THE MEANING OF DESPAIR ACCORDING TO INGMAR BERGMAN

ABSTRACT

Hope consists of expectations greater than zero regarding the fulfilment of a future goal (Rideout and Montemuro, 1986). Its most important characteristic is the belief that there is a way out and that, with help, changes can occur in an individual’s existence.

Despair, on the other hand, is defined as negative expectations, below zero, regarding the fulfilment of a goal. Both hope and despair are possible reflections of a person’s chances of attaining their actual goals in the future (Melges, 1969). Hope and despair represent opposing expectations.

While hope involves the anticipation that the plans put into action to achieve a goal will succeed, despair involves a judgement of failure. These two opposing expectations vary from person to person and from situation to situation, depending on when and how the expected outcome is expected to occur.

Each of these plans and expectations affects not only how an individual fits their plans to their goal, but also the form of the goal they establish for themselves. The individual processes this way of thinking through the following stages (Melges, 1969).

Ability versus chance: An individual may achieve their goals through ability or through chance. People who believe that their future depends on chance are less inclined toward goal-oriented behaviour. Moreover, a person’s belief that their plans are ineffective creates a sense of inadequacy. Belief in the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of action, together with a person’s self-respect and belief in their own ability, is a key factor in determining feelings of despair.

Trust versus distrust: The trust one feels toward others plays an important role in the development of hope. When considered in terms of dependence on others, the intensity of a person’s distrust toward other people limits their goals. When an action undertaken together with others ends in failure, a person who lacks a sense of trust tends to hold others responsible. A person with a developed sense of trust, however, accepts partial responsibility for an unsuccessful outcome.

For this reason, a distrustful person tends to prefer short-term goals rather than long-term ones.

Long-term versus short-term: Hope determines goals that can be achieved in the short term, the long term, or both. The extension of time may begin to coincide with despair. Thus, even if a person waits for the outcome in a fatalistic manner, they continue to make an effort toward short-term goals.

In summary, the interaction between ability and chance on the path toward achieving a goal, one’s sense of trust in others, one’s belief in the effort required to achieve short-term goals in comparison with persistent and long-term goals, and the interaction among these beliefs largely determine the forms of hope or despair experienced by an individual.

WHO IS INGMAR BERGMAN?

Ingmar Bergman was born on 14 July 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister who later became chaplain to the King of Sweden, and Karin (née Åkerblom), a nurse who was also of Walloon descent.

The Bergman family came from Järvsö in Gävleborg. Bergman’s paternal grandfather worked as a pharmacist in Stockholm, while his great-great-grandfather Henrik Bergman worked as an assistant pastor and married Erika Augusta Agrell, the daughter of pastor Erik Agrell, and Elsa Margareta Hermanni, the daughter of chief accountant Hieronymus Emanuel Hermanni, as well as Anna Katarina Neostadia. The Hermanni family were merchants in Stockholm, while Hieronymus’s father, Simon Daniel, was a wholesaler like his grandfather.

Through Elsa Margareta Hermanni, Bergman was descended from the Swedish noble families Bröms, Stockenström and Ehrensköld, as well as clerical families of Swedish and Swedish-Finnish origin and urban families of Swedish and German origin. Through his paternal grandmother, Anna Katarina Eneroth, Bergman was descended from German noble families. The Flach and de Frese families had been introduced into the Swedish Riddarhuset.

Anna Katarina Eneroth was the cousin of Johan Åkerblom, Bergman’s maternal grandfather, who worked as a traffic director. Thus, Bergman’s parents were second cousins. His maternal grandmother, Anna Calwagen, was the daughter of the German and English lecturer Ernst Gottfrid Calwagen and his wife Charlotta Margareta Carlsberg. The ancestor of the Calwagen family, the merchant Paul Calwagen, had migrated from the Netherlands to Karlshamn, Sweden, in the seventeenth century.

Paul’s wife, Maria van der Hagen, of Dutch-Swedish descent, was descended from the Dutch-Swedish court painter Laurens van der Plas. Through Ernst Gottfrid, Bergman was descended from the noble families Tigerschiöld and Weinholz, as well as the Bure family.

WHAT IS DESPAIR ACCORDING TO INGMAR BERGMAN?

“I came out of the cinema reeling as if drunk, in a state as though I were speechless from drugs, while the film pumped through my bloodstream at a rapid pace.” Gunnel Lindblom, the star of The Silence, described her first experience in a Bergman film in 1949.

Ingmar Bergman’s mature cinema creates an intimate interaction with the viewer in which a series of disturbing emotions emerge and are shared, often taking place face to face. Bergman’s groundbreaking 1966 film Persona provides an example of such an encounter. The film’s original title was Cinematographe, the Swedish term for cinematography.

Yet both names are appropriate for a work that questions cinema and the subject through an effective but disturbing ontological collapse. This can perhaps be seen most clearly in Bergman’s extraordinary use of close-ups, which Gilles Deleuze described as forcing the human face into an encounter with emptiness.

The relentless close-up of the face is a formal and thematic key to Bergman’s work. In these frequent, almost embarrassingly intimate and fully extended moments, the viewer can see, contemplate and feel existential securities in various states of crisis, while watching the faces before us reduced to bare flesh, bone, mouth, nose, hair and eyes.

This finely focused dissection forces us to confront both the mysterious materiality of the face and its role as the communicative nerve centre of an individual’s investment in subjectivity. The camera moves anxiously, almost as if attempting to enter, until the enormous, isolated face fills the frame and brings the zoom to a halt.

As we watch our enormous diegetic companion ask what it is that they are, confronting a personal void, the viewer encounters a vast human world that is at once close and alienating.

Here, a doubled gaze takes place: the self-consciousness of the subject on screen as it confronts crisis meets the viewer’s gaze, incorporated into and participating in the image. Both the face and the viewer seem to experience the intensity of the gaze as diegetic and metadiegetic perspectives intermingle and fragment.

This is reinforced by Bergman’s frequent use of the 1.33:1 frame, which excludes any clear view of the world beyond the face, leaving it with no obvious direction—up, down, left or right—in which to direct its gaze.

The face trapped within the relentless close-up seems to search beyond the dimensions of the frame, opening a black-hole-like space immune to cinematic existence. Enclosed on all four sides, the face looks toward a direction not confined by the graphic dimensions of the screen, toward a space that is something far greater than a black hole.

In this final movement, in which the enormous face looks directly out of the screen and visually explores a world beyond the world in which it conventionally exists, the field of the diegetic subject becomes connected to my own.

(Here I am, sitting in this disturbingly intimate experience, disturbed by it and yet simultaneously exhilarated.)

THE PLOT OF PERSONA

Persona is a 1966 Swedish psychological drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. The story revolves around Alma (Andersson), a young nurse, and her patient, the celebrated theatre actress Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann), who suddenly stops speaking. They move to a cottage where Alma begins to look after Elisabet, trust her, and gradually finds it difficult to distinguish herself from her patient.

Characterised by elements of psychological horror, Persona has been the subject of extensive critical analysis, interpretation and debate. The film’s exploration of duality, madness and personal identity has been understood as reflecting Jung’s theory of personality, while the filmmaking has been interpreted in relation to vampirism, homosexuality, motherhood, abortion and other themes. Its experimental prologue and narrative style have also attracted considerable attention.

The enigmatic film has been called the Everest of cinematic analysis. According to film historian Peter Cowie, “Everything said about Persona can be challenged; the opposite can also be true.”

Bergman developed Persona together with Ullmann and Andersson around the idea of its protagonists and their exploration of identity. The film was shot in Stockholm and Fårö in 1965. During production, the filmmakers experimented with effects involving smoke and mirrors to frame a scene and, in post-production, combined the faces of the principal characters for a single shot. Andersson defended an explicit monologue in the script and rewrote parts of it.

When Persona was first released, it was edited because of its controversial subject matter. It received positive reviews, and the term Person(a)kult was coined by the Swedish press to describe its enthusiastic followers. The film won Best Film at the 4th Guldbagge Awards and was nominated by Sweden for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The censored material was restored in 2001.

Many critics consider Persona one of the greatest films ever made. It ranked fifth in Sight & Sound’s 1972 poll and seventeenth in the 2012 poll. It has also influenced subsequent directors, including Robert Altman and David Lynch.

ANALYSIS OF PERSONA

The title Persona reflects the Latin word for “mask” and Carl Jung’s theory of the persona, an external identity distinct from the psyche. Jung believed that people project public images in order to protect themselves and may come to identify with those personalities.

An interviewer asked Bergman about the Jungian implications of the film’s title. Bergman accepted the alternative interpretation that it referred to the masks worn by actors in ancient drama, while also acknowledging that Jung’s concept corresponded to the film “admirably.” Bergman agreed that Jung’s theory “fit the situation well.”

Elisabet is a theatre actress and is seen in “mask-like makeup,” which, according to Singer, points toward a “theatrical personality.” Singer notes that Elisabet wears “thick and artificial eyelashes” even when she is not performing.

Egil Törnqvist observed that, while performing as Electra, Elisabet turns her eyes away from the theatre audience and breaks the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera. According to Törnqvist, she makes a fist, symbolising her rebellion against the concept of meaningful performance. Singer concludes that although Elisabet develops a deeply personal relationship with Alma, she cannot escape her identity as an actress and is ultimately left alone with the “desperate dream of being.”

The photograph of Thích Quảng Đức setting himself on fire, as described by Carsten Jensen, was identified by journalist Malcolm Browne as being connected to the themes of Persona.

According to Singer, Bergman confronts his audience with “the nature of the art form.” Literary critic Maria Bergom-Larsson wrote that Persona reflects Bergman’s approach to filmmaking.

Although Alma initially believes that artists are “created out of compassion, out of the need to help,” she sees Elisabet laughing at performances on a radio programme and realises that she herself has become the subject of the actress’s work. She rejects her earlier belief: “How foolish I am.” While Elisabet examines Alma, Bergman examines them both.

Michaels wrote that Bergman and Elisabet share a dilemma: neither can respond authentically to “great catastrophes” such as the Holocaust or the Vietnam War. Political columnist Carsten Jensen identified the images Elisabet sees from Vietnam as those of Thích Quảng Đức setting himself on fire in 1963.

According to Jensen, photographs of Quảng Đức’s death were widely circulated and were used in Persona. Scholar Benton Meadows wrote that Elisabet sees herself in Quảng Đức’s death and fears that this will be the consequence of her silent rebellion.

Törnqvist wrote that Elisabet was affected by the fact that the monk was a genuine rebel, while her own rebellion amounted to a cowardly retreat behind a silent persona.

Coates also associated masks with the themes of identity and duality: “The mask is Janus-faced.” Alma’s secret emerges in the sex-party monologue, which critic Robin Wood connected to a combination of shame and nostalgia, perhaps indicating the character’s sexual disintegration. According to Wood, the incident touches upon infidelity and childhood sexuality.

Arnold Weinstein wrote that Alma’s story provides the harshest example of the “cracks” in the character’s mask. She believes in her identity as a nurse, ultimately leading to the “collapse of the self.” The monologue is so intense that it approaches pornography.

Film historian P. Adams Sitney summarised the story’s trajectory as a psychoanalytic process: a referral, followed by an initial interview, explanations and the discovery of the patient’s fundamental problem. According to Sitney, the story initially appears to begin from Alma’s point of view; after Elisabet compares their hands, however, her perspective emerges as the source of the story.

Another possible reference to psychology is the play Elisabet performs when she becomes mute: Electra by Sophocles or Euripides. According to Bergman, he did not focus on Greek tragedy in his work, but the character of Electra inspired the idea of the Electra complex. Bergman felt that his choice of the play was connected to “sexual identities,” a key concept in psychoanalysis.

The theme of gender also fits Bergman’s recurring motif of “fighting women,” previously seen in The Silence and later in Cries and Whispers and Autumn Sonata. According to Professor Marilyn Johns Blackwell, Elisabet’s resistance to speaking can be interpreted as a resistance to gender roles. By portraying this tension primarily through women, Bergman can be said to “problematise the position of woman as the other”; the role imposed on women by society is “essentially alien to their subjecthood.”

Blackwell also wrote that the attraction between Elisabet and Alma, together with the absence of male sexuality, is consistent with their identification with one another and creates a doubling that reveals a “multiple, fluid, self-contradictory identity”—a concept of identity that undermines male ideology.

The theme of merging and doubling surfaces early in the film when Alma says that she has watched one of Elisabet’s films and is disturbed by the thought that they resemble one another. Blackwell also suggests that one of the film’s original titles, A Piece of Cinematography, may imply the nature of representation.

She also draws attention to the film’s fabricated tones. Alison Darren describes Alma and Elisabet’s relationship as existing “somewhere between love and hate” and profiles Persona in The Lesbian Film Guide, suggesting that, “although it may easily be an illusion,” the two women may approach having sex in one scene. Viewing the scene in which Elisabet enters Alma’s room as seductive, she interprets the film in feminist terms as a depiction of lesbianism.

Professor Alexis Luko felt that the characters’ touches and similarities on screen symbolise the merging of their personalities while also conveying intimacy and eroticism.

Foster believed that Elisabet’s gaze leads her to question Alma about her engagement to Karl-Henrik. According to Foster, sexual encounters between men and women are associated with abortion, while lesbian love increasingly becomes associated with a shared identity.

However, if Persona dramatizes a lesbian relationship, this is clearly not presented in a positive light, as it later becomes characterized by narcissism and violence. If lesbianism is regarded as a stronger version of female friendship or maternal love, Alma and Elisabet’s relationship takes the place of the depiction of the Oedipus complex in the prologue, in which the male child reaches out in vain toward his mother. According to Jeremi Szaniawski, the homoeroticism (gay and lesbian) in Bergman’s Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Cries and Whispers, and Face to Face constituted a rebellion against the strict upbringing imposed by Bergman’s father, Erik Bergman, a minister of the Church of Sweden.