Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema

Introduction. Ingmar Bergman and the Foreign Self

1 Originally published in a fairly mainstream magazine , Film Comment, the late Robin Wood’s “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic” justly became a cornerstone text of early GLBT (gay, lesbian , bisexual, and transgendered) cinema studies.1 It continues to merit attention and respect within the field, despite several paradigm shifts that have seen the emerging discipline challenged (some would say eclipsed) by the distinctly different work begun by queer theorists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Arguing for the value of what scholars contributing to the latter discourse would define as a queer perspective on the cinema while advocating films with little or no overt homosexual content, from Rules of the Game (1939) to Rio Bravo (1959), Wood’s seemingly modest essay anticipated a still-growing body of work that collapses disciplinary distinctions between aesthetic analysis and political criticism. More importantly, it pointed the way, along with more psychoanalytically oriented work by second-wave feminist critics, toward rich and historicized understandings of cinematic specIf I were to rewrite my early books now, the one on Bergman (published in 1969) would certainly cause me the greatest problems. Robin Wood, “Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic” (1978) Introduction Ingmar Bergman and the Foreign Self 2 Queer Bergman tatorship as mediated by profound (and profoundly complex) perspectives connected with gender and sexuality. Perhaps most importantly for this book, Wood’s article stands, more than thirty years after its appearance , as one of film studies’ only well-known essays to offer a direct statement connecting the idea of a specifically homosexual perspective with the films of Ingmar Bergman: arguably the paradigmatic figure in the history of mid-twentieth-century European art cinema.2 Coming after a number of impassioned feminist indictments of Bergman ’s work, including Constance Penley’s essay on Cries and Whispers (1972), which characterizes the author’s experience of seeing the film as no less than “one of being emotionally and psychically raped,” Wood’s own postliberation assessment of the Swedish director is far less ferociously condemnatory—understandably so, considering Wood’s almost hagiographic earlier writings on the filmmaker.3 Nevertheless, Wood’s newly radicalized reappraisal of the auteur was only slightly less critical than Penley’s analysis. Pathologizing aspects of Bergman’s work that auteur critics (including Wood) had essentially celebrated a decade earlier —as expressions of selfhood across a body of work—he now considered the “obstinate recurrence of certain narrative and relationship structures in Bergman’s work” to be “plainly neurotic”: “What the films repeatedly assert, with impressive intensity and conviction, is that life under the conditions in which it is lived is intolerable.”4 With some justification and, more importantly, some illuminating power, Wood employs the concept of neurosis to highlight a characteristic attribute of the narrative structure that Bergman used in many of his films, particularly those made from the early 1960s onward. Rather than concluding his cinematic visions of nearly intolerable human suffering with a psychologically healthy (and, presumably, politically efficacious ) assertion that “‘we must strive to change the conditions [behind this suffering],’” Bergman ended his films, according to Wood, with a “shutter com[ing] down,” implying that “‘the [intolerable] conditions are something called “the human predicament”: they can’t be changed.’” Offered as an example of “that central principle of neurosis ,” specifically, a manifestation of “resistance wherein the neurosis defends itself against cure,” Wood’s metaphor of a “shutter com[ing] down” was, and indeed remains, an apt description of the sudden endings of a number of the most emotionally charged films the Swedish director produced throughout the 1960s and 1970s.5 Exemplifying a utopian radical’s optimism, Wood can certainly be forgiven for what later readers might consider a form of political naiveté in his implication that hopefully expressed, politically prescriptive ep- 3 Ingmar Bergman and the Foreign Self ilogues might actually have given middle-period Bergman films such as Winter Light (1963), The Silence (1963), Persona (1966), Shame (1968), or The Passion of Anna (1969) some kind of revolutionary use-value. Indeed , something close to such a hopeful, prescriptive dénouement can be found at the end of the director’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961), when—after the young schizophrenic Karin has suffered two days of emotional and (arguably) sexual abuse while in the care of her husband , father, and brother—a redemptive reconciliation between her father and brother appears as little more than a failure of...