Bergman Island

What do women artists desire out of their craft?

The art of women is a strange blend of soul, introspection, mysticism, and actual object-making. The most accomplished art of women is rarely manifests itself as an objective, fully-formed external thing like men's art does; women's art never seems to depart from the artist – rather they are extensions that she grows upon her body, which reach out to the audience without ever achieving complete severance from the woman who authored it. Maybe J.K. Rowling is the only exception? Most other women write from a highly subjective point of view and are incapable of fully detaching themselves from the thing that they are crafting, or of creating an objective vision. Even Camille Paglia, a titan of cultural theory and an accomplished woman with great perceptive power, often slips in the occasional "I" into her scholarly writing. I wonder how men react to such works like Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher, Marguerite Duras's The Lover, Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir, Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, or Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island. Personally, I couldn't tell you what any one of these works was about, but I "get" them.

In French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve's Bergman Island, which I just watched last week though it was released in 2021, the overall import of the movie is not delivered through any ascending line of plot or action, but through little details, looks, nuances that are threaded into a cinematic environment revolving around a bilingual filmmaker couple on residency in Ingmar Bergman's house on the tiny island of Fårö, Sweden. Artists and their lives are already fascinating enough as material, and this movie doubly more so (to me, at least) because of how it complicates the narrative of the artist by contrasting the practices, tics, and routines of a male vs. female artist.

Upon setting up in their Bergman residency, Tony, the man, immediately lays claim first to "his space" in the house. Tony (played by a talented and believably gruff Tim Roth) is already mid-way through unpacking all his things in the first room he entered while Chris (the honey-voiced Julia Krieps) has been leisurely touring the house. He has taken what appears to be the main study in the house, replete with a large commanding window and a solid working table. When Chris saunters in after her tour of the house, he offers a half-apology for his entitlement by offering to move somewhere else if she'd prefer to have the space instead, but his tone suggests that it's not really up for discussion. Evidently they've already developed a routine of their own when it comes to spaces, in which Tony is the more decisive and straightforward one, but he maintains options open for Chris. Chris wanders off out of the main house and into a small, converted windmill-slash-guest house on the property and sets up camp there, in a space more simply furnished than Tony's and clearly functioning for more temporary purposes rather than long-term hunkering-down. Their writing utilities and routines develop in the same way. Chris makes intermittent, squirrelly notes in a softcover A5 notebook. She stares at her notebook, writes a few words, stares out the window, realises she's out of ink, wanders into the main house to get ink, peeks into Tony's notebook, wanders in and out of rooms, gets bored, takes the bike out to explore the town. Tony, meanwhile, writes with intense concentration into a large, square, hardcover journal (more similar in size to an artist's watercolour sketchbook than a writer's notebook). In his boredom, he doodles sexual acts and naked women – a habit that Chris, upon leafing through his journal, seems to react to with more embarrassment than jealous indignation, like seeing a porn site open on your son's laptop.

Like the movie, Chris meanders. The camera lingers upon Tony's notebook pages, conveying Chris's envy at his prodigious work habit and capacity for generating ideas. From the beginning of the movie, which opens with Chris crumpled up in Tony's lap from nausea due to turbulence on the plane to Sweden, we are provided with the impression that Tony is the more accomplished filmmaker of the two, an impression strengthened by his consistent presence and even-headedness throughout the film, even in a scene where Chris reveals that she'd been out gallivanting round the island with a younger film student. And yet, in a panel discussion following a screening of one of Tony's films at the Bergman Centre, Tony reveals that he largely tells his stories through the perspective of female characters because of a constant sense of vulnerability that he experiences. The short snippet of his film that we see is of a young woman running jaggedly down a dark road, chased by a car, with a butter knife in hand, banging for help on an abandoned shop in the middle of nowhere.

This brought to mind Camille Paglia's assertion in Sexual Personae that the artistic temperament is essentially androgynous in nature, with artists being natural transgenders. In a moment of creative block, Chris complains that writing appears to come so naturally to Tony while, for her, it is like "drawing blood out of a stone". Could this be the female artist equivalent to Tony's identification with feminine vulnerability? I get what she means, for me it's the same. Writing seems like a Herculean labour – indeed, my writing of this post now is because I'm procrastinating on writing something else that is much more pressing. Writing seems to require a massive exertion of stamina and focus in order to capture and pin down into words the impressions and thoughts that flash through one's mind. I strongly identify with cold-blooded characters like the piano teacher in the eponymous novel by Elfriede Jelinek, and Lydia Tár in the Todd Fields's Tár (note: a female character written by a male author); similarly, I identify with male characters a lot more than female ones, because I admire their callousness and boldness, the singular pursuit of the grand and ambitious, the indifference to the small and petty. (A nice detail in Bergman Island is when a young film student named Hampus tells Chris that he and his girlfriend got into a fight over Chris's last movie, because he loved it, but she hated it. His ex-girlfriend must have been someone like me.) But the inner world of woman is a finicky one, full of emotions that can't be explained yet rise unbidden in overwhelming waves. Is it merely because of social conditioning that women find it harder to control their tears? If a girl were raised exactly as boys are, could she actually train herself not to cry out of nowhere? I don't know about that. The inner life of woman consists entirely of this remembrances of small things... the casual indifference given in response to her frustration, the type of sunglasses that a character in a film wore, the look of a kindly stranger, the generous gesture that was offered with total indifference to the nature of the act... Like when they're on the ferry and Chris mentions that she might have left her sunglasses at the airport and Tony just passes her the glasses that he's wearing and turns back to the scenery... And Chris seems to pay him back by taking her turn in the driver's seat when the ferry docks... All of these little things, gestures, responses, this is the data that fills my mind and makes me practically indifferent as to whether a movie has a "plot" or not.

This is what the character of Tony ultimately cannot grasp, despite his identification with his feminine nature. When Chris is telling him of her idea for her movie, his mind wanders and his body language suggests he finds it boring, possibly because the plot of Chris's movie appears to be based on her own life and experiences with a previous lover, a fact which alienates Tony. When she expresses frustration at his indifference, when she demands him to tell her what she should do to end her movie, Tony quite rightly tells her: That's up to you. The woman, her hand and head filled with all her useless, precious data, demands of the man to give her direction and finality to her life. The man, who's been walking the entire time with his hands empty, can't understand why she insists on carrying all this stuff along and tells her to just drop it.

The woman cannot. It is in her very nature to gather, remember, and ruminate. But when one's subjective world is filled with so much Proustian data, the act of creating an object of ART for the consumption of others seems indeed like drawing blood from a stone. How do you get others to understand? What if the audience can't grasp what the big deal is if you don't throw in some action and violence that makes it literal? Ultimately, like Fellini's 8 1/2, the film gets made after all, and it's just a continuation of life... only instead of the procession of women, there's just the two lovers that characterised different halves of Chris's life, and the encyclopaedia of words, looks, and gestures that inducted her into a spectrum of emotions and revelations. Furthermore, the camera never gets swept away by these objects of beauty, spiralling off into a wistful beyond, but remains solidly held by the woman's subjectivity. The self abides; it is not a grand narrative about art or directing or love and life and ageing, but a story of true and particular things felt by Hansen-Løve (I imagine) as Chris as Amy.

Tony's movie ends abruptly with the his fictional, female stand-in meeting her pursuer and stabbing him in the stomach with a butter knife. This appears to be a metaphor for the director overcoming his inner feelings of vulnerability and triumphing over them using whatever tools are at his disposal. The actual ending of Bergman Island is, unfortunately, no less trite, with Hansen-Løve's fictional stand-in, Chris, reuniting with her young daughter. Whatever the director ultimately meant by the ending, it seems to suggest the inescapability of biological human nature, even in the elevated realm of art-making; that for men, the path to achievement lays in transcendent violence, while for women, the path lays in nurturing reproduction, expressed literally through the director's reunion with her daughter, and metaphorically through the director's "giving birth" to younger versions of herself in her fictional characters, each a new vessel for reexamining and sublimating her life's experiences.

Is a woman capable of creating something completely fantasised and alienated from herself, as many men are? Or is she perhaps destined for another, equally great task instead, being, as she is, the embodiment of the life principle? These are the questions that are always on my mind, and I suppose at some point you stop beating yourself up for not having the imaginative, projectile type of thought that men have, and start to figure out the things you're actually good at, the things that make you uniquely you. I am instinctively resistant towards anything that offers up motherhood and child-rearing as solace, so I can't accept the ending of Bergman Island (though of course it's not mine to "accept"), but I admire Hansen-Løve for creating such an honest and, not to mention, beautifully shot movie about the nature of feminine artistry, the relationships between artists of the two sexes, and how both can complement each other.