‘Father’ in Bergman’s films and Strindberg’s ‘The Father’: a cursory survey

‘Father’ in Bergman’s films and Strindberg’s ‘The Father’: a cursory survey

Ingmar Bergman is said to have been accompanied by August Strindberg throughout his theatre career. Strindberg had also impressed, partly, upon Bergman’s philosophical outlook especially in his post-Inferno crisis period. His different films have many indications of this fact and amongst these is his handling of the character of the Father, which have recurred in his films in different overtones. It is a fact that his personal life did have a great implication in his approach to this character. And thus, some of his important films get an autobiographical touch. His own father was the Lutheran chaplain to the Swedish royal family, and he had forced the little Bergman into religion. We find that, he relates this fact through the pastor in his Winter Light who tells his mistress how he was forced by his father to become a preacher. Bergman, from his relations with different wives and mistresses, had fathered eight children, including a daughter who came to know about him being her father twenty-two years after she was born. We find the familial relationships, especially of the father with his offspring are the pivotal points in a number of his more significant films.  

On the other hand, Strindberg, whose autobiographical novel is named The Son of a Servant was a son of a serving-maid who followed Pietism, which is a part of Lutheranism. This had made him religious minded from his early childhood. But his childhood had witnessed religious fanaticism, too, apart from poverty and ‘emotional insecurity’. One wonders how similar had been the childhood upbringings of both the guru and the shishya. Though Strindberg’s recurrent theme had been to probe the husband and wife relationship, his portrayal of the father as a familial character in his The Father, finds an exceptional treatment. He portrays a couple who, in spite of a congenial relationship otherwise, constantly disagrees on their daughter’s future. The mother wants her to be home-educated and thus get to know the ideal Christian values. This is opposed by the father who is a freethinker and an intellectual. He has no qualms of his daughter exposed to atheism or, for that matter, any other faith. The wife in a desperate attempt to stop this patriarchal system, unscrupulously plan to drive her husband mad. She insinuates that he is not the girl’s father. A very intense psychological battle is designed by the playwright making the play a combination of psychology and Naturalism.

Incidentally, it is worth mentioning that, a very well adaptation of this play by Strindberg was staged by Ushneek, last year. Ishita Mukherjee, the director and playwright of the play entitled Babai, added a typical Bengali texture to the familial set-up, in addition to the distribution of space on the stage for the husband, wife and their daughter to depict their individual space in the conflict. Debshankar Haldar portraying the father, is an actor who knows the art of dissecting out a character to reveal its soul to the audience.   

Returning back to our discourse, it should be mentioned that Bergman was himself a bit too sensitive about the father’s portrayal on the stage. He writes to the Swedish novelist Axel Lundegard, who was asked to translate The Father into Danish, ‘… I suggest that the Captain’s role be given to an actor with an otherwise vigorous temperament who meets his fate in fairly good spirits, with the self-ironic, slightly skeptical tone of a man of the world. He is aware of his superiority but dies wrapping himself in those spider webs he cannot tear to pieces because of the law of nature.’ In a correspondence with the theatre director Harold Molander, Strindberg writes, ‘The plot is no crazier than Iago’s soul murder of Othello, and the question of paternity is here treated only a little more seriously than in The Maternity Room (the reference of which I am yet to come across, though the idea is well established), where it is depicted with the usual classical crudity.’    

The Father, elaborates on the ‘problem play’ tenets of Ibsen, especially on the moral dilemmas of the characters, but it moves further from Ibsen’s Naturalism to a ‘greater Naturalism’. This also is evident in the treatment of the central characters of Bergman’s Trilogy of Faith films. Strindberg believed that in The Father he had found a new style of writing which he termed ‘artistic-psychological’. We can also might term Bergman’s cinema-making ‘artistic-psychological’ as well. Strindberg used heavy dose of emotional elements in his building up of the events, which, in turn, shaped the characters and gave their specific tone and texture, and that is even reflected in their reciprocal dialogues. This is equally evident in Bergman’s play of the plots and the characters.

The psychological elements in Bergman’s films is the mainstay of his works. The themes that Bergman chose were certainly not very pleasant for joy-reading. They were sordid and some of them were once taboo to even mention in societal gatherings. The themes in Bergman’s films ranged from love and its negation, faith and the loss of it, marital relations that questions the very institution of marriage, inter-familial relationships, incest relationship, emotional isolations, or the irrationality of moral choice, or pointing at the absurdity of existence, questioning the father figure which also included, of course, beliefs, disbeliefs and doubts about God, and so on.   

Bergman had defined the three films of his Trilogy of Faith as films dealing with ‘reduction’. He used this term metaphysically to address the fundamental nature of reality. By this term he denoted a total replacement of the concept of God. The concept of the real presence of God (and the father) is reduced gradually in the three films. According to him, in Through a Glass Darkly certainty is achieved, that is, the schizophrenic daughter of the escapist non-communicative father has no doubts that God appears as a monstrous spider and the father has no communication with his children. In Winter Light certainty is exposed, that is the pastor himself expresses his doubts about God. In The Silence, by which he meant God’s silence, it is the negative impression, where a mother and an aunt are present while there is no father.

It is interesting to note that, in the film The Sacrifice by Andrei Tarkovsky the central character called Alexander bargains with God. Incidentally, Tarkovsky was a follower of Bergman (and also of Akira Kurosawa), and the making of the film is so very Bergman-like (with the Kurosawa-like slow camera movements).

As I had mentioned in my earlier blog that mysticism and different metaphors used by the playwright have found their places in Bergman’s films. The power of observing supernatural phenomena and clairvoyance, are abundant in his films.

Bergman’s handling of God, religion, faith etc., was a natural outcome of his personal growing up. On the other hand, we find Strindberg writing to Georg Brandes, the Danish literary critic who had appreciated The Father, ‘I regard Christianity as a regression, [-] because it is contrary to our evolution, which seeks to protect the strong against the weak, and the current pressure from women seems to me a symptom of the regression of the race and a consequence of Christianity.’      

But twenty years later in 1908 it is strange to find Strindberg writing to Uno Stadius, a supporter of temperance, ‘I am a Christian and am convinced that people should not be raised with theatre and paintings but with work and the fear of God. Instead of the surrogate of art, they possess the original, God’s wonderful natural world! [-]’

I believe here in comes the element of mysticism and dreams.  And that leads us from the Father or the God to the world of dreams and fantasies.

Bergman’s handling of the dreams is akin to those of Strindberg’s. Strindberg wrote to Axel Lundegard, ‘It is as if I’m walking in my sleep; as if my life and writing have gotten all jumbled up. I don’t know if The Father is fiction or if my life has been, but I feel as if [-] this at some moment soon will dawn upon me, and then I shall collapse either into madness and remorse or suicide. Through much writing my life has become a shadow life. I no longer feel as if I am walking the earth but floating weightless in an atmosphere not of air but darkness. If light enters into darkness, I shall collapse and be crushed!

‘The strange thing is that in an often-recurring nocturnal dream I feel I am flying weightless which I find quite natural, as though all notions of right and wrong, true and false, have dissolved and everything that happens, however strange, appears just as it should. [-]’ 

The dreams in Bergman’s films, so to say, are his revisits into his inner self. But a very different treatment is seen in Wild Strawberries, where the dream (nightmare) sequence is a masterpiece of surrealism in cinema. Interestingly, Tarkovsky’s films, too, have such dreams of floating weightless. 

Bergman had once said that he would want to keep the dreams in his mind and later make a film on it. He frequently mixed the elements of his unconscious with art – dreams and cinema. Innumerable images are encountered in his films which are dream-like. Existential fears of sexual anxieties are explicitly portrayed. He cited Strindberg’s A Dream Play as his inspiration. But The Ghost Sonata which Strindberg wrote in 1907 has had a particular fascination for Bergman who produced this chamber play four times in his entire theatre career – 1941, 1954, 1973 and 2000. The questions of paternity, betrayal, morality, spirituality are put up in this early modernist drama. Seeing the film made by Bergman himself on the latest version of his stage production is an exceptional experience. Strindberg had defined the play as ‘a piece of fantasy’. This version is seen as a ‘depressing existentialist Strindberg compendium; a Judgement Day drama.’ Bergman had said that, he had stressed the fact that, ‘the only thing that can give man any kind of salvation – a secular one – is the grace and compassion which come out of himself’. And that is the summit where Bergman meets his ‘Father’ Strindberg.