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.Bergman is one of the most fearless adventurers into the realm of the irrational, to the extremes of passionate experience.Our culture has a particular distaste for tragedy and extremes of emotion, it avoids exploring the unconscious, will not portray actions not analyzable by the intellect.But as D.H.Lawrence said, passionate experience must come first, and analysis afterwards.What Bergman gives us is an entry into the very heart and core of passionate experience.The critics are annoyed by mystery.If significance eludes them they feel powerless, but mystery is the proof of man’s spiritual existence and symbolism is the only way to capture it, and the language must be learned.But one must first of all accept immersion into the night world of the unconscious.You cannot analyze while feeling.John Simon, who has best understood Bergman, says in his book, Ingmar Bergman Directs: “The superficial, popular notion of Bergman, sparked perhaps by such irresponsible criticism, is as a maker of misty, symbolic, pretentious inscrutabilities.”This is because we demand answers before we enter into the labyrinth of the interior journey, we demand sign posts and street signs.Bergman’s films, as Simon says, are open-ended films abutting on unanswerable questions.Who has answered such questions as: Is there a god? Is there an afterlife? If the solution to our problems is love, what kind of love, and how can it be achieved? If we find peace in work, artistic creation, closeness to nature, the circle of friends or the family circle, just how do we go about accomplishing this?Bergman is saying that we are intelligent enough to pursue our own examination of the experience he makes us undergo.He asks you to suffer it, because he knows that if you do not enter experience with emotion, but only with the mind, it will not change you.He communicates directly with your unconscious.The one who seeks only analytical clarity remains a tourist, a spectator.I assume from the misunderstanding of Bergman that many are more comfortable as tourists and do not wish to stir, awaken, disturb, the obscure selves we do not even acknowledge within ourselves.Another thing which is foreign to us (obsessed with collective mass history) is Bergman’s interest in what Simon calls the “chamber film, derived from chamber music, which means an intense focus upon one, two, or four persons, the action confined in time and space and the story intensely intimate.”Once we become aware of the enormous importance of music for Bergman, we can better understand that he intends that we should receive his films as we receive music.It should reach us directly as music does, touching the centers of emotion, bypassing analytic dissection by the mind.We have to tune in to Bergman differently than we tune in to one-dimensional films.By affecting us as music does, he brings us into intimate contact with a few people.In Cries and Whispers we become intimate as never before with the process of dying.We become intimate with the meaning of compassion, expressed by the servant, which not even religion has been able to convey with such human power.No saint has given the depth of human love given by the servant.Bergman wants you to feel with him and to dream with him.He will not tell you when the dream begins or ends.For him life, dream, and art are identical.Whether consciously or unconsciously, we live by an intermingling of them, what the surrealist calls “superimpositions.”He refuses to establish boundaries.He feels that dream and action are interrelated, fantasy and madness, creation and destruction.As his role is to make our subconscious life visible, as visible as the conscious, he does not paint it as a ghostly presence.When he dresses the four sisters in white against a red background it is not only a realistic description of the dress and background of their epoch, it expresses the idea that although apparently related, they are total strangers to each other.The unity of a family is an illusion.The dying sister’s dream was that they should merge as sisters; that they should commune and by emotional unity defeat the disintegration of death
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