Grade AA Extra-Large

One of the indispensable rights of the artist is the right to fail. The creative mind needs to grow, and such growth may not be possible without convulsions or occasional false starts. Most great creators who went from one style to another had to pay for it with transitional works that remained relatively or totally unsuccessful. Even Shakespeare’s problem plays are problematic in part because they are a problem to mount. Before Ingmar Bergman could make Winter Light, he had to stumble with Through a Glass Darkly, the relationship between kindred yet antagonistic women in The Silence did not come off; in Persona, it did. In the former transitional phase, Bergman was evolving the chamber film; in the latter, a method of delving into psychic action under comparatively uneventful surface goings-on.

With The Serpent’s Egg, Bergman is again striking out in a new direction, and though his failure of achievement cannot be excused by worthiness of intentions, it behooves us to understand what is at stake here. That Bergman is one of the supreme masters of the film about personal relationships, about the neuroses and psychoses men and women fall prey to both in seeking out and in trying to avoid involvements, no one in his right mind can deny. But Bergman has not been much concerned with politics, and some of the younger Swedish filmmakers have duly attacked him for his alleged elitist solipsism, his lack of social awareness. Now, Bergman has occasionally made more political films: e.g., the early This Can’t Happen Here (1950), of which he says that he did it only for the money; that he was dead tired and ill at the time, and turned it all “into a lot of crap.” A more recent political film, The Shame (1967), likewise failed to satisfy its maker, though many of us consider it one of his finest.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

One of the indispensable rights of the artist is the right to fail. The creative mind needs to grow, and such growth may not be possible without convulsions or occasional false starts. Most great creators who went from one style to another had to pay for it with transitional works that remained relatively or totally unsuccessful. Even Shakespeare’s problem plays are problematic in part because they are a problem to mount. Before Ingmar Bergman could make Winter Light, he had to stumble with Through a Glass Darkly, the relationship between kindred yet antagonistic women in The Silence did not come off; in Persona, it did. In the former transitional phase, Bergman was evolving the chamber film; in the latter, a method of delving into psychic action under comparatively uneventful surface goings-on.

With The Serpent’s Egg, Bergman is again striking out in a new direction, and though his failure of achievement cannot be excused by worthiness of intentions, it behooves us to understand what is at stake here. That Bergman is one of the supreme masters of the film about personal relationships, about the neuroses and psychoses men and women fall prey to both in seeking out and in trying to avoid involvements, no one in his right mind can deny. But Bergman has not been much concerned with politics, and some of the younger Swedish filmmakers have duly attacked him for his alleged elitist solipsism, his lack of social awareness. Now, Bergman has occasionally made more political films: e.g., the early This Can’t Happen Here (1950), of which he says that he did it only for the money; that he was dead tired and ill at the time, and turned it all “into a lot of crap.” A more recent political film, The Shame (1967), likewise failed to satisfy its maker, though many of us consider it one of his finest.