|
GAME OF LIFE: Antonius Block challenges Death (above) in Bergman's The Seventh Seal. -- PHOTOS: INTERNET, AP
|
|
|
IN A different time, a different place - perhaps on a Paris fashion runway or at a soiree for an Issey Miyake autumn/winter show - he wouldn't be out of place.
But there he stands in this cold blustery beach, a stark incongruity: oval face painted white, towering and lean, body cloaked in a hooded black cape that flaps dramatically against sky and sea.
He is at once stylish, iconic, enigmatic and alluring, a hieroglyph alive with portent - who could he be?
He is, as film aficionados would know, Death, the character (played by Bengt Ekerot) who appears in the mesmerising opening scene of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's 1957 classic The Seventh Seal. Death is here to claim his next victim, Antonius Block (played by Max von Sydow), a knight returning from the Crusades to a Sweden ravaged by the plague.
Antonius smartly challenges Death to a game of chess, if only to delay the inevitable result.
This scene replayed in my mind when I found out that Bergman, 89, had died peacefully in his sleep on Monday in his island of seclusion, the remote, windswept Baltic islet of Faro.
One imagines the director would have stared Death in the face and smiled sanguinely. After all, he had lived a fruitful life on his own terms.
One of the last great European art-house auteurs, Bergman was described as 'profoundly influential, deeply depressing' by film critic Joe Queenan in a recent article in The Guardian.
Who could blame Queenan, for the poor chap had watched Bergman's entire oeuvre - 38 films - which detailed emotionally tortuous scenes of adulterous couples and innocent kids murdered (1960's Oscar-winning The Virgin Spring) and families torn apart by domestic accidents like paraffin oven explosions in movies like To Joy (1950).
Austerity, for better or for worse, is the director's middle name. Indeed, 'Bergman-esque' has become a cinematic catchphrase for anything morbid, chilly and even nihilistic.
In my view, though, this is unfortunate and misleading.
No doubt there are those who flinch at the mention of Bergman, but for artistic ferocity and focus, he is nonpareil.
His obsession with death and man's series of unfortunate accidents wasn't so much misanthropic as humanist.
Riddled by illnesses when he was young and raised in a family of severe discipline, it was not surprising Bergman would spend his career pursuing the meaning of life, and by extension, death.
To begin with, not every film of his is unremittingly bleak - 1955's Smiles Of A Summer Night is a scurrilous partner-switching comedy of manners and 1964's All These Women a satirical slapstick comedy about a womanising cellist sidetracked by a bevy of blonde beauties.
But it is the black-and-white masterpieces of Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, both released in 1957 in the prime of his middle-aged era, that haunt and keep one awake.
They prove that belying the gloomy Swede tag is a vital, visceral heart beating at the core of his art.
As French director Bertrand Tavernier said: 'Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics - religion, death, existentialism - to the screen. But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity.'
In Wild Strawberries, ageing physician Isak Borg (played by Swedish director Victor Sjostrom) embarks on a journey to his former university to receive an honorary degree. Along the way, he encounters strangers and relatives, afflicted by nightmares and lost dreams. Consumed by his own demons, he comes to terms with his own imperfections.
One scene is a classic - the oft-copied dream sequence with Borg arriving at a house with windows boarded up. In the street is a clock with no hands. A hearse approaches him before it hits a lamp post and a coffin falls out. An outstretched hand tries to pull Borg inside the coffin.
Bergman's spectral vision gets to the primal fear without plumbing for cheap thrills. In contrast to today's torture porn flicks - from the gory Saw by James Wan and Leigh Whannell to Eli Roth's Hostel I and II that flaunt macabre contraptions and relish the murderous high - Bergman's films, however bleak, make you feel every breath of your own existence.
He makes you want to live, despite all the bad things that have happened.
And don't forget that occasional spark of mischief in his films: See the Death intro again in The Seventh Seal, which at once seals the director's reputation as a figurehead of the European art-house, elevated and satirised in equal measure.
Parodied endlessly in films ranging from fawning acolyte Woody Allen's Love And Death (1975) to Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life (1984) to Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (1991), Bergman's personification of Death achieves the impossible in a simple classy act: Normalised as someone who could sit down with you to play a chess of life, Death is approachable and reasonable.
He isn't a nasty Grim Reaper from some unknowable place. He is right here, right now, always with you as part of this cycle of life.
Bergman said it best when he dissected the scene in the book Images: My Life In Films (Bloomsbury, 1994): 'It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in white face, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death.
'Instead of saying, 'Come on now, don't try to pull something over on us! You're not Death at all', nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.'
Indeed, it is Bergman's twinkle in his eye amid quiet rectitude and rigour that still enthralls me, thrills me and kills me while watching his films.
kaichai@sph.com.sg
Bergman's spectral vision gets to the primal fear without plumbing for cheap thrills
|
