From the Life of the Marionettes - Breaking Down Bergman - Episode #39
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 11 окт 2024
- Whether you consider it a sequel, an offshoot, or a standalone film, From the Life of the Marionettes offers some unusual choices from director Ingmar Bergman. David Friend and Sonia Strimban discuss whether the shocking violence, the heightened sexuality and disco music really served Bergman well in his tale of a relationship that falls apart and a mind that falters. Originally titled Aus dem Leben der Marionetten in its initial release.
Friend and Strimban are watching the career of the Swedish director from his first film to his last, in order, and discussing their observations. Visit the main channel for more details.
All related clips and images are copyrighted and property of their respective owners.
#breakingdownbergman #ingmarbergman #sweden
You didn't understand the movie at all. It is a fantastic film (one of Bergman's very best) with its underlying anxiety, its technical perfection, its silence and rhythm, its form. The reversed and broken chronology is part of the man's split personality. They have a codependent relationship, which they have long challenged through open infidelity, fierceness and challenging arguments, etc. Basically, the man was sexually frustrated due to a subconscious homosexuality.
Congratulations on this great channel, mates. For a Bergman enthusiast as I am (my graduation thesis was about some of his movies), it feels very interesting to attend to your discussions on his Grand Oeuvre. And I really do appreciate the high quality of your commentary. Having discovered this channel just today, I've just seen a couples of videos and there's still a lot to discover and enjoy. So, how exciting!
I have to say, though, that I don't agree with your views on this particular movie, which is for sure among my favourites. One of the missing key points in your discussion is about the conflict between the psychic landscapes of the characters and the social structures that oppresses the wild rawness of their emotions. In my opinion this is the main subject of the film, more importantly than the conflict in the couple, the plain marital dispute. The dicotomy between what Peter is "supposed to do" according to his high standard living, and how Peter feels deep down in his subsconscious, and the madness deriving from the the clash of these incompatible worlds... this is what the movie is really about. In my view, Peter is like a corked volcano looking desperately for a vent valve for his boiling magma. Moreover, sexuality is a recurring theme throughout all the movie. All the characters talk about it as something that cannot be controlled, something that confuses and baffles people's behaviour, a demonic power that overwhelms rationality and causes conflicts, betrayals, misunderstandings. So, from this perspective, the strip-dance scene becomes not only very necessary, but also a key point of the whole movie. After so many words, monologues, analysis and instrospection, here comes the real trigger for Peter's final explosion: rough sexuality, in a basement with a prostitute, far away from social conventions he is used to deal with. The explicit strip-tease and the disco music soundtrack represent something which is very far from Peter's habits and idea of acceptability, and this triggers the "psychic magma" of his to erupt up to the surface.
Ooops, sorry for the long comment! Keep up the good work! Cheers mates.
Worth mentioning is that this was made for the german television (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) and Bergman didn't like that it was shown on theaters. Later Bergman said he should have cut out the scene with the letter (which btw Peter never send). I actually like the compressed form, the feeling that we're not told the whole story. I don't think you should make too much of the fact that Peter and Katarina is also in Scenes from a mariage, Bergman often used the same names (Vogler etc) for different characters. Looking at "Marionettes" as a sequel to "Scenes from a mariage" just prevents you from appreciating the film for it's own qualities. "Marionettes" does not look like the usual Bergman movie, but I think it's a great one!
It's wonderful to find this channel and to hear such intelligent commentary, and I look forward to hearing more. I don't, however, much agree with the views expressed, particularly David's comment that it was somehow badly directed. I found Marionettes to be a rather impressive late-career achievement and -- whatever its flaws -- cannot imagine it being more sensitively directed or acted, especially by Christine Buchegger. I saw this film for the first time just last night, one day after seeing Bergman's Autumn Sonata, made a few years earlier. Before I tell you what I thought about this film, let me say a little about how I felt about the other. I found Autumn Sonata, despite some good performances, extremely familiar. It did not feel to me inspired, as if Bergman was discovering the material as he was making it. Rather, it felt rather dead -- as if the story was a little too planned and prepared -- anyone who has seen a lot of Bergman may well have thought "been there, done that." It felt like a retread. Marionettes, then, which I saw just 24 hours later, felt entirely the opposite, as if Bergman was not just back on familiar turf but re-energized by a theme which he had not completely worked out, which still felt mysterious, where he didn't have all the answers to the disastrous marriage between these characters. The film did not, however, ever feel confused or uncertain, but profoundly interested and sympathetic to the fates of both Peter and Katarina; you could feel, or I could, that Bergman was gripped by the material. The commentary seemed to suggest that the film was bad because the main characters seemed so very far from the original source material -- the minor characters in the subplot of Scenes from a Marriage -- but to me this is a completely unimportant criticism. Bergman wasn't bound by that earlier film -- he had no duty to be consistent to an earlier conception of these characters. Clearly the characters evolved in his head -- they became darker, and richer, as he probed further, and it's because of that probing that the film has such a shattering effect. A great one? No. A minor masterpiece? Not sure. But it left thoughts and original images in my head, and I'll definitely return to it again.
This was on wikipedia: "The title is a quotation excerpted from a passage in The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi: Most unfortunately in the lives of the Marionettes there is always a BUT that spoils everything."
Could anyone tell me what the song is that's playing at the beginning of this clip, please? It has a very 70s disco feel. Many thanks.
that's an adorable attempt at an analysis.
If you wanna talk about life of the marionettes, the first thing to note is Peter's overwhelming sense of paranoia.
Life of the marionettes is beautifully written if you learn how to read it.
Also, if you're into this movie, watch it with Liv Ullman's 'Faithless', that's the one it goes together with ;)
Btw, Robert Atzorn later had the main role as a teacher in a popular German family TV series :)
It doesn't have to be a precise "sequel". Shakespeare used names for characters that weren't exactly alike: eg Justice Shallow MWV vs same name for HIV2. Don't get hung on whether they'll as "convincing" or as "alike" as the other types. They're similar enough and Bergman was probably adjusting his dramatic lens. The characters in the later film could have been more apathetic or shallow, maybe deliberately so.
The first time I saw it, I didn't like it much at all, and for some of the reasons you state. Over the years, though, I come to find it more and more fascinating. And your discussion of it sure seems to suggest it fascinates and engages you at some level--you seem more intrigued by it than you have other Bergman films you end up calling "essential". It's ultimately, I think, one of his most daring "art pieces" as opposed to being a traditional drama or a narrative. I think the wordiness you mention, really to the point that you do tune out after a while, is intentional. The scene of Peter dictating the memo is the best example of it. It's totally meaningless and dramatically empty, but that's surely the point. The film is in some ways about how language (as a synecdoche for civilization) can deaden us. In some ways I think this film shows Bergman not only being positively influenced by Fassbinder, but by Chantal Akerman as well--think "je tu il elle" or "Jeanne Dielman". Interestingly both are queer directors and Bergman has said that Peter's likely repressing homosexual feelings and that that is a key to the film and the film's crime.
Great video as always. I wonder if another reason that most of the film is in black & white is to stress the basic inability to truly discover the reason behind Peter's desire to kill. The nonsense spouted off by the professor near the end of the film seems to really nail the point home that his desire to kill cannot be rationally explained. At the end of the day, we are left in the dark... or at least without a clear and colorful reason.
9:50 "childlike" really should be "childish" if you mean "bratty". Childlike-ness is good for adults: Wonder, Creativity, Humility - Trump could use more of it
The whole search for the truth behind the motivations through interviews, flashbvacks etc. harks back to Citizen kane where subjective points of view serve to construct the mystery of Kane rather than essence. Same here I think.
While I actually do like this film as a sort of oddity, I cannot imagine Bergman having conceived anything like it at the time of SFAM. I don't know his feelings about the director, but this sometimes feels like Bergman being (or trying to be*) Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
* That's certainly not intended as a disparaging comment, although RWF is probably my all-time favorite director alongside Tarkovsky.
***** I haven't seen either NJ or PinI in full, but yeah, those and Rio das Mortes are the ones that I always hear considered RWF's worst. Though I will say that I did quite enjoy the Amon Duul cameo clip I saw from NJ.
***** Although I've only seen about 35-40% of his oeuvre, I think I'd also consider Satan's Brew a semi-oddity. And of the three you mentioned, I've just seen BoaHW (but liked it a lot).
***** I'm actually waiting until I can read the original (though I'm very familiar with Billy Budd, I know that QdeB is a lot different).
(P.S. It may be blasphemous, but as you mentioned Sunset Blvd, I seriously think Veronika Voss outdoes it, though it's not a fair comparison. It's easy to take things to some very dark places amidst the backdrop of postwar Germany.)
…also, take the "sequel to SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE" notion with a grain of salt. I think Bergman had a very broad sense of what a sequel is. It might be more accurately to suggest that these characters were inspired by the SCENES characters and were given the same names as a nod to that. When we get to SARABAND, supposedly a DIRECT sequel to SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (with Ullmann and Jospehson back as Marianne and Johan), we will see that the pieces don't add up between the two films, either. In SARABAND, they have kids they never mentioned in SCENES, and they never mention in the later film the kids they did have in SCENES, etc. So once again, Bergman isn't all that concerned about having these "sequels" really fit with their origin films.
It's consistent between SFAM and Saraband that Johan and Marianne had two daughters, but for whatever reason, their names are different. And he reuses the original name of one of them for a new character. But it's a good point. A "sequel" to him is more like a different dream he had about the characters, rather than the attempted continuity of a Hollywood sequel. If something was useful to the new film (Marianne working in family law, Johan having left Marianne for a "feather-brain named Paula," Johan being a mediocre aspiring poet), he referenced it. If he needed something to be different (Johan suddenly having a son nearly Marianne's age, and now the age gap between J/M being 20+ years rather than seven), he changed it.
Definitely not essential in spite of some good scenes. The underlying story is not believable, especially with the amateur psychology at the end about his dominating wife and mother. The lead character is a monster. He murders a perfectly nice girl and for no reason. This is Bergman at his most cynical and the film generally lacks the touching, human elements that made the Bergman films of the 50s and 60s so compelling.