A horror film, Ingmar Bergman’s black-and-white Hour of the Wolf is creepy and terrifying. It draws on stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann and, like Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, it purportedly and playfully derives from its fictitious protagonist’s diary. Its store of anxieties is perversely comical.
Johan (Max von Sydow, excellent), a painter, and his pregnant wife, Alma, share a cottage on a remote island. Johan barely sleeps, and his sketchbook documents nightmares: a beaked “bird man”; an ancient woman who pulls off her face. Wealthier inhabitants of the island, suggesting these creatures, may be figments of his imagination, in which Alma shares. Eventually, at night, while Alma watches helplessly at a distance, they attack Johan and cannibalize him.
Bergman’s poker-faced reaction shots of Alma secretly reading Johan’s diary are hilarious, as is the suggestion that the painting by Johan adorning the wealthy couple’s bedroom—it is a portrait of a past mistress of Johan’s—hangs upside down. Bergman’s camera doesn’t show the painting, only Johan’s and Alma’s reactions; it’s left to our imagination, in this case prompted by dinner conversation about some other artist on whom the derisive joke had been pulled. Sometimes the humor is retroactively associative. If Johan is eaten up at the end, earlier, in one of the film’s starkest passages, he is bitten, while fishing, by an imagined boy whom he bludgeons to death, the corpse hauntingly reemerging from the sea’s depths—Johan’s subconscious—into which he had tossed it.
Johan the Artist is bound to his imaginings, and even Alma, who apparently survives him, may be imagined. We, the audience: Has Johan, or Bergman, imagined us into existence? Or is it we who have imagined the Artist into existence, the better to negotiate the hour of the wolf between midnight and dawn?
B(U)Y THE BOOK
MY BOOK, A Short Chronology of World Cinema, IS CURRENTLY AVAILABLE FROM THE SANDS FILMS CINEMA CLUB IN LONDON. USING EITHER OF THE LINKS BELOW, ACCESS THE ADVERTISEMENT FOR THIS BOOK, FROM WHICH YOU CAN ORDER ONE OR MORE COPIES OF IT. THANKS.
Dennis Grunes 