Scandinavian film (1952)

(1946) concerned the efforts of two young people — honest but clumsy citizens— to come to terms with a community which seems intent on making life difficult for them. Despite the light satirical note in Bergman's treatment there was no doubt where his sympathies lay. In Skepp till Indialand (1947), adapted from a play by Martin Soderhjelm, the conflict between the generations was more specifically dramatized in the persons of the skipper of a small salvage vessel, his hunchback son whom he despises, and the girl whom he brings on board and whose sympathy for the deformed youth grows into love. A film finely acted by Birger Malmsten, Gertrud Fridh, and Holger Lowenadler was suffused with a bitter poetry. Music i Morker (1947), adapted from a novel by Dagmar Edqvist, had a similar quality in its story of a blind youth and his love for a lowly-born girl. Mai Zetterling and Birger Malmsten helped to give it a strong emotional appeal. The most pointed expression of his theme was given in Hamnstad (1948), adapted from a story by Olle Lansberg and set in the dockland of Gothenburg. Here the young girl who is its central figure, bears the marks of a conflict which has continued over many years between her father and mother, and a flash-back to an earlier period in her life helps to establish the relationship. An association with a sailor seems to offer an easy escape from the community which has brought them so much unhappiness, but they decide to stay and solve their problems together — a characteristic conclusion for a Bergman film. In contrast to the films which preceded it, Hamnstad had a harsh quality and Bergman used the abrupt transitions from exterior to interior to intensify the violence of its attack. Torst (1949), adapted by Herbert Grevenius from the short stories of Birgit Tengroth, gave Bergman an opportunity to vary the background of his familiar theme. The film opens in a Basle hotel and as the train carrying the chief characters travels across war-devastated Germany, the story moves backwards and forwards in time to expose and reveal. Bergman made exciting symbolic use of wrecked masonry to suggest the disharmony and frustration of life, before his young people reached a characteristic conclusion that more difficult to bear than anything else is loneliness. Bergman both wrote and directed Fdngelse (Prison) (1949), a film which concentrated the essence of what he had been endeavouring to express in his earlier work. Fdngelse opened in a film studio with a project for a film on the theme that hell is here on earth and that the devil rules the world, and continued, after the director has rejected the idea, with his discovery of an analogy in the lives of people he knows. Whether or not we accept it, as one Swedish critic did, as 'a confounding and inspiring embroidery on the theme that life is a hell which moves in a cruel and voluptuous arc from birth to death', there is no doubt about either the challenge of Bergman's idea or the imaginative power behind its expression. In this film Bergman achieved, as writer-director, a command of the medium which is rare in the cinema. It proved that he had cut clear from many of the conventions of film technique and brought his ideas to the screen with a vital and compelling 29