Bergmans instead of “Batmen” – Newspaper Kommersant No. 167 (7368) of 09/10/2022

The film company “Russian Reporter” has released four films by Ingmar Bergman – not just one of the most important directors in the world, but a great artist and thinker, one of those who defined the very image of the twentieth century. Russian viewers can see on the big screen Through the Dark Glass (Sasom i en spegel, 1961), Silence (Tystnaden, 1963), Whispers and Cries (Viskningar och rop, 1972) and Autumn Sonata (Hostsonaten, 1978). Sincerely rejoicing at the release, Mikhail Trofimenkov could not resist asking a few bitter questions.

The rental of Bergman’s masterpieces is a triumph for a lonely and unpopular rental concept that I have defended for many years. Conditional “globalists” argued that Hollywood rules the show in the domestic box office because this is the will of the people: demand determines supply. Well, no one will watch all these your Antonionis, Bergmans and Sokurovs for nothing. Crowded halls at repeated premieres of just “all of these”, organized primarily by the Other Cinema company, testified to the opposite. St. Petersburg’s Aurora had to put on extra, almost overnight screenings of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: so many people aspired to the black-and-white, frilly, baroque masterpiece of 1941. But the “globalists” shrugged their shoulders. Yes, in Moscow and St. Petersburg there are several thousand perverts, fans of Godard’s “Mad Pierrot” or Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”, but people are against it.

It always seemed to me that demand does not determine supply, but supply determines demand. And if, instead of the numbered “Spider-Man” or “Kung Fu Pandas”, Dovzhenko and Kurosawa are shown around the clock, the souls of the audience will demand more and more: some Yasujiro Ozu or Satyajitov Raev.

This dispute remained a pure abstraction, neither side could prove its case. The Batmans are now being replaced by the Bergmans at the box office. In a sense, this twist of rental politics revives or mimics the Soviet practice of mass “culture enforcement.” This is, roughly speaking, when the lecturers of the Knowledge Society read lectures on Gothic and Impressionism at the Baku oil fields, Donetsk mines and even in the polar colonies. And at the monthly weeks of foreign cinemas, which rolled through all the main cities of the USSR, one could see brand new Fassbinders or Truffauts.

But then people were not familiar with all sorts of different “Marvels” and sincerely believed that it was possible to build communism only by mastering all the treasures of world culture. Whether this policy will work in relation to post-Soviet viewers is a big, big question. Would anyone go for Bergman in the absence of comic book gum? But even if the adventure fails, as Andrei Voznesensky wrote, thanks for the attempt.

Another question – not of a commercial-political, but of a purely aesthetic nature – concerns the choice of films for Bergman’s release. All four are masterpieces, but terrible masterpieces.

In all films, relations between relatives are painfully decomposed. She is drowning in schizophrenia and an incestuous relationship with her brother Karin (“Through the Dark Glass”): in this very “Dostoevsky” film by Bergman the God-fighter, God seems to her like a nightmarish spider. In an unknown city of an unknown country inhabited by dwarfs, tanks and lustful waiters, two sisters are chewing on mutual disgust (“Silence”). Two more sisters (“Whispers and Cries”) are amazingly soulless in relation to the dying third: only the maid who lost her son remains a ray in the dark kingdom. Finally, the long-awaited meeting between the mother (the only time Ingmar was played by his great namesake Ingrid Bergman) and her daughter ends in hysteria. A family tragedy in every film is invariably accompanied by the theme of an incurable disease, oncological or mental.

So the choice of films ideally coincides with the official Soviet interpretation of Bergman as a director of despair, darkness, hopelessness and personality breakdown. Damn existentialist, in short: in the 1960s, the word was almost an obscene expletive.

At the same time, all his films, not counting the Strawberry Glade and the same Autumn Sonata that broke through, could be seen in the cinemas of the State Film Fund. And even in those epic times, even Soviet viewers could understand that the real Bergman does not at all coincide with Bergman in his official interpretation. That he can be a light, frivolous, frivolous comedian (“Smiles of a Summer Night”, 1955; “About All These Women”, 1964). That even the darkest in texture The Seventh Seal (1957) is a plague, a witch hunt is a hymn to life, and not a dance of death. And following the gloomiest, “Soviet” Bergman, I would very much like to see a joyful Bergman at the box office.