SCHEDULED FILM FOR 30 October 2009

HOUR OF THE WOLF

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SINCE OCTOBER 31 IS HALLOWEEN, I thought it would be appropriate to schedule a horror film, of sorts, for Friday's film on 30 October. Actually Hour of the Wolf falls into the genre of what is called an art film, by one of the most famous auteurs, Swedish director, Ingmar Bergman.
    The film was made at the height of the art film craze in the 1960s, and particularly the Ingmar Bergman fad, at a time when Americans dismissed their own Hollywood cinema as too mainstream and commercial. Fashions have changed and many Hollywood films have been shown to have profound subtexts, while Bergman has nearly disappeared from many film textbooks!
    Of course, Bergman's place in the history of cinema is secure. But whether he will ever regain the preeminence he once held in film studies is another matter.
    Hour of the Wolf is a difficult film, nearly bordering on incoherence. It does bring up the question of how much coherence the artist is responsible for.
    We know, for example, that one standard of higher art is delayed closure; so that the tune, "Twinle, Twinkle, Little Star" is a lesser piece of music than a Chopin piano etude (study) because the closure is simpler in the nursery tune but more delayed in the Chopin; and, of course, a Beethoven quartet delays closure even more than a Chopin etude. Thus the "work" needed to achieve the satisfaction of closure (on the part of both artist and audience) defines, by degrees, the level of art.
    But what if the artist doesn't offer closure, in other words a satisfactory resolution of all elements, in the work? This is the issue that Bergman's film poses to the critic or scholar, not to mention the common viewer. To some degree this is an issue shared by all postmodern art.
    There is, as I point out in my study pictures, a hint of closure in the film, since it begins on day and ends on night. However there is no coherent argument that explains how that closure was achieved, except that the artist wanted the film to end in that way.
    Put differently, there is no answer to the artiist's (Johan's) dilemma. And surely all art is an argument of some kind (conventionally dramatized as heroes and villains, or (with more gravity) as protagonists and antagonists.
     In some ways, Alma represents the life force. She is pregnant with child when her narrative begins and we know that the hour of the wolf is the hour when most people die and children are born. But by the end of the film the child (the woman's creative product) is forgotten and she is left in the night of her vanished husband's dark reality, creating coherence in this way. The viewer creates coherence in the same way, by accepting, even sharing, the artist's vision.

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