"If the whole world is a theater, then you need to play."
Prelude. What thought and what felt Ingmar Bergman, awakened by the ringing of the alarm clock in the early morning of November 1, 1997, the day when, after almost a twelve-year break, the great master was to present his new creation to the public. Perhaps there is nothing more strange and mysterious in life than this moment of awakening, when the mind rushes to collect and quickly glue together the fragments of our own self, scattered in the realm of Morpheus. What kind of “I” did Bergman have to collect and how much effort did it cost him? Surely every morning he desperately and strained himself as if in an old, worn-out suit, thinking: “Well, there I am – an eighty-year-old old man, “a great intellectual of the twentieth century”, “an artist of the level of Shakespeare”, “the flagship of the world film industry”, “the last of the titans of the spirit” ... three times a night running to pee. Oh, my God, what a circus! Nobody knows me, including me! How tired I am... And why do we have to play these roles, where does the energy come from to drag this cart loaded with shit to nowhere? What a colossal, amazing and brilliant deception is called life. I am a prophet, a spiritual teacher, and a supporter to millions of people...If they knew how pathetic I am at night! What despair and fear squeeze my breath with icy fingers. As I cry, I try to pray, but I realize that I am addressing emptiness. Take all your honors and the whole island of Fore to boot! But give me one more day. Yes, when I work, there is no death, and the universal horror of being timidly watches, as if fascinated by what is happening ... But OK, stop lying like a pile of bones, for this I will have eternity. We need to finish that scene from Sarabanda and call Erland before we go to these lost souls, more alone than I am, but not aware of it. What is their limitless happiness? After that, Mr. Bergman slowly rose, shaved, washed, and went out into life with his head held high.
" It all ends like a bell,
On a poor theatrical stage
The dranka up carries my longing -
Delicious purple lilacs...
I despised your art.
What else can I compare my life to, say,
If someone played my role,
On the turn of fateful events?
Where are you, my lucky double?
You must have taken me with you.
Because there's a stranger here.
He quarrels at the mirror with fate. A. Tarkovsky "Actor" (1958)
Act 1. Life is theater. In the yard the year 1920 by R. H. Already an elderly engineer-inventor Ockerbloom recognizes in the professor of philosophy Oswald Vogler native soul. Both literally ooze with enthusiasm, scatter crazy ideas and fantastic plans, their thirst for life crosses every conceivable and unthinkable boundaries, and the imagination now and then carries new friends away from the shores of shaky reality. That is why their meeting place is a psychiatric hospital. It is here that the double-magnified power of their mad fantasies gives birth to the idea of the best representation in history - the idea of the life of Franz Schubert, standing on the verge of death, rotting alive from syphilis in a poor room somewhere on the edge of the world. Oh, how many contradictions in the soul of this "holy libertine" Fogler and Ockerbloom clearly see! Should I describe it? You have to see it!
Act 2. Death. However, not all the time Okkerbloom burns fire enthusiasm. Often, especially at night, a dead pale clown appears to him, laughing at both his plans and his very being, disappearing drop by drop in the void. His laughter deafens, captivates and disarms poor Ockerbloom, penetrating through and breaking straight into consciousness. Fear immediately paralyzes him. He feels a colossal, cosmic loneliness of which there is no one to tell, because all words are dead. And people, too. You can get rid of this feeling only in one way that works flawlessly. The exit is close, one step away. Does it make sense to call death if it is already here?
Act 3. Theatre is life! However, in the morning, Ockerbloom gathers with strength, and enlisting the support of Mr. Fogler and his wife, who forgave him even an attempt on his own life, to hurry to realize his dreams. Some time later, somewhere in the backwater theater, there is already a super-saving performance, which is attended by only eleven people. But what these people will experience in the next few hours is beyond words. The mundaneness that engulfed them turns out to be unarmed before absolute art - many of them felt like living beings for the first time. Let this poor scene with scanty scenery come to light for the first and last time, but it changed the fate of people, opened their eyes and inspired their souls. But why is Ockerbloom always looking at the curtain? Oh, it's still the same old friend of death, dressed up as a clown, carefully watching the performance from behind the scenes. But now she no longer laughs, and in her eyes she reads surprise before the strength and power of the creative spirit. As long as Ockerbloom plays, she's powerless. And now the white figure hides in the shadows for the last time flashing his black as night smile as if saying "to see you." Ockerbloom again turns to the audience and returns to the role, not knowing if he will live until dawn. Curtain.
Without a doubt, this is one of Bergman’s best, most heartfelt, deepest and craziest films. His favorite themes of death and theater organically merge into a certain higher unity, fully representing a kind of “system of being according to Bergman”. What is it about? The human world is a living embodiment of self-contradiction. We are surrounded by endless chaos and absurdity, all communication with the “others” is cut off, for each is hermetically locked in his fate, and the mere thought of death poisons even the happiest life. According to Bergman, this can only be counteracted through “play” and “self-giving.” Resistance to fate, the elements and death lies in the creative potential of man, which originates in freedom, primarily freedom of imagination. Well, theatrical performance according to Bergman is something sacred, the sacrament is akin to communion. The act of renouncing the false persona, the exposure of pure existence, the introduction to being – all this is accompanied by a real representation. And in this film, Bergman managed to show the viewer exactly this lively theatricality of his best years. It is impossible to convey in words how realistic and vitally saturated the scene of the entreprise looks in the second part of the film - not only the fourth walls and all the boundaries between the artist and the viewer break down, but the barriers of life and death itself, time and space. Stunning as in three sets, with two aged actors filmed on television, you can find a radiant and striking truth with its beauty. Eighty-year-old Bergman has shown he's really the best. What else can I say about this movie? Words run out. All that remains is pure surprise. Endless admiration. Joy.
Turn on the light. I don’t want to go home in the dark. – O. Henry
Ingmar Bergman's In the Presence of a Clown is an absurd pact with the death of inventor Carl Okerbloom and his fiancée Pauline Tibault, and it is a contract with the mind of their friend Oswald Vogler, who tried in vain to cover up spiritual poverty and the existential horror of realizing a meaninglessly lived life with a done madness. This is a film about a failed deal with the emptiness that we all make from time to time, turning into an irresistible panic nightmare of loneliness of dying, when, like Oscar Wilde, there is only one thing left to joke about their inner clowns: My wallpaper and I fight a duel to the death. One of us has to go..., and people turn into no more than pricks, noisy on the vestibule, forgetting that sooner or later it becomes any "bridge", where life is mixed with its own false games.
After all, you yourself will never forget the picture on the wallpaper, which will once become stronger than you and will become an indifferent witness to how life energy will drop out of you, and your hopes will be cut short, as blood and breath will freeze, and your hands will become wooden, and you will not be able to win by force of will irreparable.
If in “Persona” or “Whispers and Screams” Bergman has a vague hope for catharsis, then here the director conveys a state that balances on the verge of panicking horror before non-existence and non-existence itself, and the viewer is kept in continuous tension, slipping into his personal existential hell, watching these bifurcation points, in which the characters fight, then dissolving in the absurdity of the narrative, then resisting it, then getting involved in it.
Karl Okerblum and Paulina Tibault tried to give meaning to the circus surrounding people, creating their play-attractor about Schubert as the last hope for the orderliness of life. But they, like any person on Earth, are overtaken by tons of informational falsehoods – scraps of meaningless conversations, false masks, stupid phrases, attempts to give life a meaningful form, false poses, false drama – that very mockery of clowns living inside us, mixed with mocking us of real life. The main characters die in tragic loneliness, and unable to truly become close to each other, in a room flooded with morning sunlight, because they are no longer able to see him and therefore are not entitled to be forgiven by him.
When the balanced and always indifferent Ebenezer Scrooge shouts to a dead partner who has disturbed his damned loneliness on Christmas Night: Don’t you realize, Jacob, how unbearable all this is? But in the film “In the presence of the clown” Bergman does not awaken conscience and does not hope, and something inside the audience inevitably ends, and all the hidden nightmares break through, and there is no power over them.
Androgynous Clown Death for Carl Okerbloom in its absurdity is so strange that tormented other operetta villains countless times in the works on this topic that this idea of the director becomes especially convincing, and the effect of personal involvement in the narrative inevitably locks the viewer into the cage of his personal tragic conditioning.
How many deals in life do you have to make to get to the most important thing, an interview with death? How many illusory dramas do you take part in and dismiss as mind games? How many lives would it take for a circus and its clown to leave a man alone? And will you have the courage to challenge this mockery and obsession, if you are already 79, and you have to wear a mask of a master "like a person's face?" Donnie Darko answered this question at 16, but we do know that Bergman's hero was locked in his circle of the Immortals like Harry Haller in Hesse's "Steppe Wolf," and we know that intellectual moral responsibility tears the soul apart with an unbearable burden. And although his personal music of the spheres was not Mozart, but Schubert, not a martyr who died by the intervention of a man in black, but a sinner who dies of syphilis in tragic loneliness and from that in the torments of more powerful than the physical, we feel even more compassion for him, and are even more aware of our own impotence. Perhaps it is this compassion that makes Carl Ockerbloom “rise to the cross” for Schubert, “close his personal gestalts”, as has always been customary among people of conscience – but a film that begins with the phrase: What do you think Franz Schubert felt on Tuesday morning in April 1823? It snowed at night and the fireplace went out? - does not answer this question, and therefore the subsequent actions of the hero are doubly tragic, and the ability of the director to convey this makes him a truly outstanding artist.
... Why, dying, can not disappear not only from the face of the earth, but get rid of your name, title, from the memory of people, erase everything said, all imprinting and insight, all truth and all lies, because death promises eternal peace? Why does she come to you as a continuation of all the circus that has haunted you all your life, because it is unfair?
The boundaries within which a person confines himself are so deep that they are often perceived by him as the only reality. To begin to see them, you need to come out of all your old meanings, goals, habitual perception of yourself and the world, you need to die like a gospel seed. By losing our values, our protective models, without fear of becoming nothing, we come to a deeper understanding of ourselves. And only then he begins to throw away both his frames and the illusory surroundings. “What is the use of man to acquire the whole world at the cost of his own soul?” To take a wave in surfing, you must first rise to the same height within yourself. It is to go beyond your boundaries, die, become someone completely different and thereby find a new level of existence.
... And only Martha, trying to look into the soul of all the present and subsequent viewers, personifying the order of God in the film, tells us with sincere tears in her eyes: Are you complaining about the fact that you scream, and God is silent? You're saying you're locked up, and it's a life sentence? You are your own judge and jailer. Prisoner, leave your dungeon. And to your surprise, you'll find that no one is stopping you. Of course, the reality behind the prison walls is terrible, but no more than your desperation in the back of a locked room. Take the first step to freedom. It's easy. Step two is harder. But don't let your jailers beat you. Your jailers are just your fear and your vanity.
I have offended God and mankind because my creations have not reached the height to which I aspired.
Leonardo da Vinci
40 years, plus minus a few more, is the threshold of true maturity. The period of entry into the golden ratio, or the beginning of the most severe crisis of middle age. It is after reaching this bar that real creativity begins. And some, like Haneke at 40, are just getting started. Bergman’s first masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, was filmed when the director was “under forty.” But 4 years before that, a preamble was drawn up, so to speak, without which further creative development of the director would have been impossible.
We are talking about the film “Evening of jokes”, to the motives of which Bergman returned 44 years later in his perhaps most personal film “In the presence of a clown”, or “Figure making noise on the platforms”. In many ways, summing up the director’s quest, this work is also critical to understanding the major conflicts of his movie universe.
We can observe some semblance of rational deconstruction of the work.
The action, as well as in the “Evening of Jesters”, develops in the 20s. Bergman, somewhat simplifying the plot itself, consciously focuses on its symbolic scenery. The starting point of action becomes a madhouse, in which the vast majority of Bergman’s heroes would find a cozy haven. Karl Ockerlum of them is perhaps the most canonically pathological. The psychological state that accompanies him alone at the beginning of the film is the sensation of a man drowning in a swamp. In the presence of other people, he feels as if he is planted on a stake. All his life, Karl tried to direct his temperament to the invention of all sorts of practically useful trinkets. But the space of society for Bergman’s heroes is hidden behind a door, like the one from Alice in Wonderland – you can enter it only by shrinking to the size of an insect. Not getting a response to his socially useless activities, Karl periodically "almost kills" people. The last vacancy for the victim fell to his bride.
The situation is not fun. But it is in a psychiatric hospital that the hero is enlightened. The outside world is closed, there is nothing left but to focus on the inside. Still, drowning you can always extend a helping hand, which is the music of Schubert, opening the film, and gradually bringing to the forefront the image of the greatest composer. The hero plans to put the first sound film in history, based on the tragic death of Schubert and the story of the “holy prostitute”, a girl who committed suicide and on the autopsy recognized as a virgin. Thus, again, as in the Evening of the Jesters, Bergman, analyzing the high and the low, comes to the pri-elements that unite them. At the same time, both ideas prompt the hero - first a psychiatrist, then a friend.
The sound of the film should be brilliant idea to give the actors hiding behind the screen. The role of the prostitute immediately goes to his wife, Schubert takes on the role of Karl. The rest of the roles go to the allegedly alter ego of the hero, the eccentric old philosopher Vogler, a connoisseur of metaphysics. So, meet, the theater of one director, almost in full force. Almost because the most important element is invisible to the rest of the troupe is the clown woman, the “Circus Queen,” who appeared to Carl the night before her illumination. Here she is, Bergman’s muse, the director’s reincarnated collective image of the heroes of “Joster’s Evening”, largely owed its DNA to the clown Frost. And a muse like that, especially a man like Bergman, can't just follow -- he'll catch her up and rape her. The motive of penetration plays an important role in both films, but in In the presence of the clown it is also defloration. After himself, the clown leaves a strip of red in the air - the same thing that in all color films Bergman was the most important element of the palette. If Godard’s conceptualist red blood is just a visual solution, Bergman’s blood is sacred, his hands are always stained on the sacrificial altar.
As for Schubert, here you can recall one of the “Dreams of Kurosawa”, in which the young Akira, immersed in the canvas of Van Gogh, held a fruitful conversation with the artist himself. Thus, Schubert here is an unveiled prototype of inspiration and a role model in creativity from a historical context. Only brought from the subconscious into consciousness, which is quite common for a madman. In the same way, novice artists can now dream of talking to Bergman. And “In the presence of a clown” is, in fact, a conscious dream of Bergman, with weakened for the viewer the nuts of symbolic censorship.
The film is divided into three acts - in the hospital, then in the actor's homeland (a repetition of motifs from the "Evening of Jesters"), before the screening of the film. The final, climactic, is a change in meta-position and a declared rational deconstruction. The Bergman cinematography literally in front of the bewitched viewer loses its first layer by the hands of the master, dissecting it into details: the screening of the film turns into a performance. Increasingly personal, this film experience allows us to see through Bergman’s eyes the subtle and painful mechanisms of creation. This movie is about an act of creativity, but not in a collective sense, but in a very personal sense for Bergman. About his birth from a prisoner of psychological prison and before, again, ruthless self-sacrifice in front of the public. Stunningly symbolic exit from the movie screen. Creativity Bergman is in many ways delayed precisely by its uncompromising honesty, complete, often savage exposure of all the anatomical details of human nature and their subsequent scrupulous analysis.
One can admire the courage of the director, who actually performed surgery on his own open heart. But do not be too enticed – exhibitionism has always been a separate breadth on the neurosthenic maps of Bergman’s work. Inferring from parentheses the personal, sacred subtext of the creative act, the director simply declares that this is life for him. Being in stagnation, letting go of reins, he plunges into the Tartars, but the creative act elevates him, like Fausta, to invisible distances. So, rounding off his grand creative journey with this film, so symbolically echoing another, 44-year-old, Bergman does it for himself, marking his final "ascension," not in terms of death, but in terms of absolute self-realization. Such an exquisite and at the same time monumental gesture, perhaps, no one else succeeded. Let the rest of you watch, and the clown with you.
Ingmar Bergman is known as a gloomy and ascetic artist, whose talent was expressed in the inimitable ability to bring to the screen deeply personal experiences and searches, and sometimes painful, paranoid fantasies. Although it was the soreness that was especially characteristic of his paintings, as well as his nature, which required constantly throwing out all mental struggles and sufferings. It was she who threw a disgusting shadow on the bright gift of the artist, which sometimes completely eclipsed all the world and even at best left a strongly oppressive impression. It is difficult to say which of the director's paintings was the most personal, the most confessional, the most important for him. At least there are a few that claim a special place in his work. They can be called “family” paintings, because in them Bergman told about the people closest to him. These are “Scenes from Married Life” and “Fanny and Alexander.” And if in the first person the characters are veiled with actors’ faces and invented names, then in the second - these are almost exact prototypes of his family members. In the film “In the presence of a clown”, the director came as close as possible to the true biography of his characters. His mother, his grandmother and his uncle, Carl, are present. All of them are named after themselves, and each of them played an important role in Bergman’s childhood.
In his book Laterna Magica, he writes about his uncle: He was a large obese man with a high forehead, now and then anxiously wrinkled, with a bald spot in brown spots and the remains of rare curls on the back of the head. The hairy ears were burning. A large round stomach pressed on the frogs, glasses sweated from the moisture that protruded, hiding the kind, violet-colored eyes. Fat soft hands are squeezed between the knees. This passage is far from the brightest period of the life of Karl Ockerblum, which could not be called happy. According to the nephew, the uncle was an amazing man and a real inventor, gifted, but not recognized. The patent office only twice granted his requests, and there were hundreds, if not thousands. Carl was the most talented in his family, and once the younger brother out of envy hit “too smart” Carl's on the head with a hammer. He remained weak-minded for the rest of his life and was forced to be under the constant care of his stepmother, Bergman's grandmother. The director chose for his film only a small, but very significant for him excerpt from the life of his uncle. As a child, Uncle Carl often helped him perfect his “magic lantern”, which projected incredibly vivid pictures on the hung screen, from which it was impossible to take your eyes off. “In the presence of a clown” is the story of how Karl Okerblum came up with a brilliant and revolutionary idea about the world’s first sound film and how the desperate attempt to implement it ended.
From the outset, Bergman seems to be deliberately setting us up to think about the disappointing outcome of the whole story, placing Karl Oeckerblum in a psychiatric hospital. Where soon, by chance falls and Professor Vogler – another madman, who gives Carl the idea for the plot of the future film. Together with their devoted wives, the four of them decide to make a sound tape about Franz Schubert, who died in terrible poverty, and the young Countess Miza, his lover, sold from a young age to a rich nobleman and soon committed suicide. And Schubert's music has haunted Carl throughout history. The sounds of his melody, although beautiful and give a sense of harmony, are still dark and disturbing. From the very first shots, they seem to warn and at the same time confirm the painful tone of the situation and the hunch about the inevitable hopelessness of all good intentions. If you think about this idea, there is a lot of absurd, tragic and funny. A mad engineer, an infantilist, a fiancée desperately and thoughtlessly devoted to him, a mad old professor and his deaf-mute wife, ready to spend fabulous sums solely for the joy of her husband - these people are happy that they have found a common and important cause for all mankind, and the rest does not matter. For example, it does not matter that Countess Mice lived a hundred years later than Franz Schubert. It is so natural for art to show a little imagination, to merge something that could not exist together before, and through this unity to achieve harmony and try to give answers to old questions in a new and unusual way.
And the questions are all the same that Bergman has always been interested in: death, creativity, the search for God, the imperfection of earthly love and attachments to each other, doomed to endless lies, concessions and pain. If you try to put the meaning of this film in two words, it will be God and the Devil. There are two extremes, one of which gives light and the other tries to cast a shadow on it. Carl has a talent for noticing things in the world that people do not understand, do not know how to use them and how to make them serve for their own benefit. His gift is to invent, to create. This is his bright power, which turns a fat, clumsy, balding man into a bright personality, with eyes burning from enlightenment and understanding of beauty and truth, a beautiful and convinced orator, whom it is impossible not to listen to and love for those very eyes and his soft, submissive and defenseless disposition. But another force, to the ridicule of the first, distorts and perverts his nature. All natural kindness, friendliness and talent become rare enlightenments in the darkness of madness, lust, anger, lust for violence and murder. Such is Professor Vogler, whose attempts to meditate on grace, on angelic powers, and on sin characterize precisely his abnormality, in the light of which all lofty words become incoherent muttering. In ordinary life, a man is old, weak and lost, able only with the last strength to reach for the bottle.
Here clearly emerges the sinister image of the clown, placed by Bergman in the title of the film. This is a strange, disgusting creature of a dead pale color, having no age, no sex, no name. Only in the delirium and lust of Charles, it acquires female flesh and conditionally associated with her name. Clowns have always been contradictory creatures. They were designed to amuse and delight children, but often, on the contrary, only frightened and dreamed of them in nightmares. Similarly, here the clown appears to Carla at night, in the pale strip of moonlight, in the form of a nightmare, and over time continues to haunt him in reality. From the words of the director, it is clear that the night guest is death. But I think death is not in the literal, ancient sense, not the pale high face in the black hood of the Seventh Seal, but rather a spiritual, creative, crooked mirror, an evil spirit, a symbol of the distortion of all good intentions.
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