Scenes from a Marriage

Sneak Preview Feature for September 2022 (Watching Bergman's film & Remembering Jean-Luc Godard)

Teaser Trailer

Last time I promised to post a feature essay in two weeks, it took four. This time, I’ll promise three and try my best to stick to that. Then by the next Sneak Preview I’ll have a better understanding of how grounded my timelines are in reality. Speaking of, this month’s feature essay is about Michael Haneke and Cinematic Structure. Perhaps it’s not as enticing as assessing the absence of body fluids from Christopher Nolan’s filmography, but I’m trying to create a balance here between click-bait provocateur and refined critic, so let’s just pretend I also have impressive things to say about high brow subjects like Cinematic Structure, ok?

Watching: Scenes from a Marriage (1973)

I’ve been on a Bergman binge lately. Some of you are probably rolling your eyes at that. But Mia Hansen-Løve’s recent tribute to the master, Bergman Island (2021), gassed me up for another dive into his filmography. Perhaps it was seeing the placid, pine ridden landscapes of Fårö or swooning over the Scandinavian modern interior design again. Or perhaps it was missing those faces Bergman captures so beautifully in close-up – Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Max Von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Harriet Andersson. Whatever the reason, I’m glad I returned because there is still plenty of Bergman left to discover.

This past week, I was quite taken with the televised version of Scenes from a Marriage (1973), which would give any modern tv drama a run for its money. It is a deeply intimate drama, so intense that it starts to feel claustrophobic at times. That’s partially because the series spends the majority of its five hour span with the same two characters and partially because each episode is only shot in one to three locations (most of them lacking windows). Modern television shows rarely, if ever, limit their geographical scope in this way, which strikes me as a bit odd. Not only does it offer an affordable alternative to dozens of locations and multiple set builds, it also enables the creator to dive deep into the characters’ psyches.

By the end of Scenes from a Marriage, I started to feel like I knew the characters a bit too well, which isn’t something I’m used to thinking about even at the end of a fifty hour television series. In fact, it’s the only drama in recent memory where my fiancé and I have felt comfortable yelling at the screen on occasion – a behavior we usually reserve for reality tv contestants. I suppose Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson’s performances inspire such passion as does Bergman’s astute ear for vitriol.

Other Bergman films, while dramatic in their own right, strike me as more philosophical than Scenes from a Marriage. Returning to The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries feels more like reading Kierkegaard than Ibsen, but I think Persona is the best example of a Bergman film that straddles the line between both. Perhaps for that reason, it’s also the one I’ve returned to the most over the years. So this go-round instead of rewatching Persona, I decided to read the screenplay to see more of Bergman’s craft. It was about as bizarre as one might expect: entire sections devoted to inchoate descriptions of cinematic sensations or vague images intended to give the reader the feeling of the film rather than a concrete sense of it. This is a no-no in Screenwriting 101, but I guess if you’re Ingmar Bergman you can submit a ham sandwich to the producers for notes and trust that they’d sign off on the dotted mayo line.¹ It’s also a thrilling endorsement of the improvisational nature of filmmaking; sometimes you don’t know how you’ll achieve a certain effect on the page, but you know you’ll figure it out with a camera or in the editing room.

Then, there are Bibi Andersen’s enormous monologue passages: entire pages that range from elongated musings to gripping personal narratives, like the infamous beach monologue. In a sense this tendency of the script is integral to the story, given Andersen is caretaker to Liv Ullmann’s character who has taken a vow of silence. Yet it’s also a tendency that could have been hedged by simply adding in more characters – voices to bounce off Bibi Andersen while Liv Ullmann sits quietly nearby. The decision to keep the film tight on these two reminds me of his minimalist approach in Scenes from a Marriage.

As an artist Bergman goes big by going small with the cast and deep with the dialogue. He is freakishly talented under such constraints. I’m sure there are plenty of filmmakers out there with a similar proclivity for smaller scale projects. Mia Hansen-Løve comes to mind again as L’Avenir and Bergman Island explore the psyches of their central characters through a small handful of sets: a professor’s book laden apartment, a leftist collective’s farm in the mountains, a famous filmmaker’s former home. In the age of CGI world-building, there is something very cozy and human about these familiar yet character specific locations. As with Bergman, by the end of Hansen-Løve’s films I start to miss the feeling of those spaces and look forward to returning to them again.

Remembering: Jean-Luc Godard

Jean-Luc Godard died last week. A coworker remarked that she thought he’d been dead for years, which, from what I can gather, is not an uncommon reaction to the news. Perhaps that’s because so many associate Godard with his early French New Wave films and forget about his later radical and experimental projects. This is a shame, but also a sign of his uncompromising artistic vision, which did not cater to audience tastes or market incentives. Actually, it did the opposite. And I find that kind of inspiring. But, rather than discussing my thoughts on Godard – which feel limited compared to the critics and filmmakers who have been reviewing and returning to his films for decades – I’d rather share a few pithy quotes from the many appraisals of his work to form some retrospective, fragmented impression of a complicated artist. If one thing could consistently be said of Godard’s work, it’s that he loved a good quote.

From Mike Leigh, The Guardian

“It was 1960 and Breathless exploded on to the screen at the precise moment I arrived in London, a film-obsessed 17-year-old from Salford, who had never seen a movie that wasn’t in English, British and Hollywood fare being my sole diet. Godard’s debut masterpiece did indeed leave one breathless. Free-spirited location filming, spontaneous believable acting, wayward unconnected quirky moments … here was a feast of revelatory challenges to one’s ideas about cinema: pure anarchic bliss!”

From Peter Wollen, Verso (see also his interview with Godard on Criterion)

“His disenchantment sprang from the cinema's inability to respond to its times, to act as a kind of seismographic early warning system, registering the first tell-tale tremors of social and cultural upheaval, as he tried to do in his own work. As Michael Witt has recently observed, Godard finally became convinced that the cinema was indeed a doomed art, that it had lost the will to live, when he concluded that it had abandoned its former cinematic grandeur to pander to an audience whose subjectivity had been constructed by their experience of television and video.”

From Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

“Godard didn’t make it easy, or not always. He insisted that we come to him, that we navigate the densities of his thought, decipher his epigrams and learn a new language: his. If we couldn’t or wouldn’t, too bad — for us. We were the ones impoverished for not seeing that cinema can be more than laughter and tears, dollars and awards.”

From Blair McClendon, n+1

“All of Godard’s failures seem to indict the medium with which he quickly became synonymous, and the depth of his own talent made his own shortcomings all the more glaring. Even by generous accounts his work was frequently misogynistic, and yet it somehow remains ahead of even much more well-meaning contemporary cinema in simply taking for granted that women can be characters rather than puppets, that they can act on the world because of their desires… On sets he was demanding and petulant, and probably, as the world’s preeminent auteur, led many others to believe that making great art meant subjecting everyone to a vortex of volatile emotions and poor producing. This has never been true. It is a mark of Godard’s genius that his films succeeded at all, given that he tended to put himself in dire emotional and financial straits for no particular reason. Pierrot Le Fou is brilliant. Still, I would never suggest to two recently divorced people that they make a film together about criminal lovers and their betrayals of one another. There are easier ways to spend eight weeks.”

From Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Godard achieved his goal: leaving his legend behind, his work has become, very simply, the central reality of the modern cinema. In his office, Godard told me that he thought the cinema was nearly over: “When I die, it will be the end.” He was wrong—and it’s his own fault.”

1. I wouldn’t be surprised if David Lynch actually did this once.