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Cries,
whispers, silence and space :
death and the family in films by Pialat, Bergman and
Ozu par Maximilian Le Cain
La Gueule ouverte (1974)
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traduction française...
  
In his excellent Pialat biography, Pascal Mérigeau
notes his subject’s ire at the commercial failure
of La Gueule ouverte (1974) in light of the
success that Ingmar Bergman had encountered just one
year previously with Cries and Whispers (1971),
his similarly harrowing treatment of a family gathered
around a painfully dying relative. While both films
explore the ravages of sickness with a rare, unflinchingly
physical intensity, Merigeau diagnoses a glimmer of
hope in Bergman’s film that is remorselessly
avoided by Pialat. This ‘hope’ is so ambiguous
that we cannot take it for granted- a cathartic moment
of closeness between the two bereaved sisters (Liv
Ullman and Ingrid Thulin, the family that await and
survive the end of third sister, Harriet Andersson),
the effects of which are already eroding at the film’s
conclusion. If Bergman’s film is in some way
less unforgiving- if no less bleak- than Pialat’s,
it is more likely because the French director denies
us even the illusion of catharsis. In fact, he denies
us any illusions at all. Put simply, Pialat situates
suffering in the indifferent space of the real world
while Bergman films death from the inside, finding
a means to give form to pure, naked feeling at its
most extreme, the limit point of human existence.
In abstracting the dynamics of the sisters’
relationships and magnifying them through the refractive
presence of death, Bergman creates a metaphysical
space that seems to emanate from the consciousness
of the dying sister, the conscience of the film that,
weblike, holds the others entrapped (or, perhaps,
embraced) even after her death. It is not for nothing
that she is a painter, engaging with and recreating
the texture of the world even as she prepares to leave
it. In creating this abstract space, interior in every
sense of the word, Bergman uses images of a forceful
physicality. The film is saturated with the colour
red, rich red walls, dissolves to red that throw the
solidity of the seductive yet cloying wall coverings
into question. It is as if Bergman’s characters
inhabit a living body, a trembling, pulsating, sensitive
organism that periodically swallows them up in flashes
of liquid red. Yet the texture of this ‘flesh’
is soft, warm, plush, absorbing the horror that it
encloses as much as it highlights it. The trappings
of its period setting further accentuate its otherness.
(If Mérigeau seeks a reason for this film’s
commercial success as against Pialat’s failure,
perhaps it lies in Bergman’s distancing aestheticism
versus Pialat’s observational realism rather
than in any narrative or philosophical difference.)
Set into the ‘flesh’ is time : the ticking
clocks that famously open the film and punctuate Andersson’s
passage. Her ailing body is the centre of this enclosed
world, a world endowed with an oneirically heightened
vividness as if being seen for the last time, exterior
space taking the form of living matter as the continued
perception of the former becomes dependent on the
now tenuously continued existence of the latter.
On cold paper, this set up might seem excessively
metaphorical. Yet subtlety is not Bergman’s
goal here ; never
has his determination to strip his characters down
to their rawest level of emotional existence been
more ferocious than in Cries and Whispers. He dissects,
taking everything from the two sisters except the
traits that form the basis of their characters, defined
in flashbacks that culminate in moments of stunning
gestural revelation- Ullman recoiling from her husband’s
(Henning Moritzen) bungled suicide attempt, Thulin
cutting her vagina with broken glass. Anguished, desperate
and sometimes ridiculous, they flail about like beheaded
chickens already plucked in search of or recoiling
from human contact, often crashing painfully into
each other. It is as if the red membrane that surrounds
them provides an extra layer of warmth and protection
that allows them to take off the wraps of habitual
distance and detachment that are already being re-applied
in preparation for a return to the outside world as
the film concludes. The camera often seems to cut
into the characters, to face them as if to stare them
down in a stance of physical confrontation defined
by the merciless big close ups that are such a crucial
part of the film’s style. The monologue the
Doctor (Erland Josephson) delivers to Ullman in which
he describes the faults in her character from the
lines on her face might function as a self-referential
note on the workings of the Bergman close up. The
aggressive nature of his camera is perhaps best perceived
in a scene in which Thulin violently and hysterically
recoils from Ullman’s touch, attempting to flee
out of the left of the frame. Bergman cuts and zooms
in on her in as she escapes with a rapidity that can
make the cut appear to be a pan on first viewing-
the camera is positioned only slightly further left
and the angle and background are identical. This cut
can only be likened to catching her mid-flight and
physically restraining her squirming body. The emphatically
deliberate, calculatingly disciplined nature of the
camera movement is what gives it its cruelty, as opposed
to the compassionate sense of a camera spontaneously
spinning to catch a piece of virtuoso acting in rhythm
with the player, as in Cassavetes.
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