put.

So, for example, Humphrey cites work on film narrative by the critic David Bordwell, who wrote that "in the art film, 'personal psychology may be indeterminate'" and that in many art films "'scenes are built around chance encounters, and the entire film may consist of nothing more than a series of them, linked by a trip ... or aimless wandering."  Humphrey then suggests "for the post-World War II queer spectator, a historically specific sense of queer relationality -- the habits of disaffected homosexuals searching for their lost reflections, the closeted queers' search for their equally guarded kindred spirits, the drawn-out experience of cruising urban landscapes for fellow travelers" (45).  Bordwell, according to Humphrey, prefers this "connotation-based" approach to cinematic narrative and exalts it for its "ambiguity" (46).

There may be something to this, but I have some objections.  First, although cruising has the episodic quality Humphrey assigns to it, it is also goal-directed, seeking a particular kind of connection.  It may also lead to finding community, among those queers who stick around in the cruising places to socialize.  Second, I think Humphrey is conflating the post-Stonewall closet with its predecessor: the former means not telling straight acquaintances that one is gay, the latter means cutting oneself off from the fellowship of other queers.  "Coming out" (though not "out of the closet") in the pre-Stonewall period meant making one's debut in gay society, and having one's first homosexual copulation.  The "search" Humphrey mentions was the quest for the secret society, though in large cities it wasn't all that secretive or "guarded."

Most important, even the supposedly unambiguous Hollywood mode of narrative had its ambiguities, which gay fans made the most of, looking for in-jokes, double meanings, and the like.  Other gay critics have pointed out that there were plenty of gay people working in Hollywood, most of them in crew and technical areas, but also writing, acting and sometimes directing, and their sensibilities would have been reflected in their work, sometimes deliberately.  There's a large literature, starting with Parker Tyler and Vito Russo, on queer readings of Hollywood film.  Perhaps the style of European art film would have signified homosexuality in different ways, but gay moviegoers didn't have to go to art houses to find plenty of material for speculation, gossip, and wishful thinking.  I'm wondering if Humphrey isn't, to some extent, constructing a false dichotomy here.

Another area where I quibble is in his discussion of lighting and close-up styles for actors.  Humphrey writes that some European art films' "sexual allure also results from the ways in which the male actors are lit and photographed, reinforcing a sense of passivity, at least to an American spectator, which is in strong contradistinction to the ways men were typically lit and photographed in the classical Hollywood cinema ... Beginning with American motion pictures of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the image of women was concretized by using the rich, eroticizing chiaroscuro patterns that the artists Rembrandt and Caravaggio had conceived for their subjects centuries before, while male protagonists increasingly became more functionally illuminated through what cinematographers refer to as 'flat', or high-key, lighting" (42).  European art films continued to light male characters with those "rich, eroticizing chiaroscuro patterns" at least some of the time; Humphrey discusses Andrei Tarkovky's Ivan's Childhood (1962) at some length for its lighting of the male leads.

Again, there is something to this, but I still wonder.  Flat lighting of male stars in American films doesn't seem to have inhibited gay male (or straight female) fans from eroticizing them, even when they were not pretty boys in the mold of Rudolf Valentino, Ramon Navarro, or Ivor Novello.  Humphrey seems to assume that physical beauty means femininity, and that if men aren't lit and photographed in the same way Hollywood treats its women, they won't be attractive.  This is a weird kind of essentialism to my mind: far from being queer, it's built on the third-sex, quasi-heterosexual model so dear to 19th century and 20th century sexologists, and to not a few gay people.  But as I've pointed out before, this model is incoherent.  It assumes that erotic desire is male, and that eroticism always consists of an active subject (assumed to be male) and a passive (assumed to be female) object.  This assumption underlies a lot of cinematic "gaze" theory, pioneered by Laura Mulvey, which essentializes the camera as male, and the actor of either sex as female.  (As I recall, Mulvey was much more tentative in her 1975 "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" than her disciples have been.)  But if a woman, let alone a sissy boy, gazes longingly at Clark Gable (whose advent, Humphrey declares, "portended the end of that era in mainstream Ameridan cinema, one that has never really been repeated" [44]), the woman/sissy becomes the man and the man becomes the sissy/woman.  The essentialist-despite-himself Gore Vidal claimed that this was why Hollywood actors became alcoholics: being subject to the objectifying gaze of the camera was emasculating, because men aren't supposed to be looked at.  (Actresses, he claimed, took up knitting, though I guess nobody told Judy Garland.)  Maybe this is true, but to me it suggests that gender needs to be decoupled from the Gaze and other related concepts.  Gender is accidental, not essential, in such analysis.

Like just about everybody these days, Humphrey seems to be of at least two minds about "gender."   He straddles the line between using the word in its 1970s feminist/sociological sense (where gender as behavior or personality traits is distinguished from biological, bodily sex) and its present confused and confusing sense, where it means both body and behavior.  So, for example, he opposes "male" and "feminine" several times.  "Male" is a sex, so its opposite should be "female."  But on page 109 he writes:

In many of his writings, Freud seems beholden to the conventional thought of his day, which suggests that it can only be a person’s “feminine” sensibility that desires to have sex with a “masculine” partner, and vice versa. In other words, masculinity requires femininity in its sexual object, and femininity requires masculinity in its sexual object. While Freud would later develop a theory of homosexuality in ways that seem more in line with contemporary understandings, only with the development of queer theory would scholars fully conceptualize homosexual and heterosexual object choices as distinct from – although not completely unrelated to – female and male gender positions. Meanwhile, the notion of bisexuality remained problematic in psychoanalysis; while it stood for a mere masculine-feminine mixture in the person, it was often discussed by Freud as part of a heterosexual-homosexual dynamic in the psyche. Put simply, Freud made the mistake of confusing gendered identity with sexual object choice. 

This problem is hardly confined to Freud or "the conventional thought of his day."  The tendency to assume that erotic desire for females is innately male, and vice versa, is older than Freud and persists in the present, where it's the unspoken assumption that structures scientific study of "sexual orientation."

Having just finished reading Queer Bergman, I've begun to reread Emma Donoghue's Passions Between Women (Harper, 1993), which shows how women who loved other women were assumed from antiquity until the 19th century to be physical hermaphrodites, with oversized clitorises or possibly even genuine penises that came bursting out of their bodies like a Ridley Scott alien (only lower down).  The savants who postulated this couldn't decide whether the penis produced or merely enabled desire for women.  Nowadays, however, gender itself has been reified into a discrete matrix of traits and behavior, somehow radically separate from the body yet still obscurely tied to maleness or femaleness.

I can't blame Humphrey for succumbing to the conventional thought of his day, but this passage indicates that he can see the way out.  Queer Bergman was well worth reading, and I'll probably check out some of the early Bergman films Humphrey discusses, as well as look again at some of the later ones.

The Ghost of Strawberries Past

The Onion AV Club has a new review of Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film Wild Strawberries.  Reading the review and the comments it inspired made me think again about what I think of Bergman as a filmmaker.

I can't remember now which was the first Bergman film I ever saw, because it was over 40 years ago, but it was probably The Seventh Seal.  It was my introduction to art film, except maybe for a late-night broadcast of Rashomon dubbed in English on the local NBC affiliate (I'm still trying to figure how that happened), and so I was impressed by the contrast with Hollywood movies, but I still saw that it was ponderous and self-consciously arty.  I liked its literariness, being a bookworm, but it didn't excite me all that much. Some years later, after I'd seen it a couple more times, I happened on Stanley Kauffmann's remark that it was Bergman's pretentious film, and I was relieved to learn I wasn't the only person who thought so.

I saw Wild Strawberries not very long afterward, and disliked it intensely: as far as I was concerned, it was nothing but a Bergmanesque A Christmas Carol, and annoying from start to finish.  I don't think I've watched it again.  I did see every Bergman film that showed on campus after that (this was in the days before home video), so I saw quite a bit of his early work, and each new one as it was released.  Perversely I liked The Devil's Eye the best of his early work, and Scenes from a Marriage best of all, followed by The Magic Flute.  But Face to Face and The Serpent's Egg and Autumn Sonata were awful, and I gradually tuned him out.  (Despite this, I still intend to see films of his that I haven't gotten around to, like Fanny and Alexander.  The Criterion DVD set is on my table, waiting...)

I suspect that Bergman's reputation comes partly from the fact that he is so many people's introduction to art film, and he opens up new horizons for people who grew up on Hollywood product (as I did).  At the same time, though, one of the connotations of 'art film' in the 1950s and 1960s, when I was growing up, was sex, specifically a bluntness and matter-of-factness about sex that was impossible for American films in the days of the Hollywood code.  That interested me too, but I'd spent my high school years exploring taboo-breaking books, which exceeded anything European art films offered in their explicitness, so I never had such a sense that these films were groundbreaking except perhaps as films.  For that matter, I noticed fairly soon that the themes of a lot of European art film had mostly been done to death in European and American art literature, and the films didn't have anything to add that I could see.  Of course I mostly came to these Fifties and Sixties films late, a decade or more after their original release, but more recent European films indicated to me that they had hardened into schtick by the 1970s.

By the time I was in my late 20s, Bergman's Protestant (Calvinist?) guilt/angst made me impatient.  I had no religious upbringing to speak of, and as an atheist I never felt the need to shake my fist at Heaven as he did.  I've never been one of those atheists who feel that they lost or lack something because they don't believe.  I respect and admire Bergman's craft -- his direction and his actors, and Sven Nykvist's cinematography -- but I think he's overrated by many people.