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The Passion of Anna [VHS]

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'The Passion of Anna' sometimes feels like a compendium of Bergman films, such as 'The Seventh Seal' (Max Von Sydow struggling to find meaning in an apocalyptic environment), 'Persona' (Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson as two women suffering on a remote island) and 'Hour of the Wolf' (Von Sydow, living with Ullmann on a remote island, tempted by sophisticated strangers led by Erland Josephson).

But though the film deals with the many of those films' themes - emotional violence, power mind-games, dissatisfaction, ennui, exile - it somehow seems lighter, less like spending two hours on a (nerve) rack. This may be because though the title refers to two kinds of passion - an overwhelming love for or interest in something, and a journey of trials and sufferings leading to some kind of redemption - it features a hero who is removed from either.

A gruesome mystery element soon intrudes, as an unknown figure starts slaughtering all the animals on the island. This element performs at least two functions - by asking the question, who is this madman, it forces us to look more closely at our characters; and it creates an apocalyptic feel that is an appropriate backdrop to the characters' mental deterioraton or fatigue, while also suggesting a wider, largely unseen social framework against which these isolated figures exist.

It also contributes to the film's bleak colour scheme - though in colour, the film's winter setting is all brown and grey, with big black bare trees, swathes of mud and stone, dirty smudges of snow. This has obvious symbolic value - just as we first meet Von Sydow repairing his roof, as if trying to paper the cracks in his mind; so we see him alone, sometimes drunk, in this huge, empty landscape, peopled only by dead animals, elusive madmen and an unseen mob.

As is typical with Bergman, the film is full of narrative games or interruptions, such as the actors commenting on their roles, trying to encapsulate coherence while their director proliferates the unknown; and Ullmann's monochrome nightmare, increasing the sense of medieval plague, is a figure for a malaise much closer to home.

This is one of the very few films that I came out of the theater crawling *under* the carpet... And I still find it disturbing - and at the same time or perhaps exactly because enlightening. Many of Bergman's films of that time dealt with the inherent self-destructiveness of the "human condition"; but most of them also had a plot element that involved an external destructive force: war (The Seventh Seal, Shame), the proximity of death (Wild Strawberries) and so on. Even Hour of the Wolf, the one that comes closest to Passion, has the "wolves" - the coterie that seduces Max von Sidow's character into reliving, facing, and ultimately succumbing to, his inner demons (by the way, make sure that your version of Hour of the Wolf includes the posface, "look, this is a movie, and we just wrapped it up, it's not real, you see, these people are just characters in a movie played by 'normal' people - but the demons will stay with you, cause they're not really ours, they're your own").

Not so Passion. Here, there is no outward force pushing these people - these "normal", whatever their personal demons, people - towards inescapable destruction. There is the wanton, unresolved slaughter of animals; but this doesn't touch the characters, no more than the everyday "slaughter of the lambs" that surrounds much of our lives does us except to at most evoke a vague disquiet, let alone drive them. They're doomed; always were. Nothing can save them. Not love, or the forlorn illusion of, not a bourgeois life surrounded by creature comforts, not even outburts of personal violence. There is simply no redemption.

For the "passion" is not "a" passion, but *the* passion, the passion that drives us all, and indeed all life: the endless collision and collusion between Life and Death, that sets down the boundaries within which we, like Von Sydow's character at the film's closing, must forever pace back and forth.

Bergman's "Passion of Anna" (more accurately and originally titled "A Passion") is an overlooked gem. One of Bergman and Nykvist's first forays into color, the film continues the themes explored in "Persona," "Hour of the Wolf" and "Shame" immediately before. Von Sydow's Andreas Winkelman is a man spiritually adrift in his bleak island landscape. By chance he meets Anna (Liv Ullmann), his morally adrift match, and her friends (played by Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson). Each of these people has secrets; some that will be revealed--intentionally or not--through mistakenly left letters, overheard telephone conversations and passed-on heresay. Anna's story about her loving husband's misfortune--it turns out--may have, in fact, been at her hand. Meanwhile, a maniac is loose on the island, torturing and killing animals. Could it be one of the four characters in our story? As always, the acting is top-notch. Ullmann, for instance, telegraphs Anna's self-deluding lies through the blushing Nykvist's camera masterfully captures in close-up. The ending (which won't ruin the movie by revealing) is an ingenius construction. Von Sydow's Andreas--completely stripped of his pride and character paces back and forth within the bleak terrain of the camera's frame. Bergman/Nykvist simultaneously zooms in slowly while pulling back optically at the same rate. The result is a "flattening" of the image in which Andreas literally disolves into the grain of the film. Bleak... but brilliant. I await this film's release on DVD!

People who aren't "turned off" & disgusted by the current state of the world (enviromentally, politically, culturally, sociologically, etc.) will immediately understand this film and appreciate its beauty! Upon the first time seeing it, I felt it was unfocused and confused. The second time, when it occured to me that these people were living in front of the backdrop of something emotionally emasculating (random slaughtering, War, whatever you want to supplement), I realized what a masterpiece this film is. That uneasy feeling that life is unraveling all around you, that human beings are destroying each other, even though you don't directly see it...Bergman captures that feeling beautifully.

The interviews in the film bothered me for a while, but then I started to view them (and commend Bergman's brillance) as Brechtian distancing effects, as if Bergman is saying: "yes, live vicariously through these people, but after all they're just characters representing something, but they are NOT these people, so what???". Fantastic!

If you don't already own this and you love Bergman, what's wrong with you???

There's a lot going on in this movie, maybe too much. Andreas (Max Von Sydow), running away from some obscure disgrace, has come to live in a mildly dilapidated farmhouse on a small island. Bergman is working in color in this movie, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist is up to the challenge. He paints with an end of winter palette, the browns of wet, muddy ground, the gray of soupy overcast, the weak blue of late winter skies, the grey/white of dirty snow. Andreas moves through this bleak landscape with a look of stolid suffering on his face.

His solitude is broken by a woman who comes to his door and asks to use the phone. This woman, Anna, (Liv Ullman) makes her call and leaves, but forgets her purse. Curious, Andreas peeks into the purse and reads a letter from a man, obviously a lover, saying that he can't continue their relationship. Andreas returns the purse to the house where Anna is staying and gets invited in to dinner with Anna and the couple who live there, Eva and Elis (Bergman regulars Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson). We learn that Anna's been in a bad car accident, one in which her husband and son were killed.

In an unusual move for him, Bergman films the dinner scene as pure improvisation, allowing each of the actors a few glasses of wine and a few minutes of dinner table philosophizing. He also pulls us out of the film on four separate occasions to have each of the four main actors analyze the characters they're playing. Since he typically kept tight control of the lines his actors spoke, this openness suggests that Bergman is asking the cast to help him find the heart of this movie.

Andreas has a brief affair with Eva, but both of them seem to realize there's no center to it. Then, abruptly, we learn that Andreas and Anna have moved in together. Anna's passion is for honesty. She doesn't want anything to do with evasion or deception. But in Andreas she's tied in to a man with a hazy past and no real desire to lay his emotional cards on the table. After they've lived together relatively peaceably, Anna reveals that it was she who was driving the day her husband and son were killed. A little while later, Andreas tells her his soul is dead and he can't find the will or the reason to go on with her.

There's a subplot about an unknown psychopath loose on the island who murders and mutilates animals. We're never quite sure what this senseless slaughter means, other than to highlight the many ways in which those who are living wage war on life. In his soul-baring speech, Andreas compares humans to animals, sentient but silent about the suffering they endure.

By the movie's end, Andreas discovers that Anna's passion for honesty is a way of masking her madness, and that he is potentially her victim as well as her lover. The final shot is unforgettable. Anna has driven off, and Andreas, alone, paces back and forth on the road like a caged animal. His cage isn't physical; it's the consciousness of his condition that he can't escape. As he sinks to the muddy ground, the camera slowly zooms in, losing focus as it does so, until the image dissolves into grainy incoherence. Another of Bergman's existential antiheroes bites the dust, disintegrating before our eyes.

Many of Bergman's major preoccupations are on display in this film: the splintering of personality under stress; the emptiness of a world from which God has withdrawn; the inability of men and women to rescue one another from their self-created prisons; the porous boundaries between art and life. But the tight dramatic structure of his other major films from this period is missing here. The story has a resolution of sorts, but the bigger questions about the characters - how Anna got trapped in her peculiar mania, how Andreas got lost in a fog of emotional emptiness - stay unanswered. Eva and Elis have major roles in the first part of the film, and then disappear halfway through the story. And who killed all those sheep, cows and horses anyway, and why?

You're carried along moment to moment by the fine acting and often startling imagery. It's only when the film stops rolling and the lights come up that you wake and wonder whether Bergman himself understood what story he wants to tell. When held to the highest standard of world cinema - his own work - The Passion of Anna ranks as good but not transcendent Bergman.

Hearing about the recent death yesterday of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman I felt compelled to review one of the master's films as a sort of tribute. But which one? I've reviewed so many of his films on Amazon. "Wild Strawberries", "The Seventh Seal", "Persona", "Scenes From A Marriage" and "Fanny and Alexander". Then I suddenly thought about this movie.

Bergman was and still is my all time favorite director. No filmmaker in the history of cinema has shown the human condition in such poetic ways. Many times when watching a Bergman film it is as if we are staring into a mirror of society. Moments become so realistic we turn away. It's uncomfortable when faced with such grim truths. I've always thought that was the strenght of films such as "Scenes From A Marriage", the most intense film I have ever seen on the subject of love and marriage.

Though there were those who claimed Bergman was pretentious. His work was boring and depressing. I suppose that's the risk you run when you make films concerning man's relationship to God and question the very existence of God's being. But, I must admit, so called "depressing" films never depress me. After you watch a great film, say "Cries and Whispers", which is undoubtedly a sad movie, I never felt depressed afterwards. When I watch a great work of art I become inspired. It's like after reading a good book, you find that you want to share your discovery with others. You tell all you see about it. That's how I feel about movies. You may think of them as depressing but I become moved by them. It could be because I'm a filmbuff and an amateur filmmaker, but great art doesn't depress me.

Ingmar Bergman made a career out of asking the big questions. His films were either about the relationships between men and women, i.e. "Scenes From A Marriage", "Secrets of Women", "A Lesson in Love" or about man's place in the world and God's silence which surrounds us as was the case with his "faith trilogy"; "Winter Light", "Through A Glass, Darkly", and "The Silence". "The Passion of Anna" falls somewhere inbetween.

The first image we see in "The Passion of Anna" is of a flock of sheep. Next we meet Andreas Winkelman (Max von Sydow) as is does some roof repairs. Andreas we discover lives the life of a hermit. His wife left him and he is faced with financial woes. One day a lady, Anna (Liv Ullman) comes to his door asking if she can use his phone. He agrees and lets her in.

There's something about Anna that intrigues Andreas. There is a sense of sadness on her face. Anna was in a car accident with her husband and son and now walks with a limp. She speaks fondly of her marriage. All she has are her memories since her husband and son died in the accident.

Anna lives with Eva and Elis Vergerus (the beyond beautiful Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson). And Andreas strikes up a friendship with Elis and soon finds himself having an affair with Eva which ends soon as Andreas starts to see Anna.

Now while all of this is going on a madman has been killing animals in this empty village. Sheep are found mutilated, Andreas finds a dog that was hung, a barn is set on fire killing all the cattle. The townspeople try to investigate what is going on and soon blame a friend of Andreas, Johan (Erik Hell).

There is a parable between the destruction of the animals and the slow, emotional destruction of the characters in the film.

But Bergman never answers the question of who is behind the killing of the animals. It always remains a faceless, unseen person. I think the statement Bergman is making is that it is mankind who is killing the animals and everything else. Mankind has violent tendencies within him.

At times Bergman breaks the dramatic tension he builds in scenes by showing us interviews of the actors speaking about their characters. While at first this may distract some viewers or at the very least confuse some, I think this device works on two levels. For one, it is a reminder this is all only a movie. Bergman did something similar at the beginning of his film "Persona". But the interviews also serve another function. One of the themes of "The Passion of Anna" is self-examination and having the actors speak of their characters gets this point across. During Max von Sydow's interviews he says of his character, he tries to block out his identity. And soon we think of that first image of sheep. Are these characters like the sheep? A flock of wandering, aimless people who simply get lost in the flock? One sheep looks like the next, thus losing their identity.

"The Passion of Anna" is a movie dealing with some strong themes. Violence and God's silence is one of them. These characters are surrounded by violence. First the violence against the animals, the violence Anna witness after the crash which killed her family (it is one of the most painful scenes in the film), and the violence which in inflicted upon Johan. And through it all, where is the justice? Where is God? This all culminates to a powerful ending between Andreas and Anna.

During the seventies it seemed as if Bergman could do no wrong. Starting the decade with this film he would also release "The Touch", "Cries and Whispers", "Scenes From A Marriage", "The Magic Flute" and "Face to Face" among others. "The Passion of Anna" won Bergman a National Society Film Critics award for "best director" and was placed on Siskel & Ebert's top ten films of the year list.

Bergman will be missed by film lovers all over the world. His films will not be forgotten and will continue to inspire young filmmakers for years to come.

Bottom-line: One of the great Bergman films dealing with self-examination, violence and God. Powerful performances and beautiful cinematography highlight this Bergman masterpiece.

I would have to agree with Marc Gervais when he says on the documentary to this movie that it is perhaps one of Bergman's most successful efforts of the period. Persona opened the door, but 'the passion of anna' completely explodes with innovation. This is one of Bergman's first color movies - and Sven Nykvist proves that he is also a master in this medium.

This is a fascinating psychological exploration, and unflinching statement into man 's hidden dragons of the human being and the always unstoppable tendency toward the self destruction. Four people, a desert island, will interact showing their fears,insecurities, frustrations, emotive status and personal bunkers.

In a very similar way employed by Bergman in Persona, he maintains an increasing physical tension with his accustomed and inimitable style.

Personally, I recommend to watch the following tetralogy in this order: The hour of the wolf, Persona, The passion of Anna and finally Shame, because as you know Strindberg 's influence is more than obvious.

An unforgettable film!

After having seen Woody Allen's INTERIORS I was so impressed by the direction. I found out that Allen was paying homage to Bergman and at the time I was just finding out about all sorts of different movies, I was 14 at the time so this was so amazing to me and still is. Afterwards I sought out movies by Bergman but I was always a little afraid of being dissappointed (I had recorded THE SEVENTH SEAL on TV but I thought I ought to take baby steps in terms of getting to know Bergman so I did not see it). But finally I decided to start with THE PASSION OF ANNA and now every week I rent at least two Bergman movies from my library. The direction is genius! I love the way Bergman doesn't try to hype up events. He just lets everything unravel in a natural way. Whenever someone in this movie is saying something regarding their emotional state or past experiences, etc. Bergman lets their emotions shine through and he presents us with intimate close ups of their faces so that we can observe every bit of the emotions that the character is going through. Other directors prefer to use music and other methods which I am not condemning, I actually like some of the other methods that other directors use but I had never seen a movie in which the director let everything happen so naturally, as if it weren't even a movie but a documentery though the look of the movie is not realistic, it looks like a movie but it doesn't feel like one. Bergman gives us a stark and compelling movie about these 4 people who are going through the motions and how they affect each other's lives. Max von Sydow plays a widower who lives a very mechanical life until he gets in involved in the lives of three other people and they are played by Bibi Anderson, Erland Josephson and finally Liv Ullmann as Anna. von Sydow and Ullmann I thought were particularly great. It's hard for an actor to play a man who is emotionally hollow to a certain degree but von Sydow does it perfectly. Ullmann plays a woman who is still suffering after effects of the deaths of her husband and child and who ends up looking for solace in von Sydow's character. She shows great measure of desperation and sadness in her performance without being showy. And the cinematography is very beautiful if a bit depressing to those who hate gray skies. And the lack of music gives it a very strange feeling like I mentioned before. And Bergman uses an interesting method of showing short interviews with each of the four actors with them discussing their characters. I found this to be a bit daring because Bergman ran the risk of breaking the suspension of disbelief of the audience but personally I felt it just made me go deeper into their lives and selves. I can see why Woody Allen idolizes this guy.

Master director Ingmar Bergman tells a story about four people who meet on a small Scandinavian island. All four are in a sort of self-imposed exile. Middle aged, worn out from life experiences and throwen into each other's company they form a bond that forces them together as much as it separates them apart.

Andreas is a loner, living on the island with limited income and increasing dread of loneliness. Anna on the other hand is a widow whose son and husband died in a car accident and she was seriously injured. Anna's friends, married couple of intellectuals are nursing thier troubling marriage intermingeled with codependency.

Bergman explores theme of truth in this film. What is truth, how do we as individuals perceive it and do we make out our own truth in order to avoid daily suffering of our seemingly ordinary life? And if the truth is accepted only in terms we are ready to accept it, does that lead person to madness? Is it possible for love to survive such maddness?

Such explorations are unique to Bergman and his fabulous cast of actors deliver a memorable performance.