Abstract
Hour of the Wolf (1967) started as a project for Ingmar Bergman three years before its eventual completion. It is unusual for a Bergman film to take so long, but the director’s health problems, and then the inspiration to make Persona, were responsible for the delay. 1 Bergman also made clear that the personal nature of the story led to complications in the production, including the decision to edit out much of the opening prologue. 2 The original title, The Cannibals, is instructive of Bergman’s intent in representing an artist surrounded by an aristocratic entourage who effectively devour him, and the way damage is enacted by malign elements that possess the artist’s imagination and eat away at his sense of identity. The story, in the finished film, begins in digressive fashion with a figure that we may suppose is the director, recalling how he received the diary of Johan Borg, an artist who disappeared, from his wife Alma. This information is fictitious, 3 although it obliquely refers to autobiographical elements in the film, including the pregnancy of Liv Ullmann (with Bergman’s child), who plays Alma. The story goes on to tell through a range of flashbacks how the artist Johan (played by Max von Sydow) disappeared on the island of Baltrum. I will provide a detailed analysis of the film, but before this I will look at reasons why this work in particular justifies psychoanalytical and philosophical analysis.
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Notes
Steene, B. (2005) Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, p. 278.
Björkman, S., Manns, T., and Sims, J. (1973) Bergman on Bergman, English translation by Paul Britten Austin, New York: Simon and Schuster (originally published in Sweden in 1970, p. 215.
Cowie, P. (1982) Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, London: Secker and Warburg, p. 242.
Cowie adds the point that Passion of Anna focuses on Max von Sydow as a recluse (Bergman, as we know, escaped society for the remote island of Fårö). Cowie also mentions Persona, suggesting that across all these films ‘the humiliation grows more violent in its manifestation’. p. 246.
Simon, J. ‘Ingmar Bergman and Insanity’, in Petrii, V. (ed.) (1981) Film & Dreams: An Approach to Bergman, South Salem, N.Y.: Redgrave Publishing Company, pp. 127–138.
Comolli, J. L. (1968) ‘Postscript: The Hour of the Wolf, Cahiers du Cinéma 203, August 1968, in Hillier, J. (ed.) (1986) Cahiers du Cinéma, New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood: 1960–68, London: Routledge, pp. 313–316; p. 314.
Wood, R. (1969) Ingmar Bergman, London: Studio Vista, p. 165.
Livingston, P. (1982) Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art, Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, p. 235.
Hubner, L. (2007) The Films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of Light and Darkness, Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p. 100.
Klein, M (1935) ‘A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States’, in Klein, M. (1998) Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945, London: Vintage, first published in 1975 by The Hogarth Press, pp. 262–289; p. 288.
Gado, F. (1986) The Passion of Ingmar Bergman, Durham: Duke University Press, p. 345.
Livingston argues that Bergman may have been significantly affected by Kaila’s Psychology of the Personality. As Livingston notes, Bergman said that he was very struck by Kaila’s philosophy in this book. Bergman singles out, in particular, the idea from Kaila ‘that man lives strictly according to his needs’, Livingston, P. (2009) Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 126. The Livingston quotation is from Bergman’s film script (1960), Wild Strawberries: A Film, translated from the Swedish by Lars Malmström and David Kusher. Livingston refers to ‘many film scholars’ assumption that Bergman can be unproblematically situated in a general “European” existentialist tradition or movement’, and notes in a footnote that apart from ‘Camus’ Caligula, Bergman never chose to stage any of the great existentialist dramas’. p. 127.
Sartre, J-P. (2002) Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, London; New York: Routledge (originally published in France in 1939), p. 53.
Kinder, M. (1981) ‘From The Life of the Marionettes to The Devil’s Wanton : Bergman’s Creative Transformation of Recurring Nightmare’, in Film Quarterly, Vol. 34, no. 3, Spring 1981, pp. 28–29.
Klein, (1933) ‘The Early Development of Conscience in the Child’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921–1945 op. cit., pp. 248–257; p. 249.
Explaining Klein’s account of ‘the fear of life’, Kristeva writes, ‘In a word, it is for Eros’ sake that our anxiety about the annihilation of life penetrates the deepest layers of the psyche’. Kristeva, J. (2001) Melanie Klein, translated by Ross Guberman, New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, p. 84.
Gardner, S. (2009) Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Reader’s Guide, London; New York: Continuum International Publishing. Gardner discusses the significance of The Transcendence of the Ego in Sartre’s work. pp. 32–34.
Alford, C. F. (1989) Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory, New Haven; London: Yale University, p. 84.
Kinder, M. and Houston, B. (1972) Close Up: A Critical Perspective on Film, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, p. 278.
Johns Blackwell, M. (1997) Gender and Representation in the Films of Ingmar Bergman, Columbia, SC: Camden House, p. 207.
Mosley, P. (1981) Ingmar Bergman: The Cinema as Mistress, London; Boston: Marion Boyars Publishers Inc., p. 97.
Segal, H. and Abel-Hirsch, N. (ed.) (2007) Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, London; New York: Routledge. Segal is in interview here with Jacqueline Rose, p. 254.
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© 2015 Dan Williams
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Williams, D. (2015). The Destruction of the Artist: Hour of the Wolf. In: Klein, Sartre and Imagination in the Films of Ingmar Bergman. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137471987_6
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