Port of Call

Ready for Close-Ups

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In a small'ish port town a reformatory girl (and ex-gang member, Swedish style) (Nine Christine Jönsson) under the terms of her probation labors in a factory while boarding involuntarily with her mother. A flashback reveals her problems stem for the most part from the broken marriage of her parents, although what might come off as a rather simplistic formative trauma is kept to a minimum of exposition, a sketch, really, within the contemporary narrative proper. (During this scene, for the first time in Bergman a clock ticks on the soundtrack. A bell tolls minutes later after three of her inebriated co-workers challenge her date [Bengt Eklund], "the salty sea-dog," to a rumble.)

Mirror reflections, and double compositions, irony of the self, irony of comparison.

Much of what I'd written here was lost thanks to the Blogger window being open for a period of time beyond twelve hours, which knocks off the auto-save function, and I was too stupid to hit command-A command-C before closing the window. A run-through recap of what I might have written:

-There's the ex-gang-member friend in need of an abortion. She's accompanied by Berit (Jönsson) and Gösta (Eklund) to the procedure in a back room, but post-op all hell breaks loose, and in a portrayal, although not graphic, far beyond what most mainstream Western cinemas would agree to show in 2020, let alone 1948.

-Berit confides her history to Gösta in the way of men and the reformatory, who in turn shocks after the flashbacks of her actions by uttering, "How many guys have you HAD? ... Why couldn't you have kept your mouth shut?"

-The abortionist smears makeup on Gertrud directly post-procedure as though she's already a corpse. A shot and a pill, and she will abort in a week or so... except she dies straightaway...

-The police question Berit. "If you tell us the abortionist's address we can all go home." Negotiations, not to drag Berit through the mud in court. Her attitude matters a great deal to these bureaucrats, who threaten her with being an accomplice to murder.

Berit, post-probation, and Gösta contemplate running away on a departing ship. They don't. Something about hanging around and sticking it to the olds. In short, Port of Call [Hamnstad, 1948] sticks out liberal, provocative ideas in the way of youth living, sex, and consequences, but the film ends when it ends (this is not an original Bergman manuskript), and it's likely enough that the master, still in his relative apprenticeship, found it most advantageous to move on to the next project. •

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Other writing on Ingmar Bergman at Cinemasparagus:

Kris [Crisis, 1946]

Skepp till India Land [Ship to India, 1947]

Hamnstad [Port of Call, 1948]

Törst [Thirst, 1949]

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Ship to India

A Passage to Maturation

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In an earlier piece on Crisis I mentioned a similarity to an Ozu film in Ship to India [Skepp till India Land, 1947], but I would never assert that Ozu was a filmmaker Bergman had his eyes on given the essential non-distribution of his films in the West for a very long time, first; — and second because Bergman was a cinephile of shall we say super-mellifluous tastes. (Too many trills in the line; he not only hated Godard, but also Welles.) Nevertheless, one scene. The rest owes itself to a handful of Warner and RKO programmers not to mention the cinema of mutiny and, say, the superior L'Atalante or The Docks of New York...

The Italian style of Crisis gives way here to more modern, then-contemporary '47 American studio values.

With Swedish allowances: besotted Johannes attempts to rape his father's mistress (before her variety-show gig she was a whore), out of resentment for his congenital humpback, against a staircase before his mother steps inbetween to break up the assault. He's ashamed. At the next communal dinner, his father (a physiognomical cross between Max von Sydow and John Huston) brings up the missing cognac; Johannes tells him it's being replaced.

Johannes and Sally the whore bond in a hayloft. Sally says later to Johannes's mother, after she proclaims in her constant Jean Arthur voice, "Imagine if I'd hit back after every time I was hit." — "[...] One shouldn't just accept things like an animal that's whipped until it dies. One should stand up for one's rights." The paradox of Bergman the Feminist.

And always the pull of the Hollywood style still in this era of his.

To wit, an excellent final act in which action and kinetic dramatics take grasp and run the scenario over the gunwale...

And then...: the snapback to the present as we're reminded the film was a flashback. Johannes lies in a dirty sea meadow, found by two young girls. It's seven years later. He runs up to a ship and Sally is there; he coaxes her into coupledom.

The seagulls fly; the pair rush to a departing ship; their love is sealed. No indication whatsoever of India Land. •

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Other writing on Ingmar Bergman at Cinemasparagus:

Kris [Crisis, 1946]

Skepp till India Land [Ship to India, 1947]

Hamnstad [Port of Call, 1948]

Törst [Thirst, 1949]

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Crisis

Corpus Day

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Crisis [Kris, 1946] is Bergman's first film. A banal story involving the small-town keeper of a boarding-house, her adopted teen daughter, the boarder who yearns for her, the biological mother fleshpot salon-keeper who comes to snatch her away, and the bio-mother's lover, a young kept man who himself falls for the daughter.

It's not without certain atmospheric touches, nor racy scenes around the young woman, but neither distinguish the film in the manner to which we'll become accustomed and struck by a few Bergman films after.

There's the suggestion that the salon doubles as a brothel, but neither resulting trauma nor insouciant pleasures are expanded upon within the scope of the filmed scenario. Also: a plot movement hinging on a sudden ailment in one of the characters, straight out of the Japanese playbook. (In Bergman's next film, the following year's Ship to India, a character will declare his macular degeneration shortly after a framing that wouldn't be out of place in any Ozu movie of the period.) — A slight film, but concise, bearing no hint of pretension. •

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Other writing on Ingmar Bergman at Cinemasparagus:

Kris [Crisis, 1946]

Skepp till India Land [Ship to India, 1947]

Hamnstad [Port of Call, 1948]

Törst [Thirst, 1949]


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Poemquotes 18 - Three by Baudelaire from "Spleen and Ideal"

my translations

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XIV. L'homme et la mer - Les fleurs du mal
[XIV. Man and the Sea] [The Flowers of Evil]

Free man, always will you cherish the sea!
The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul
In the infinite unfurling of its swell,
And your mind is not a less bitter gulf.

You like to plunge into the bosom of your image;
You embrace it with eyes and arms, and your heart
Is sometimes distracted from its own rumble
By the sound of this untamable and savage groan.

Both of you are gloomy and reserved:
Man, not one has sounded the depth of your fathoms,
O sea, not one knows of your intimate riches,
So jealous are you in keeping your secrets!

And yet here though are centuries innumerable
In which you've battled one another without pity or remorse,
So much do you love carnage and death,
O eternal fighters, o implacable brothers!

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XV. Don Juan aux Enfers - Les fleurs du mal
[XV. Don Juan in Hades] [The Flowers of Evil]

When Don Juan descended toward the underground flow
And when he came to give his pittance to Charon,
A somber mendicant, his eye proud as Antisthenes,
With arm vengeful and strong seized each oar.

Showing their pendulous breasts and their open robes,
Women twisted beneath the black firmament,
And, like a great gaggle of sacrificial victims,
Trailed a long lowing behind.

Sganarelle, laughing, demanded his pay,
While Don Luis with one trembling finger
Showed all the wandering dead on the banks
The audacious son who mocked his white brow.

Shivering from her bereavement, chaste and thin Elvira,
Near the deceitful spouse who had been her lover,
Seemed to demand of him a final smile
In which shone the sweetness of his initial oath.

Upright in his armor, a great stone man
Held himself at the helm and chopped the black swell;
But the calm hero, bent over his rapier,
Regarded the wake and deigned to see nothing.

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XVI. Châtiment de l'orgueil - Les fleurs du mal
[XVI. Penalty for Pride] [The Flowers of Evil]

In these wonderful times in which Theology
Blossoms with the most lifeblood and energy
We recount that, one day, one of the greatest doctors
— After having pried open indifferent hearts;
Having stirred them in their dark depths;
After having crossed toward the celestial glories
Of singular paths to himself unknown,
Where the pure Minds alone perhaps had come, —
Like a man who has clambered too high, stricken by panic,
Yelled out, transported by a satanic pride:
"Jesus, little Jesus! I've raised you up so high!
But, if I'd wanted to attack you in the absence
Of armor, your shame would equal your glory,
And you would no longer be more than a piddling fetus!"

Immediately his reason took leave.
The radiance of that sun was veiled beneath a crepe of mourning;
All chaos rolled within that intelligence,
Temple once alive, filled with order and opulence,
Beneath the ceilings of which so much pomp had glistened.
Silence and night took up inside him,
As in a subterranean vault whose key has been lost.
From that moment he was indistinguishable from the animals in the street,
And, when he vanished without having seen a thing, across
The fields, without telling apart summers from winters,
Filthy, useless, and ugly as a worn out thing,
He became the enjoyment and the laughing-stock of the children.

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Poemquotes 17 - "XIII. Gypsies Traveling" by Charles Baudelaire

my translation

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XIII. Bohémiens en voyage - Les fleurs du mal
[XIII. Gypsies Traveling] [The Flowers of Evil]

The prophetic, ardent-pupiled tribe
Set forth yesterday, carrying their little ones
Upon their backs, or delivering to their proud appetites
The ever ready treasure from their dangling mammaries.

On foot the men, beneath their gleaming weapons, go
Alongside the covered wagons in which their kin are huddled,
Moving over the heavens eyes overburdened
By the gloomy regret of vanished chimeras.

At the bottom of his sandy recess, the cricket,
Watching them pass, redoubles his song;
Cybele, who loves them, increases her verdures,

Makes the rock into a spring and the desert bloom
Before these travelers, for whom is opened
The familiar empire of future darknesses.

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Poemquotes 16 - "X. The Enemy" by Charles Baudelaire

my translation

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X. L'Ennemi - Les fleurs du mal
[X. The Enemy] [The Flowers of Evil]

My youth was but a gloomy storm,
Traversed here and there by shining suns;
The thunder and the rain made such a ravage
That there remains in my garden barely any ruby fruits.

Here then I touched the autumn of ideas,
And had to put to use the shovel and the rakes
To gather the flooded grounds anew,
Where the water digs holes large as tombs.

And who knows whether the new flowers I dream
Will find in this soil washed like a shore
The mystical food that would provide their vigor?

— O suffering! o suffering! Time eats life,
And the obscure Enemy that eats away at our heart
Grows and draws strength from the blood we shed!

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Film Socialisme

The Goldbergs

===IV. Correspondences - The Flowers of Evil
[IV. Correspondances] [Les fleurs du mal]
by Charles Baudelaire - my translation
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Nature is a temple where living pillars
At times allow confused words to emerge;
Man crosses them through forests of symbols
Observing him with familiar looks.

Like prolonged echoes mingling from afar
Within a tenebrous and profound unity,
Vast as night and clarity,
Perfumes, colors, and sounds give response.

There are perfumes fresh as children's fleshes,
Gentle as oboes, green as prairies,
— And others, corrupted, rich, and triumphant,

Having the expansion of limitless things,
Like amber, musk, bezoin, and incense
Singing the transports of the mind and the senses.

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The other correspondences were not only bereft of the here and now, but also of “limitless things.” The last slice of mastery before the Cold War began in true, an unedited truth beyond all remnants true or untrue. It was the last thing to come.

Behold: this tale of granddaughters and grandfathers aboard the ship the Costa Concordia, which would later — sink. These sirens perhaps did not hijack, but certainly served to set the ship upon its course. “The last beautiful free souls on this planet,” as has been said. “La muse malade,” in the words of Baudelaire. — “My poor muse, alas! what have you then this morning? Your hollow eyes are populated by nocturnal visions. And turn by turn I see reflected upon your complexion the folly and horror, cold and taciturn. // The greenish succubus and the pink elf, have they poured forth fear and love from their urns towards you? / The nightmare, of a despotic and mutinous grip, has it drowned you at the base of a fabled Minturnae?” I would like that exhaling the odor of the saint, in your presence.

Since at least Détective [1985], Godard has trafficked in conspiracy and invisible backstory, or that which requires unearthing and which does not exist onscreen except in fleeting suggestions or images. Pieces of gold, here; a watch. I think in Film Socialisme [2010] and Adieu au langage [Goodbye to Language, 2014] in fact he comes closest to Rivette, who once spoke of Pialat "inventing" Sandrine Bonnaire "in the archaeological sense."

Then can you imagine x + 3 = 1? Can Saint Mary imagine 1 + 1 = 3? When we travel south, latitudes become negative, so we have to travel north instead... If you make fun of Balzac I'll kill you. If the sun attacks me, I'll attack the sun too. •

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