Hour of the Wolf (1968)

Not rated, but the movie gets pretty dark.  In some ways, this is a horror movie.  But there's also some nudity, in typical Bergman fashion in the context of adultery.  There's also a couple of grizzly murders in this one.  To add a little more spice, these are nightmarish images that seem more insane than normal.  Once again, a Bergman movie not for kids.  For all those kids who are Jonesing for Ingmar Bergman deep cuts.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I don't know how much I have in me.  In a perfect world, I knock this blog out and I read a crap ton before the ball drops in Times Square.  Thus, I will enter 2025 as the most accomplished human being that ever lived.  I know.  None of this matters.  I'm already pretty darned accomplished.  If you look at the Film Index, you know that I'm not exactly joking when it comes to being self-motivated.

Hour of the Wolf might be my official entry into the weirder Bergman movies.  I'm going to make a confession that I've been dancing around for a while.  A couple of years ago (I think!) I watched Persona.  Persona was an incredibly frustrating film that hit my specific annoyance when it comes to surreal filmmaking.  I'd like to point out that Persona came out two years before Hour of the Wolf.  Bergman has earned a reputation, in the best way possible, of being a difficult director to pin down.  This entire blog, with its casual tone, lack of research, and laissez-faire attitude to proofreading, might not be the best place to unpack Ingmar Bergman.  Some of my blogs regarding his films might be too informal for someone who is universally recognized as one of the masters of cinema.  But when I wrote my Persona blog, I apparently crapped the bed pretty hard with my read on that film.  It's difficult!  It's an incredibly difficult film!  I think that the Criterion box gave me a lot of the Bergman softballs up to this point.  But between From the Life of the Marionettes and Hour of the Wolf being on the same disc, I think I might be in some of the more challenging works of Bergman.  I'm still mortified that I got called out on Persona.  But that being said, I think I still have to take wide swings when it comes to challenging cinema.  If I didn't, I can't promise that I was really engaging with the film itself.  What I'm saying is that if I'm off on my read of Hour of the Wolf or any of the following Bergman films, I'd like to apologize.  But I also would like to say that it makes blogging more interesting.  When I have a ho-hum read on something obvious, how is that interesting writing?

Now, I tend to shy away from movies that get weird for weird's sake.  I know.  Again, I'm being entirely flippant over something that is much smarter than I am.  Out of the weirder movies that I watched, Hour of the Wolf isn't terrible.  Maybe I'm being a hypocrite.  Maybe I really wanted to like it, thus I liked it.  But Hour of the Wolf does commit some of the sins of cinema that tend to bother me.  I'm going to lean hard into this read of the movie pretty hard, mainly because I have a modicum of evidence to support this read.  First of all, Hour of the Wolf is fictional even if Bergman started with a note that it was based on reality.  That's Wikipedia for you.  But even more than that, I have to say that this is another movie that is based on dreams and nightmares.  I don't know why these movies tend to get under my skin like they do.  If cinema is meant to discuss the human condition, dreams are part of the human experience.  (I'm really standing by that a lot of this movie is a dream rather than simply existential or fantasy.) But I also am rarely moved by the notion of dream imagery in film.  It hits a lot of the same issues I have when it comes to people telling me their dreams.  Dreams are weird and incredibly subjective.  Watching them in films doesn't really do a lot for me.  Hour of the Wolf does a decent job with them because the imagery is strong and it reflects many of the themes of the film.  But still...dream imagery.

Before I spiral out of this, I do want to stand by the notion that Bergman is cataloguing dreams more than he is going in other directions.  The title of the movie is Hour of the Wolf, which I didn't know much about going into this.  I would like to stress that I go into most Bergman movies completely blind.  But there is a almost mid-film break where we get the title card once again, followed up by Max Von Sydow explaining the title explicitly.  Now, Hour of the Wolf refers to the time when there are the most deaths, the most births, the time that people tend to have a hard time sleeping.  But most importantly, it is also the time that people have nightmares.  Yeah, I'm ignoring all of the other things that happen during the Hour of the Wolf, but I like the nightmare as the hard right turn that this movie makes.  "But, Tim," you may ask.  "Why would Alma be going through the same thing?"  I mean, I got two reads on this?  I do think that something supernatural is happening.  More psychological than supernatural, but you get where I'm going with this.  But also, there is this repeated line that couples that are together long enough start mirroring each other.  When Johan starts going mad, it's not surprising that Alma starts having a shared experience with that.  After all, the movie stresses that Alma is killed by Johan's pistol only to have Alma confess that only one of the bullets grazed her.  Yet, she goes through that nightmare in the woods stemming out of Johan's nightmarish experience in the large house.

I'm tempted to have each Bergman movie offer a different read on monogamy.  Each story shows the misery of marriage.  If anything, there are a lot of shades of Scenes from a Marriage happening here, even down to Liv Ullmann shouting at her abusive husband, Johan.  I'm now really concerned if there is an actual Johan out there and why he's always a terrible husband.  In this one, we get an almost entirely innocent wife, Alma.  But there's something matter-of-factual about the burden that monogamy places on a husband.  I can't ignore the fact that Johan is in the arts.  He's this frustrated artist who can't stand to be in this marriage with this lesser woman.  (I'm commenting on the film and in no way believe what he believes.)  He is so frustrated by Alma's goodness towards him that he attempts to murder her. Once again, there's something attempting to be sympathetic towards this jerk of a man.  But --and this is my read on this take of monogamy --his life is so much worse after he murders his wife.  The slaying of Alma is an afterthought to the nightmare that he encounters when he goes to the big house in search of his former lover Veronica Vogler.  There's never an expression of regret.  Instead, we get a lot of fear of the other guests at the party.  The entire scenario becomes like a macabre circus, down even to the clownish feminine makeup he dons.  I get a bit of Bergman griping about monogamy and marriage, only to understand that it is better than being alone or pursuing former flames who manipulate him into being something that he doesn't want to be.  We are still left with the notion that humanity is a terrible thing, but there are levels to the Hell that he is in.

I'm still trying to piece together why I don't hate this movie.  I think I was getting so annoyed by the same style of Bergman movie that I needed to get into the heavier stuff.  But I also think that, as difficult as Hour of the Wolf gets, there's something of the old fashioned horror story to this one.  The movie dances around the notion that there is something supernatural to this island.  Both Alma and Johan attend that first party where they get the marionette opera featuring real actors.  It's meant to be bizarre and the haunting thing is that no one treats the surreal as surreal.  Instead, there is the burden of the artist to accept the unreal as grounded.  Part of that might be the frustration that Johan feels as an artist.  The world is so much greater than he is able to capture that he must internalize his own fear until he becomes part of the madness parade.  Now I'm getting into weirder and into stuff that has less authority.  Still, as a horror movie, it's pretty good.  Here's how weird it gets.  I know that there are no wolves in this movie.  But with a title Hour of the Wolf, the movie wouldn't have surprised me if it turned into a good, old-fashioned, werewolf film.  

I don't know how generous I'll be later in the Bergman collection.  I feel like I've been writing about Bergman movies for so long and that I've made a ton of progress.  But in reality, I'm on Disc 9 out of 30.  That's not a lot.  Sure, I jumped around a bit and some of the Bergman movies have already been written about.  Still, I guess I'm ready to get into some more challenging stuff, even if I don't feel confident about many of them.   But Hour of the Wolf mostly works if for imagery alone.