Ingmar Bergman: The Poet Who Understood Dreams
July 31st, 2007
By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
I saw ‘Persona’ with my aunt Terez who was wearing a hat with practically an entire pheasant sewn onto it. The Notre Dame students behind us kept saying, ‘I don’t get it, this is nuts, what’s this movie about?’ Terez who had just learned to speak some English kept saying ‘Shhhh, eets abowt drrreems. Go to sleep and you’ll understand it.’
What Bergman himself, the grand mind of another time and place, said: “Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
His crown was not like some directors, massive laden with tormentuous gems of a zillion gleams, but really, just a handful, a bracelet of films, most igneous… like ‘The Seventh Seal,’ a dream about the time of the Plague and the Crusades and Death being challenged by a Knight at the river to play an intermittent game of chess over a long period of time, a black and white film that near any frame, would be considered art for the walls of any museum of future-past. The film is drowned like a pre-Raphaelite Ophelia in slimy water with fresh flowers floating by… the symbols, related to spirit and death and life, are, well, rife with pagan and Christian leitmotifs. Yet Bergman said: “I hope I never get so old I get religious.” He was dreaming in his film, that’s for certain.
Sherman Alexie, the Seattle-Coeur d’Alene poet, author of ‘Indian Killer,’ and whose poetry has been made into two films, ‘The Business of Fancydancing,’ and ‘Smoke Signals,’ told me that the essence of screenplay is to write the best most spare poem you can so that the director can fill it.
Like cloisonné, I thought. Far earlier when Alexie was still a mote, Bergman said: “I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.”
What kind of artist poet was he? His films never got the pretty-gloss treatment, but rather always had something whipping its tail around underground… “Theater is the beginning and end and actually everything, while cinema belongs to the whoring and slaughterhouse trade.â€
There, there it is. The thing great art cannot be without. Some version of primal. Bergman was an oddity in that he could describe in just a few words, the essence of night dreams, that too, does not come from the alpha and omega, but from the shadow. Dreams come from what cannot be seen in daylight at high noon, only aslant.
Reading the various critics of Bergman, those who hung his lights over the moon, and those who took ten books to say, ‘He is good,’ and those few, who seemed to have their own preservative ‘issues,’ and seemed to have preferred times gone by more, or times not yet arrived… still, Bergman would perhaps have a question for us… who dreams for us collectively now? Who are the great deep dreamers of our culture now?
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 31st, 2007 at 7:33 am and is filed under Death, Muslims, Poetry, Christianity, Theater. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
