HOUR OF THE WOLF
The game lasted 89 moves. That’s long for chess, especially considering the opponent was that consummate international grandmaster Death.
Ingmar Bergman is dead. For those of us who grew up with him—went with eagerness to his new films when he was at the height of his powers—there is a bit of the feeling that comes when both one’s parents are dead. Now there is no one between. Now we are at the front. Now it is up to us, while we can.
Reading the obituaries, I kept thinking “BUT WHEN DID HE DIE?” Not just which date, but also, what time of day? That’s because one of the films I didn’t see mentioned, but which I did see when it came out in 1968, was “The Hour of the Wolf.”
“Vargtimmen,” it was titled in the original Swedish--“the hour between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful,” the film itself explained as it began. (“It’s also the time when the most children are born,” said a woman whose judgment I trust on such matters, since she has had four of them.) A contemporary poet has called it “the hour when blues songs/ and beginner short stories again and again/ seem to begin.”
Thank you, International Movie Database (www.imdb.com, a site that all serious movielovers should know). It goes on to summarize the plot, as much as there can be said to be one: “An artist in crisis is haunted by nightmares from the past in Ingmar Bergman's only horror film, which takes place on a windy island.” The Associated Press obituary observed that he died on July 30, 2007 “on an island off the coast of Sweden.”
“The director said he had coped with the authoritarian environment of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy. When he first saw a movie, he was greatly moved,” the obituary said.
It concluded, “But he said the escape into another world went so far that it took him years to tell reality from fantasy, and Bergman repeatedly described his life as a constant fight against demons, also reflected in his work.”
There is no more iconic image from Bergman’s work than the Dance of Death at the end of the Seventh Seal—though the Knight’s chess game with Death includes memorable images as well. The Plague has taken almost all the film’s personae, their strivings to escape now seen clearly as momentary throes. Hand linked to hand, they are pulled along in the path of the Reaper, their silhouettes glimpsed as they cross the top of a hill.
But they are witnessed by the survivors: the Actor and his wife, who live among the lowest of the society’s lowest, mere itinerant performing fools--the wide-eyed and visionary ones. Bergman is not the only one to see those who have given themselves to a life’s work in the arts as moving through the turmoil around them in some sort of state of grace. Fellini, in “8½,” portrays another whose handlers and sycophants constantly mistake or misuse his essential childlike simplicity. Thomas Wolfe’s story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” describes what must have been his own wanderings through streets that anyone in their right mind would have shunned as perilous, the experience-hungry young writer protected only by the scarcely credible improbability of his being there at all.
The original Whole Earth Catalog’s closing words, as the Sixties turned to the Seventies, were “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Few did. Bergman tried.
For me, his best epitaph would be the line in the International Movie Database notes on “Hour of the Wolf.” Under “Plot Synopsis,” it says “This plot synopsis is empty.”
“Add a synopsis,” it prompts. But who could, and why should they try? We are now part of any synopsis, the story includes our own stories, and demons of our own making abound. Death has moved, and on a planet where there are in the truest sense no more islands, we have no margin left for error.
Incubi, succubi, and writtenbi can be directed to [email protected]
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