Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal – March 20, 2011

(I generally try not to give away too much of the plot of a book or movie I’m discussing, but it’s almost impossible to discuss this one without giving away something about how it ends. Since that is more or less revealed, in broad terms, in the beginning, I don’t think I’m telling too much, and I won’t not be very specific.)

It would be a sort of pun, but a true one, to say that I am haunted by this film, because it is itself about a haunting: an artist, Johann, is tormented by…things—it’s hard to say with certainty what they are—and his wife, Alma wants very much to help him but doesn’t know how. Nor is he able—or willing—that isn’t clear—to accept her help.

The hour of the wolf is the dead time of night, around three o’clock, when the only people who should be awake are those whose work requires it, which is mostly those whose work involves caring for others: doctors, nurses, other hospital staff, policemen and firemen, ambulance drivers. Even most revelers except perhaps the most decadent are generally asleep by three. For most of us, to be awake at that hour generally means that something bad is happening: insomnia or nightmare or illness. “It’s the time when most people die and most children are born. It’s now that the nightmares come to us. And if we are awake, we are afraid.”

For Johann, it is the time when he is attacked. If Satan is, most literally, the Accuser of mankind, one can say that Johann is being attacked by Satan, in the person of lesser demons, or “ghosts,” as he calls them. (I think he refers to them at least once as “cannibals,” which is appropriate, and apparently this movie and Persona were originally part of a single project called The Cannibals.) When we first hear of these it seems likely that they are nightmares or visions, but they become progressively more real. It is not at all clear, even at the end of the film, just what is real and what is in Johann’s own mind (and later perhaps in Alma’s). In the beginning he draws pictures of them, which he shows to Alma—the bird-man, the woman whose face comes off, and others. Later they are embodied in the wealthy and corrupt inhabitants of a castle on the other side of the island where Johann and Alma live. Even then, one is not entirely sure if those people really are the demons of his waking nightmares, or if his madness has caused him to see real people—not very pleasant ones, perhaps, but not supernatural—as demons. In the end it doesn’t really matter, because the assault is real, whatever its relation to the physical world.

The attacks come in different forms—hostile, fawning, seductive—but all are aimed ultimately at humiliating him as both artist and man, forcing him to see himself as evil, weak, and ridiculous. Did he commit a murder? We are not entirely sure, but he seems to think he did. We are told in the beginning that his work had not been going well when these visits began, and the entire series of events can be seen as the collapse of an artist losing his gift, or at least his ability to exercise it. Toward the end of the film, all the ghosts come together to mock him brutally, leaving him shattered and defenseless. At the end of this scene we see him mouth words but cannot hear what he says, if indeed he is saying anything coherent, so near to destruction that he has lost one of the fundamental aspects of what it means to be human.

Bergman had, by the time he made this film, cast off definitively the Christianity with, and against, which he struggled in his great works of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. But the struggle never really ended in his work, and among those films with which I’m familiar, (with the possible exception of Persona, the immediate predecessor of Hour of the Wolf) the operation of grace—God’s offer of healing love—is never altogether absent. Grace is offered to Johann in the person of the wife who loves him deeply. I seem to remember learning that the familiar phrase “alma mater” meant something like “dear mother,” but the Latin meaning seems to be something closer to “nourishing” or “nurturing.” The Wikipedia article on the name gives “spiritually supportive one” as the Latin sense when the word is used as a proper name. It is unlikely that Bergman’s choice of the name was an accident, since there is also an Alma in Persona who plays, at least initially, a somewhat similar role.

Johann lives increasingly in a world which is populated only by himself and the ghosts. It is difficult to sympathize with him, however horrible his predicament, because he seems to choose it. Alma attempts several times to reach him, to get him to allow her to help him, but for the most part he rebuffs her coldly, even brutally in one scene, which seems to be (if I’m remembering the sequence correctly) his last chance. Whether or not the ghosts are physically real, their attack isolates him, and one feels that if he could only allow love into his world things might change. At times he seems to know that this is true: he tells Alma that he needs her simplicity and wholeness. But it seems that he is incapable of moving from this abstract recognition to an actual opening to her, and giving of himself to her. Alma is pregnant, but I don’t recall any indication that Johann is at all interested in this fact.

And yet the suggestion that Alma could have saved him is ambiguous, because there are equally strong, if not stronger, suggestions that her attempt to get closer to him only brings her into the same danger he faces, and would in the end leave her as helpless as he is against the ghosts.

But even if Johann cannot be and could not have been saved, Alma’s existence, and her desire to save him, is proof that hell need not have the last word. This is surely one of Bergman’s darkest films, and yet the vision of Alma’s life-giving love is one of the most powerful things in it. The opening scene shows us a basket of apples sitting on a table outside the home of Johann and Alma, and this image of peaceful fruitfulness seems not only ironic in relation to the story we are about to see, but also indicative of what could have been, of what was offered and refused. I’m left thinking of the Biblical “I have set before you life and death…choose life.”

I don’t pretend to fully understand Hour of the Wolf. I think I’m right in my broad interpretation of it, but any number of details remain obscure to me. I said in the beginning that I am haunted by the film. I mean that in the sense that I have continued to think of it often over the weeks since I watched it for the first time (well, actually the second, but the first was in 1968 or so). I also mean it in a possibly more literal sense. I watched it alone one night, and went to sleep soon afterward. I was awakened around the wolf hour by a nightmare in which I was being attacked in much the way that Johann was, and yet nothing in my dream was borrowed from the film: it was tailored very specifically to my personal fears and experiences. I don’t know whether there was anything supernatural in that or not, but at a minimum it testifies to the power the film exercised over me.

I watched it again before sending it back to Netflix and had no ill effects, but found it even more fascinating. It is the light in it, and not the darkness, to which my mind returns. I would not attempt to reduce it to a “message,” but certainly one of the things that remain with me is the vision of Alma’s radiant and vulnerable love, and the tragedy of Johan’s flight from it. I expect I’ll see it again, and more than once. I really must find some critical and biographical material on Bergman; it is more than slightly interesting that he had a breakdown of some kind around the time of this film.

And I ought at least to mention what first struck me about Bergman’s work when I encountered it as a baffled college student more than forty years ago, and keeps me returning to it for simple pleasure as well as for psychological and philosophical insight: its sheer visual beauty. When I first saw Liv Ullman (in Persona, I think) I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, at least as Sven Nykvist photographed her, and I still think so. She seems the very face of love, and when I see her the word “beautiful” is joined immediately in my mind by others like “rich” and “luminous.” And the pleasure of looking at that face, even when it is troubled, is not the least of the pleasures of Hour of the Wolf. Someone seems to have put most or perhaps all of it on YouTube. I wouldn’t recommend watching the whole thing in that low-quality format, but here is the first scene: