INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘TO JOY’ “I’d like to bury myself so deep that nothing got to me…”

© 2020 by James Clark

The genesis of Ingmar Bergman’s thrilling final film, namely, Saraband (2003), consists of a film few have seen and few will ever see, namely, To Joy (1950). Fifty-three years is a long span; but the matters in that long-ago gem include sensibility in such a way as to expose an obligation untouched by Saraband, and any of the other films in that chain of pearls.

Before getting down to the reason why this hidden treasure is particularly important, let’s enumerate what Saraband did so wonderfully on the recommendation of that lost classic. There we find that the effete couple in the film, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), are even far more tedious in Saraband, in their craving for advantage, than when they were younger. The protagonist, Karin, therein, soldiers on to introduce an overtaking of advantage in the music industry while aiming for a career of a classical orchestra player finding gold in the form of sharing with other players attentive to the infrastructures of intention, not the pedantry of being perfect, supreme in that discipline, and mowing down one’s inferiors. Moreover, To Joy, not explicitly but readily understood, moves apace—53 years before, in one Henrik, becoming a practicing incest opportunist until Karin brings equilibrium to her métier—presents a 30-year-old siren sporting a wedding ring pretending to be the wife of a 60-year-old when in fact his daughter, and doing tricks at the homestead.

All of this drama, as we’ve said, is not new. But it is the unopened treasure of our film today which will occupy our strivings. Right from the outset (with its credits seriously and deliberately ugly as to design), we see a stage crammed to the last inches of classical symphonic agency, a horde of choristers and four vocal soloists. Details of the composition can wait. As they present themselves there, they are not only an occasional unity, but an overriding culture. It is that aspect which Bergman attends to, as never before and never again. The melodrama unfolding before our eyes, for all its mayhem, is not particularly interesting per se. What we’ve been gifted to, is the reflection of Bergman, a remarkable artist, taking a harsh bead upon his own ilk. In one light, we have an instance of the very familiar concern (for Bergman) consisting of relations who “speak the same language.” This concern, however, tends to happily savage bourgeois gluttons (crammed also with the religious and the scientific, with their gluttony). Now, though, it’s the sanctity of a supposed independent, incorruptible, clear sightedness, being questioned as opening a window upon the cosmos. Yes; and no. Here we’re about to present what it means when the arts crowd produces a form of blindness, a form of gluttony mooting nothing so much as a solitary player. Karin, in Saraband, with her high hopes, will be on a firing line—however small-town—(perhaps even smaller than the small-town depicted in our film today, the Helsingborg Swedish Orchestra).

With the exception of a rush to ascertain how his wife had died in the explosion of a kerosene stove (and the aftermath of being left with his twin toddlers), the action is a flashback of their marriage—scenes from their marriage, remarkably unlike the 1973 film—having, however, some similar form, though, in the reverie of Face to Face (1976). That the husband during the initial shock saw fit to smash his head into a table, could be an ironic bid to strike a match, a match unable to catch benign fire. Cut to a symphonic orchestra in rehearsal, by way of the pizzazz of a pair of hands, in close-up, touching the strings of a harp. (Such a flourish seeming a point of anything goes.) The aged conductor strikes a chord of hopefulness. “We’re beginning a new season. I think it’ll be good.” Then he extends a welcome to the two new and young members of a group nearly all being long in the tooth. “This is Stig Ericsson… Then we have a woman in the orchestra. It’s sort of silly and totally against nature but she’s reasonably talented. She’s right there, if you haven’t noticed. Not only does this welcome dispense with her name; but it ushers in a spate of communication, verbal and nonverbal, startling in its aggressiveness. (This is not about an ancient crudity; Marta, the unmentionable, is perfectly cheery in being spoken as a nonentity. The music is deadly serious. The rest of their life is something else.)

Of course women artists have had to face such contempt until very recently; but the overtness of the patter coming to bear here suggests toleration of violence as a special intuition of a cadre of the select. The conductor adds his baton as if a sword, when pointing her out. (Not to forget that the thrust packed some validity, but of a weak volume.) As the rehearsal gets into gear, there are close-ups and pan shots along the various sections (the newcomers being violinists, Stig being part of the first section, Marta in the second fiddles), revealing the mechanisms of the forces. And, therewith, we are apprised of the deep background able to muster at a flash. Clever, athletic and emotionally sensitive, without a doubt. But there is a vast bridge to cross between the effective and the wise. “Give it all you’ve got!” the conductor shouts. That being more a question than an order. And so, it comes to, “Well, you sounded awful today, but that’s to be expected…” (Expected because it was the first rehearsal? Or expected because the players are second-rate? He goes on, “Cortot [a touring soloist] is coming on Thursday. Then we’ll have some music!” He rushes past them as if they were carrying a plague. And yet the insult doesn’t stick. Superstar or the boonies—they have all they really want, the drug of the notes, like angels. Our helmsman, despite so brilliantly embarrassing, in his ironical dramas, those unable to control the drugs of pedantry and advantage, was far from immune from that failing in himself. This film being, a true one-off.)

    A spine running through this narrative might clarify that common and yet complex problem. “Just what did you do over the Christmas break? In this blasted town where people just drink and eat… You blobs…” One of the cello players replies, “This is a difficult part.” (Rather than extend the work, those blessed already tend to rest on their laurels.) The conductor ripostes, “Not for someone with talent. But some people are lazy bones and blockheads.” The Leader has settled like his herd, except demanding more of the same. Here, though, the whole discipline is in question. On to, “I can’t listen to any more of this frightful screeching…” At a slightly different point of view, the conductor, happy to accompany Marta and Stig to their wedding at City Hall, as their witness (but having forgotten the date), shows us the lack of attention of this, and myriad other endeavors. “I should probably apply for my pension and retire… We’ll just have to call the mayor and postpone it.” Stig’s position is, “It sometimes seems like a concentration camp.” (Flinging around insults that fail to attain any cogency, because the forces of sensibility are perpetually numb, beyond their musical playground.) The retiree lobs back, “What impudence! We’ll rehearse all day!”/ “Without Marta and me.”/ “Then you can leave my orchestra.”/ To which, the forever boy, declares, “We make your orchestra!” (Marta responds in shock from the boy’s stupidity. Were she not numb herself, the wedding would never happen.) The conductor finds this register to be apt: “You weren’t given the strap as a child. And you’re turning into a child again. Go to hell!” The boy settles for, “No, I don’t want to be where you are…” On and on, the skimpy example adds, “You’re ungrateful and inconsiderate. I could have a heart attack and die.”/ “Good riddance,” the effete junkyard dog yells. The so-called mentor rounds out this powwow, with, “This is what comes from letting women into orchestras.” And a cut finds the three, on another day, the picture of wedding hopes. Needing a soloist due to a no-show from an abrupt retirement, the one supposedly making the orchestra valid, bulls his way to taking over, and then being exposed as incapable with the topspin rigors of major intensity. (In the run-up to this supposed coup he tells Marta, “The sky’s the limit now… Maybe I’ll go all the way to Stockholm.” His humiliation—an early form of significant crisis in the Bergman surgery—pertains to that singularity about overinvolved artists. Not surprisingly, he reaches into his vast cheapness there, blaming the conductor for the fiasco. “Goddamned bastard! Now he’s happy, of course!” One of the few other artists not old, mocks, “That was better than I expected!” In another explosion, he yells, “Goddamn bastard! I’m simply mediocre!” As the shattering timbre flares futilely, bombing Stig, matters swing over to the embarrassing morning paper. (“You must be happy now, you and Sonderby. Just think how everyone will laugh?”). But there is Marta, counselling, “Shall I console you and say it’ll be better next time?” Or, that default move, instilled long ago, in her and his training: “I can go to rehearsal at 10:00, sit in my usual place and do my job…” (His response: “That shows how little you understand.” Only if Stig vaguely attempts to crash the precious ceiling, does he avoid being road kill.) On a day, some years later, when the couple and the conductor are at a farm house Stig and Marta own, Sonderby reiterates to Stig, “Give up the idea of being a soloist. Settle for being a good orchestral player. [Otherwise it’s] pride, pure and simple…” He’s met with, “Just because you’re an old failure, doesn’t mean I have to be.” Then that horrific tolerance clicks in, and somehow the “friend” quietly replies, “The world needs second-raters too. No worker bees, no honey.” Stig concludes with, “It’s awful hearing you talk. Like listening to the already deceased.”

Moving within that other area of workaday deceased, there are not only faux pas but massacre. The two new recruits at that first rehearsal are well-known to each other from their academy days (not from a conservatory). A perky Marta tells him that that past summer she was “abroad” with her brother, “and heard lots of music.” A morose Stig, looking to the floor, refers to a pop review, way below his skills. She bribes him, with a healthy amount of money, to come to her birthday party that night. (And the reference of gaining maturity anticipates her not shabby effort. In Stig, of course, we have the dangers of thinking that being a passable violinist is all that the cosmos could possibly throw at you. Ill at ease, he quickly gets drunk and begins to tell us what else he does. Marta had demanded a gift from out of her munificence. His baby polar bear doll is a hit. During the visit coinciding with Marta’s death, the bear has turned his back on Stig.) He yells out, “I’m magnificent when I’m onstage. Have you heard me play the violin? The big-name players are all charlatans. I’ll show you bastards what a violin is all about! I’ll tell you the secret of real art. It’s created when you’re unhappy. I prefer being unhappy. God knows it’s the state I usually find myself in.” The “state” is such that he turns upon his own chosen hobbyhorse of pedantic advantage. “And I say take it all away! It’s worth nothing. I’ll die and come back to life, and then you’ll hear real violin playing! Because it all comes down to humility!” (He smashes a glass to emphasize… He falls over…) Marta asks, “Are you OK?” And he tells her, “Go to hell!” She calmly tells him, “You’re making a fool of yourself.” She’s calm, because she has a history, from the academy, where his radical disarray made some sense to her. “I can’t figure out who I am… Why can’t I act like a respectable person, with my talent… A person might act crazy and stupid at times. What’s important is that he aspires to be a real person and artist.” But as these performers know, there is an obligation to deliver. Stig presses her to agree. “Yes, I do,” she eventually concurs, knowing, though, that there is much more to it. Bergman, right as rain, places the toy baby polar bear into the mix as an instance of aspiration—exactly childish, soft and so wrong.

Marta, already having been a quick wife and a quick divorcee, sets her sights on what the academy doesn’t know. An afternoon by the sea and its imposing flat rocks (flat), seems apt to be the site of her next incursion of escape from the lovely wrong. “Sonderby is nice. He’s done good things.” Stig is in a mood for only what increases his career. “I’d like to start a brilliant string quartet and tour the world. I’d be the best.” Her wry response, “Of course…”/ “I don’t like this odd grin on your face,” he challenges./ “Just being friendly,” is her argument, an argument aimed toward matrimony. He asks, “What about you? What do you want?”/ “Nothing… I’d like to bury myself so deep that nothing got to me.” The preamble here has allowed us to understand that her focus is disinterestedness. Out of a supposed ordinary outlook, she can’t conceal a force possibly upsetting all the advantages having been placed by an affluent family. That moves Stig to wonder that she sets her objectives to be so meagre. “But you’re not unhappy.” Her response—“Some people have an unnaturally happy air”—constitutes for her more a frightening conundrum than a haven. (“A happy air,” being a glimpse of forces transcending arts-smarts and all the nicety our planet presents as an acme.) He maintains that, “I know nothing about you;” and she maintains, “Perhaps that’s best for both of us.” Before mentioning that reckless marriage, she has declared, “What better than reckless could be? You’ve wanted to sleep with me, but I haven’t let you. If I did, would you care for me a little then? Be honest.” He tells her, “I have to think about it,” which for someone like her, having thought deeply—in lonely contemplation—would mean, “No, no, no, no!” (The era is the fifties; it’s also the lair of the Millennials.) But his molten self-esteem and freezing distemper imagine for Marta a study worth studying. Stig typically gets around to, “I know exactly what you’re asking. You want some assurance that I love you. Otherwise, you’ll have moral pangs.” There was difficulty reaching Stig about Marta’s death because he was with his mistress during Marta and the children’s summer vacation. The outpouring, of good-will, seen at a rehearsal in the aftermath of the tragedy and Stig’s having a shot at appearing to be a model dad, question what kind of life (air) there could be without Marta’s latter-days-tolerance. Would he have adjusted, somewhat, in his being an insensate coward, even before the death, with its flattening bourgeois dullness? This would not be about a calamity, but the appetite for looking afield for discovery while within amplified selves our adventure belongs.

Stig and Marta, like so many others, have very early in life burned their bridges. Of course ranges of  understanding can be developed while clinging to a lodestone. But free discovery, tracing beyond a trusty rationality, might still benefit from the tribulations of Stig and Marta. During that heart-to-heart on the shore, which produces their onset of living together, she tells him, “But we can promise to be honest. That’s absolutely necessary.” Sometime later, Marta announces that she’s pregnant. “You don’t seem too enthusiastic. Well you don’t have to be.”/ “How did it happen?” the supposed deliverer of love, questions./ “In the usual way” [screwball Hollywood, and its “charm]./ “Don’t be funny,” he glares./ “Dumb questions get dumb answers.”/ “Have you known long?”/ “Almost three months. Hit me if you want.”/ “Why didn’t you say anything?”/ “Because I want this child. Understood?” The understanding welling out, exposing that passion for “honesty”—is so like the elected and their play of notes given by a composer. Marta can cut corners with impunity. Stig doesn’t even recognize a constituency of coherence, beyond the writings of his repertoire. “Children come, want them or not,” Marta now embraces. His position is, “If you’ve had one abortion, you can have another.” (Anticipating the progress in Bergman’s Brink of Life [1958].) “How do I know it’s mine?” comes next, and garners a slap in his face. “Besides, there’s no room… All the crying and chaos. Where will I rehearse? Thanks so much…” Although, after lacerating distemper on Stig’s part, the baby is a go, it’s with a go with only one parent involved. (One of Marta’s only remarks within the war, is, “I’d like you to act like a man for once.”) Whereas Marta had begun to practice “burying herself so deep,” while recognizing a sense of disinterestedness (coinciding within her retirement from the orchestra, and madly going through with the once-postponed wedding—the mayor pronouncing, “May harmony and happiness reign;” and also pronouncing, “Never forget the promise of fidelity you have made)—Stig, in the aftermath of his fiasco onstage, enters the precinct of that flimsily hidden father and daughter incestuous prostitute business. Cut to a frozen window and Marta’s having few delusions about affectionate warmth. (At that first thrust about “honesty,” she also declares, “I’ve faked my way through almost everything in my life.” Meaning that her aesthetic skills carry an ironic disease.)

Three years later, of life with twins, Sonderby is visiting Marta and Stig at the farm house which she has found to be best for her bid to transcend the dubiousness of “serious art” and “serious artists.”  Resting in the grass and sun, the confirmed harmonizer, perhaps with concerns he’d never admit, speaks quietly to us, as the children play and the parents rest. “I’m glad I’m not a writer. If I were to take it upon myself to portray Stig and Marta, from when we first met four years ago, what a dishonest and incomplete picture I would paint. For example, I’ll never forget the episode last winter when I stopped by to drop off a score for Stig. The doorbell was broken so I walked in and peered into the living room. He saw Stig keeling on the floor being supported by Marta. How can I describe the way they held each other? So boundlessly tender, but with a profound, exotic sensitivity. But why was there so much loneliness and childish fear in their stillness. Holding her. I went out again and knocked on the door. When Marta came to the door, it was all still there in her eyes… Yes, she’s a remarkable little woman… Citing another moment, so devoid of vigor, they’d quarreled. I picked up on it right away. It hung in the air. Marta was a little quiet. She had huddled on the sofa and looked at Stig. He talked to me the whole time, but it was just nervous chatter. He got up for the cognac, but on the way back he passed Marta. He clung to the sofa, they looked at one other, and Stig suddenly said, ‘Hey, little girl.’ Formulaic smiles to each other. That seemed to break the spell, because the strained atmosphere vanished like a puff of wind over the open sea. I didn’t know why. I can’t tell you. Imagine trying to decipher a complicated secret language.” (There is, of course, a long trail in Bergman films, concerning, “sharing the same language.” But the dilemma here puts to shame the standard conformity and its mischief. That the two lovers developed and spoke unhidden, to conceal their most secret and fragile emotions…) “Depicting a single day in their lives would fill many shelves with large volumes… Thank God that’s not my job. I have only to reproduce what the great composers created in truth and spirit… That’s my pleasure and no one can take it from me.” At this stage of Marta’s being preoccupied with the twins, she is almost satisfied with no longer being “burying myself so deep;” but instead declaring, “I’m a very rich woman. I have you and the kids and old Sonderby snoring over there… Nothing to sweep me off my feet. But I deserve a spanking for such a horrible thought, don’t I?” Then there was Stig, maintaining, “I think it’s to your credit. Nowhere is it written that a person should be content, much less happy.” (This gushing, on the part of the man and his pleasure that no one can take from him [grossly overrating the miasma of the poisonously educated protagonists], constitutes a pivot of major import, whereby to reveal the casual physical viciousness bringing along with inept art and inept courage.)

Stig’s candid misery has a night when Nelly, the baby doll, polishes his fingernails. After the loss of Marta, he finds more subtle currents to hate himself. Expanding on that faux dignity on the day when Marta’s death was announced, we’ll touch the staging and its powerfully ironical moment. The sentimental conductor is on the podium. An army of choristers and the full orchestra are shooting for the skies with Beethoven’s “To Joy.” (Sonderby tries to rally the troops with this explication: “It’s about joy, you see. Not the joy expressed in laughter… or the joy that says, I’m happy. What I mean is a joy so special that it lies beyond pain and boundless despair. It’s a joy beyond all understanding. I can’t explain it any better.” [Here the preceding admission that writing’s range surpasses that of music, might have a role to play.])  Stig, having intoned, “It’s better to keep working ,” is at his post and the heavens seem to be focused upon his pathos, leaning to bathos. (At a much earlier rehearsal for another composition, Nelly had showed up, and Stig complained, “I said not to come here. Our relationship is nothing to advertise.” He had said, “I wish I could leave you, but I just can’t seem to.”) Now, it’s the little boy, having been off limits when the explosion happened, who sits at the same first-row seat that Nelly had occupied, long before. Here the dad smiles often to the boy, during the current rehearsal, as befits a silent martyr. Is he? His history says no, emphatically. The creation of Marta’s bid to break away from the academy was mediocre, but handicapped by a crazed Stig, even more mediocre. (The blazing last moments of bathos in the work stands as a secretive injury. Similarly, the predations of Stig and the countering of Marta are close to soap opera.  But the frequent topspins of Marta’s nightmare and very infrequent topspins of Stig’s nightmare, count for [ragged, tone deaf] actions of modernity.) (“Nelly’s better at nurturing your misunderstood genius. Can’t be easy for the poor girl.” With that, he smashes her face in a frenzy of blood and dead end. “The last part was my fault,” she says. “I’m to blame. But I won’t forget the rest.”)

Even more shocking than those plunges, are their sense of accomplishment. He tells her and us, “I know what the problem is. We both think life has passed us by. We’ve both been struck by a moment of clarity, and with clarity comes disgust. It’s a natural consequence.” In response, Marta finds recovery just around the corner. “We’ve argued and been nasty to each other, but we just had to reach out, and it was fine again. It was a great sense of security.” (“Security” will soon loom, in the form of Bergman films about Anna, an instance of butchery.) Stig argues, “Now we’ve discovered there’s no such thing as security.” Marta maintains, “Remember what you said here our first night together. The main thing is to become a real person.” He scowls, “We said a lot of things back then.” She insists, “It was the truth.”/ “It was all lies,” is his understanding. He then resuscitates his pedantic mania about becoming a soloist supreme. “That morning I came home [after visiting Nelly] with my hand cut, that’s where my clarity began. It was so unbearable that I put my hand through a window so I’d  give up my dream of being a soloist. I stood there with a bloody hand and thought how stupid I was. Why doesn’t someone laugh at this second-rate musician who won’t accept his mediocrity…” [who can’t discern a field of effort beyond showing off, beyond advantage]. She has a valid come-back—”Me, me, me. Can’t you hear how pitiful you sound?” (Compare the view of Mikael, the Sugar Daddy (he, of “I know it myself… The great silence,”), who follows the lead of a philosopher. “Everything is part of what is called, ‘spiritual science.’ This may include the self, society, state, morals or religion. It’s all just an intellectual game.” (In Bergman’s Saraband, Johan, the cynic, reads the philosopher, Kierkegaard.) Nelly will revel in Michael’s having a deadly stroke. He pens a last statement of apology, but he avoids the blockbuster, left to us to see the writing on the wall.

There is a moment, in Nelly and Stig’s not very impressive kick at the can, when first they meet, being symbolic to the point of much clever ardor and no perseverance. He tells her, “I hoped to catch the moon in a net; but just as I was going to pull it up, it sank deep below me.”

 

 

 

Advertisement