In PsycCRITIQUES, 50 (43) 2006, [np] Between the known and the unknown Saraband (2003) Sweden. Released in USA, 2005. Directed by Ingmar Bergman Review by Keith Oatley For psychologists, the films of Ingmar Bergman are of especial interest. One of the most important psychological film reviews ever written was by Erik Erikson (1978) of the highly praised Bergman film, Wild Strawberries. Erikson wrote about the film as an exploration of his theory of lifetime development, in which each phase of life presents dilemmas of motivation and emotion, such as autonomy versus shame, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus self-absorption, that may remain unresolved and persist in partly conscious forms. Bergman, now in his mid-eighties, has already retired several times, but it seems likely that Saraband will be his last film. A saraband is an erotic dance for two as well as the title Bach gave to several movements in his unaccompanied cello suites, parts of which we hear in the film. The film has ten movements, each one a duet, in a sequence preceded by a prologue and succeeded by an epilogue in which Marianne (played by the incomparable Liv Ullmann), 30 years on from Bergman’s Scenes from a marriage, speaks to us, the audience. In the prologue she is looking through old photographs scattered apparently randomly on a rectangular table. Prompted by a photograph of herself and Johan (the also incomparable Erland Josephson) to whom she was once married, she decides to visit him, although they have not seen each other for many years. She is now 63 and he is 86. He lives in isolation in a summer-house on an estate in a remote place overlooking a lake. In the first duet, she arrives and they start talking. Johan says that a priest once told him that two things are needed for a good marriage: friendship and an unshakeable eroticism. Marianne and Johan had been friends. Their meeting after the years of separation is remarkable for the shy warmth that overcomes their wariness of each other. Their eroticism, evidently, had not been unshakable, and it is unclear what intimacy they had achieved. The principal story line concerns Henrik (in an extraordinary performance by Börje Ahlstedt) and his 19-year-old daughter Karin (played with great conviction by Julia Dufvenius). Henrik, in his early sixties, is Johan’s son from a former marriage. Despised by his father who has shamed him into a sense of inferiority, the plump Henrik seems pitiable. Grieving for the loss of intimacy with his wife Anna, who died of cancer two years previously, Henrik has taken early retirement from his position at Uppsala University. He is writing a book on Bach’s St John Passion, and he continues to play the cello in a small orchestra. Henrik and Karin live in a cottage on Johan’s estate, and Henrik has taken to coaching Karin, also a cellist, whom he wants to audition at the conservatory and to remain living with him. Anna is much talked about, but she appears only as a photograph. She was someone who was able to love others, even her selfabsorbed husband Henrik, even her irritable father-in-law Johan. Her daughter

Karin is said to take after her. The story follows Henrik’s and Johan’s plans to control Karin and her musical career, and the question of Karin’s guilt should she assert her autonomy. In his theory of art, Vygotsky (1971), influenced by Russian formalists such as Schlovsky (1917), proposed that works of literature have two elements. One is the material of the story. The other is the aesthetic, by which Vygotsky meant the emotions and identifications of the reader. In a successful work, the aesthetic overcomes the story material in the dialectical relationship between them. Though one might smile at the quaintness of this Marxist metaphor, Vygotsky’s idea helps us understand why Saraband is a great work of art, and also how it achieves an intensity to which big-budget blockbusters cannot aspire. Bergman’s interest has moved from the development of individuals to the development of relationships. His aesthetic is of the unspoken passions within us that occupy territory somewhere between the known and the unknown. It is of how being different in different relationships affects our knowing and our actions. At one point, Marianne says that people sometimes said unkind things about Johan, “But,” she says, “I don’t know the Johan they’re talking about.” Some aspects of any relationship are known only to the people in it, but other information with which we construct our mental models of others comes from seeing them in interaction and from hearing about them in conversation. It is striking that Marianne could have been married to Johan for 16 years without seeing how he behaved with others so that, when they talked about him, what they said was hard to recognize. Bergman engages us so deeply that revelations to the movie’s characters come as realizations to us. Some aspects of our lives can be invested with the most compelling motivations to which we can consent only partly because we know them only partly. So when Johan has been denouncing Henrik, and Marianne asks, “Where did you get all that contempt?” Johan rejects this idea. Marianne is shocked as she recognizes that this is a deep part of the very Johan she had loved. At the same time we, in the audience, realize that the Marianne who seems so immediate as she speaks directly to us perhaps did not achieve an intimacy with Johan because she cut herself off. Unsettlingly, we recognize, too, that we share in Johan’s capacity for contempt and in Marianne’s capacity for cut-offness, which contribute unknowingly to how we act. One challenge to psychology of Bergman’s vision is that, unlike the proposals of currently favored theories of personality that emphasize persisting dispositions that pervade our lives (Costa & McCrea, 1988), our very being can be different in different relationships, into each of which we can project certain desires that certain others call forth. This idea has been explored by David Kenny, who finds that although people are somewhat consistent as individuals, there is also evidence of unique responding to particular others (Kenny, Mohr, & Levesque, 2001). Perhaps the more chaotic amongst us have come to project different ideas onto different others, and hence have become more difficult to know by others or by ourselves. Towards the end of Saraband, Karin comes to Marianne with a letter she has

found between the pages of a book, a letter written to her father by her mother a week before she died. In it, Anna entreats Henrik not to use Karin to fill the vacuum that will be left by her death, because he would damage her. There are hints that Henrik’s love for his daughter has an incestuous element, and the story line is of whether Karin will be able to recognize the nature of her father’s love, and to make a choice about her own life. This line is overcome by what Vygotsky called the aesthetic, in which we, the audience, find ourselves affected by the question of how far any of us can be known by ourselves and by others across our relationships. Can we, with our loved ones, achieve a consistency that is considerate of them and of the others with whom we are concerned? Acknowledgements I am grateful to Jennifer Jenkins and Berl Schiff for their insightful discussions and suggestions. References Bergman, I. (1959). Wild strawberries. Bergman, I. (1973). Scenes from a marriage. Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1988). Personality in adulthood: A six-year longitudinal study of self reports and spouse ratings on the NEO Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 853-863. Erikson, E. H. (1978). Dr Borg's life cycle. In E. H. Erikson (Ed.), Adulthood (pp. 131). New York: Norton. Kenny, D. A., Mohr, C. D., & Levesque, M. J. (2001). A social relations variance partitioning of dyadic behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 127, 128-141. Schlovsky, V. (1917). Art as technique (L. T. Lemon & M. J. Reis, Trans.). Reprinted in D. Lodge (Ed.), Modern criticism and theory (pp. 16-30). London: Longman (1988). Vygotsky, L. S. (1971). The psychology of art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Between the known and the unknown Saraband (2003)

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