Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf, Darren Aronofsky’s mother!, and the legend of the ‘tortured artist’

In a paper titled Bereavement and Creativity, published in October 2017 in Management Science, economists Kathryn Graddy (Brandeis University) and Carl Lieberman (Princeton University) studied the effect of a loved one’s death on the creativity of 48 artists, ranging from Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Picasso to Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. They found that the well-entrenched legend of the “tortured artist” could be a myth. Cézanne was unable to paint for months after the death of his mother. Picasso’s La Gommeuse, painted during his Blue Period, believed to have resulted from a bout of depression following a friend’s suicide, sold for $67.45 million, while Garçon à la Pipe, his Rose Period work (from when he was happy in a new relationship), sold for far more ($104.2 million).

Cinema, however, has persisted with this myth, that artists create their best work when suffering emotional turmoil. (Can you name, off the top of your head, a film about a happy, well-adjusted writer or painter or sculptor? I couldn’t.) One reason is probably that the writhing of the soul makes for better drama. It could also be that filmmakers tend to project their own insecurities and inadequacies on their creations. Consider Johan Borg (Max von Sydow), the protagonist of Hour of the Wolf (1968), which resembles Darren Aronofsky’s  mother! in many ways. (Aronofsky says as much in the clip above, though he keeps calling the film Time of the Wolf.) Both films are about a creator slowly losing his sanity, turning into the archetypal “tortured artist.” Both films begin with an isolated couple — the artist, his loving (and pregnant) wife — whose lives are gradually invaded by “vampires” (metaphorical in Aronofsky’s case, literal in Bergman’s). And so forth.

The difference, though, is that Aronofsky explained what his film meant. In an interview published in The Telegraph, his heroine, Jennifer Lawrence, said, “It depicts the rape and torment of Mother Earth… I represent Mother Earth, Javier [Bardem>, whose character is a poet, represents a form of God, a creator; Michelle Pfeiffer is an Eve to Ed Harris’s Adam, there’s Cain and Abel and the setting sometimes resembles the Garden of Eden.” In contrast, see what Bergman’s heroine, Liv Ullman, said in The Search for Sanity (see link above), a featurette about the making of Hour of the Wolf: “[Ingmar> does not want to discuss the script. He does not want to tell you what he meant with it, and whatever. He says, ‘I have written the script,’ and he allows for us to understand whatever we want to understand from the script.”

Read on Firstpost: In Phantom Thread and mother!, the story of an artist and his muse unravel in vastly different ways

But then, Bergman himself was the archetypal “tortured artist.” In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, he writes: 20 years ago, I underwent an operation… I had to be anaesthetised and, due to an error, was given too much anaesthetic. Six hours of my life vanished. I don’t remember any dreams; time ceased to exist, six hours, six micro-seconds – or eternity. The operation was successful. I have struggled all my life with a tormented and joyless relationship with God… My prayers stank of anguish, entreaty, trust, loathing and despair. God spoke, God said nothing… The lost hours of that operation provided me with a calming message. You were born without purpose, you live without meaning, living is its own meaning. When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our increasingly capricious atoms.

Why is Hour of the Wolf important, even if it rarely comes up when people talk about Bergman’s films? One, it turns 50 this year. (This is also the centenary of the great filmmaker’s birth, so I expect to write a lot more about him in this space.) Two, few filmmakers threw themselves — as in, their selves — into their films the way he did. For Aronofsky, mother! is allegory. For Bergman, Hour of the Wolf (like all his films) is autobiography. Note the scene (see the clip below) where the artist, Johan Borg, examines the naked body of his former lover, Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin), now presumed dead. He pulls back the white sheet covering her, and his hand caresses her face, her neck, and travels down, all the way to her feet, at which point, the “dead woman” begins to laugh.

Now consider this anecdote from Bergman, from when he was a boy on the threshold of puberty. (It is quoted in Geoffrey Macnab’s Ingmar Bergman: The Life and Films of the Last Great European Director.) He was locked inside a mortuary. In the inner room, among the other corpses, was the body of a recently deceased, very beautiful young woman. He was drawn towards her by some morbid, voyeuristic urge. He pulled back the sheet that covered her. “She was quite naked apart from a plaster that ran from throat to pudenda. I lifted a hand and touched her shoulder… I moved my hand to her breast, which was small and slack, with an erect black nipple… I could see her sex, which I wanted to touch but did not dare.”

But Johan Borg dares. Elsewhere, the story about Borg being locked in a wardrobe as a child was taken from Bergman’s biography. “You see, they told me that a little man lived in that wardrobe. And he could gnaw the toes off naughty children.” This is not to make a facile comparison between the real-life event and its reel-life version. This is more to substantiate my belief that greatness is usually the result of something gnawing away at the soul of an artist. As Bergman said, later, “Of course the demons have to be around. It would be very dangerous not to have them there. But they need to be kept under control. As long as I am in the studio or theatre, I control the universe. And so the demons are automatically under control. I mean, the passions are under control.” Tortured artist? I’d say so.

Baradwaj Rangan is editor, Film Companion (South). Read more of his Firstpost columns on world cinema here .