KINGFISHER SALUTES
INGMAR BERGMAN
and

The Bergman/Ullman Connection:

The Lovely Liv

Diabolical-Seeming Ingmar
(Read more)

Their major movies briefly reprised

Persona (1966)

Persona is a strange and disturbing movie and belongs to Bergman's early "dark" period. It stars Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, and the director reminds his audience through the film that they are watching a movie, an artist creation, and not "real life."

Ullmann has grown psychosomatically silent and Andersson is  a nurse hired as her companion and attendant. An intense relationship develops between the two women and they become, in a way, each other's persona. They change characters and roles.

The drama is an intense psychological thriller and has been said to make use of the Brechian alienation technique (whatever that is). And we recall Bergman's hospitalization during these years for mental illness of manic/depressive episodes.

The acting, however, elevates the plot to high theatricality.  In spite of its darkness (it is also shot is black and white), it is fascinating to watch the characters interact. Again Ullmann is magnificent.

Cries and Whispers (1973)

This is great theater and may be Bergman's best.  Ullmann plays both Maria and her mother.  Agnes, Maria's sister, is dying. (Harriet Andersson plays the part, and it is very high drama.) Ingrid Thulin plays Karin. Anna, the maid, is played magnificently by Kari Sywlan; she is both earth mother and nurse, and often steals the show from the more famous and accomplished actresses. But there is plenty of room for histrionics from them all, and yet the emotions are fully justified by the plot, for it is a complex and terrifying drama.

We watch transfixed as the dying Agnes groans and screams with loneliness and pain. Not for the squeamish.

Scenes From a Marriage (1974)
 

Bergman considers these three films among his best, and he's directed and produced about 65 movies.

All three star Liv Ullmann, with whom he lived and who bore them a daughter, Linn. A repertory company such as his included many fine actors and actresses who worked closely together for decades.  These included Erland Josephson, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson,  Harriet Andersson, Gunner Bjorstrand,  and Ingrid Thurlin. Sven Nyquist has been his cameraman since 1953 and is famous in  his own right.

My personal favorites are Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander. Both films exist in two separate releases and are available on DVD in both versions, along with interviews and narrations on the art of film making.

In Scenes from a Marriage, Marianne and  Johan have been married for 10 years and they have two daughters. She is pregnant again. Her husband talks her into getting an abortion. She does. But he has grown cold and distant; he finally tells her he is having an affair and plans to leave her. She is shattered. He leaves and runs away with the other woman, Paula. But he tires of her and tries to return to Marianne, who now  has a lover of her own. Plans for a divorce follow. They drink together and, for the first time, he beats her.

It is fascinating to watch the changes in Marianne. She goes from distraught and bewildered to confident and mature. The "theatrical" version is two and a half hours long; the original TV production, however, comprises six long sections and breaks into chapters, almost like a novel. It is nearly five hours in length. Its structure is very different, and scenes are allowed to develop more fully. It is much more satisfying to see.

Fanny and Alexander was also made for TV and later released in a so-called "theatrical" version. It is how Bergman chose to work from the mid-Seventies on. He reached a huge audience in his home country, Sweden--very much like The Sopranos in America. Reportedly, all normal work and social life stopped while the TV episodes were being aired.

What are the
greatest movies of all time?
How many are there, after nearly 100 years of movie making? Many, but only a few have achieved this wonderful status.

Tell us your favorite movies and maybe we will publish them. Or add some to our list. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any specific order:

1. Citizen Kane

2. Apocalypse Now Redux

3. The Godfather, part 1

4. Once Upon a Time in America

5. The Third Man

6. All That Jazz

7. Casablanca

8. Gandhi

9. Reds

10. Chinatown

11. House of Sand and Fog

12. Ordinary People

13. Gangs of New York

14. Mr. Hulot's Holiday

15. Cries and Whispers

The Second Tier

1. Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2002)

2. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofski 2000)

3. The Usual Suspects (1995)

4. Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino 1980)

5. Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

Kingfisher Journal Salutes:
 Jim Harrison, novelist and poet

Harrison, enjoying a hearty laugh before he got his badly needed upper plate

In his  book, Off to the Side, a Memoir, 2002, Jim Harrison writes:

"Why would anyone care about my memoir unless they directly cared about my novels and poems?"

Exactly. Overlooking the ungrammatical modernism of "anyone" [singular] and "they" [plural], now done all the time, Harrison asks the right question. And the answer is, we care and care a lot. He is one of the premier writers of my time, and perhaps yours. If not yours, perhaps he soon will be, and become a favorite.

Listening intently, watching suspiciously, preparing to disagree, or simply paying close attention? It's hard to tell from his veiled expression

more on Harrison. . .

Some of the Fiction
Wolf: A False Memoir,  Simon & Schuster NY 1971.

Wolf was Harrison's first novel. It was published on the heels of his poetry book and resembles Jack Kerouac's On The Road. It is the story of a young man's wanderings from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan's woods to a writer's Mecca, in the form of New York City and its Greenwich Village. And back again. Harrison admits in an aside that he's never seen a wolf (except perhaps in a zoo) and the title of the book is something of a joke, or a gimmick.

The movie of Wolf, released in 1994, in no way resembles the book. For some reason (perhaps at Director Mike Nichols's urging), Harrison and co-screen play writer Wesley Strick made it into just another werewolf movie. It cost, gasp, $70 million. Film critic Roger Ebert wonders where they spent all the money.  And so do I. Here is Ebert's description of the flick:

"Nebbish magazine executive Will Randall (Jack Nicholson) is fighting for his job. After he's bitten by a wolf, he becomes more competitive and energetic -- good news for his career,. but he's now a werewolf. While new boss Raymond (Christopher Plummer) wants to be rid of Will, his daughter Laura (Michelle Pfeiffer) turns Will's head. But werewolves kill the ones they love -- complicating director Mike Nichols's hip spin on the werewolf legend. "

None of these characters, and none of this plot, appear in the novel. There is no magazine, no publisher, no daughter, no competing editor, no nothing. And of course no wolf and no biting and no change into a werewolf.

Nobody seems to have noticed these discrepancies. That is because they didn't read the book. Did Mike Nichols even open it? Was he after a new vehicle for Jack Nicholson, who was Harrison's friend? One wonders and one remains baffled.

Jack Nicholson as the fiend in The Shining.  (Actually he looks much the same in Wolf, sans the  hair.)

Did Nichols have in mind Kubrick's The Shining of 14 years earlier? And why did Nicholson go along with it? In spite of the name similarity, Nichols is not Nicholson's dad. Apparently just a gig to all of them?

The book was sub-titled "A False Memoir." False indeed.
 

Legends of the Fall, Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, NY 1979.

This book is a trilogy of novellas: "Revenge," "The Man Who Gave Up His Name," and "Legends of the Fall."  Legends was made into a well-received movie.  And so was Revenge. Both were pretty good flicks, with stars in the major roles and good acting. And we can thank Harrison for good plotting.

This is the book that largely made Harrison's career. It led him to Hollywood and to screen writing as a means of making a more than comfortable living. It made him known as a writer of fiction and led to numerous magazine writing assignments. One was his adaptation of Legends for Esquire, whose monthly fiction was then considered the best in America. This made his name known.

He resurrected the novella as a viable literary form. Once considered too long to be published as a short story in a magazine, the novella was thought not to be long enough for book publication. What Harrison did was to bring three novellas together as a novel-length book. Of course it had been done earlier in American history.  (Think Henry James.) But the form was moribund until Harrison brought it back into life.

Harrison admits that the movies almost did him in. They flew him into Hollywood from Wherever and they flew him out. They paid him money like he had never seen before. There was lots of liquor, drugs, and rich food--all of which he had weaknesses for. He developed dependencies. He lost the zeal and special form of loneliness that led to good writing.

He became an American Success. And then he turned his back on it, on Them, and began to write novels again.

Dalva,  E.P. Dutton/Seymour Lawrence NY, 1988.

Harrison's voice is distinct, whether it is found in his poetry or in his fiction.

What we enjoy most about him is  his rich, first-person narration. It is always the same, yet in each book the narrator speaks with lyric assurance of a different person; in Dalva, it is a woman's voice--yet of course it has the measured cadences of Harrison we hear and enjoy:

"My name is Dalva. This is a rather strange name for someone from the upper mid-West but the explanation is simple. My father's older brother was a victim of rebellion and adventure magazines and was at odd times a merchant seaman, a prospector for gold and precious metals, and finally a geologist. Late in the great depression Paul was somewhere in the interior of Brazil from which he returned, after squandering most of his earnings in Rio, to the farm with some presents including a 78 rpm record of the sambas of that period. One of the sambas--in Portuguese of course--was "Estrella Dalva," or "Morning Star," and my parents loved the song. Naomi, my mother, told me that on warm summer evenings she and my father would put the record on the Victrola and dance up and down the big front porch of the farmhouse. My uncle Paul had taught them what he said was the samba before he disappeared again." [pp.4-5]

And so it begins, the convoluted tale spun by a master story-teller. We are enthralled, or, at least I am.

I suppose there are some who could put the book down at this early point, but I am not one of them.

The Shape of the Journey: New & Collected Poems, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 1998.

What Harrison's early fiction  has going for it is an engaging style and a lot of quick couplings. Travel, rumination, fishing and hunting asides, but most of all his distinct sound, his unique voice. And his chief feature is his ability to tell a story and make it interesting.

The same narrative voice is heard throughout his poetry and, to me, indicated a prosy quality that for a long time distracted and annoyed me. I have come to peace with it, over the decades, and have come to enjoy it greatly. It is quintessential Harrison. His fiction has helped me to appreciate his poems.

Copper Canyon Press has brought all the separate poetry books together and made them available in a single volume. The press is doing this with a number of fine poets (W. S. Merwin is one) whose works have slowly gone out of print over a long career. The press is to be commended.

Here they are, all of Harrison's poems up to the publication date. They show a good, clear voice--the sound of a man who knows exactly what he is talking about.

Originally he thought of himself as a poet, but turned to fiction to support himself, his wife, and his two young daughters.

(See "The Old Days," reprinted entirely in the right column, and on page two, for some recent fine, free-ranging poetry. The reach of Harrison's imagination is remarkable.)

Robert C. Arnold
Editor

POETRY SECTION

The Old Days
by Jim Harrison
 

In the old days it stayed light until midnight

and rain and snow came up from the ground

rather than down from the sky. Women were easy.

Every time you'd see one, two more would appear,

walking toward you backwards as their clothes dropped.

Money didn't grow in the leaves of trees but around

the trunks in calf's leather money belts

though you could only take twenty bucks a day.
 

Certain men flew as well as crows while others ran

up trees like chipmunks. Seven Nebraska women

were clocked swimming upstream in the Missouri

faster than the local spotted dolphins. Basenjis

could talk Spanish but all of them chose not to.

A few political leaders were executed for betraying

the public trust and poets were rationed a gallon

of Burgundy a day. People only died on one day             

a year. . .

 (for more of this poem, click here)
 

Hunting and fishing are important to Harrison. Here he is pictured with one of his female yellow Labs, about which he writes frequently. (But, really Jim, not on the sofa?)

Jim Harrison. . .

Memoir

Off to the Side: A Memoir New York: Grove Press, 2002

Harrison writes candidly about his early years in his memoir, Off To The Side. In fact he is pretty naked throughout his autobiography, which takes up to the early years of the new century, a time when he gave up on Hollywood and screen writing and returned to his first love, the novel both long and short.

It is what he perhaps does best: writing fiction. The voice we hear narrating both his fiction and poetry is clearly and unmistakably his own. It is uniquely Harrison. It is the sound of a man who has matured personally and stylistically, that is, in how he crafts and tells his complex stories, and how he writes  his poems.

As a young man, he spent a lot of time around the Michigan State University at East Lansing. He speaks of himself as a poor student, but this is not true. It's just that his creative, or "beat" side, was foremost, and he was not of the scholarly cast. Even so, he is extremely well read, and not modest about it. Writers--lit majors--feel they have to conquer the best of what has been said by previous generations. Harrison had to read Joyce, Pound, Faulkner, Gide, Dostoevsky, Kafka, in order to learn how to say what he had to say. And also his near-contemporaries--Kerouac, Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and the poets Lowell, Roethke, Auden, Yeats, and so many more. Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder, too.

This led to a ragged life. He taught some (the deadly English for Foreign Students, in which neither side seems to benefit, and it would be funny if it was not so dead-seriously horrible), and took a desperation job in the English Department at Stony Brook in New York State. He hated it, hated English Departments in general, with their cold, deadly competitiveness. He described it as having all the charm of a street fight in which nobody lands a punch. (Not bad description, I'd say, I who am a victim of a couple of such places.)

And yet it was here, close to NYC, where an accident led to his meeting Denise Lermontov, who was living in the apartment of his friend Galway Kinnell, whom he contacted about reading some of his poetry. She offered to read ten of his poems and, excited by them, asked to see more. She sent them on to W. W. Norton, where she was poetry consultant, and they enthusiastically agreed to publish them in book form. It is a firm that is strong in the world of poetry.

With a book of poems under his belt, he found himself strengthened in the new field of poet in residence. After decades of neglect, published poets had become academic darlings, and had found that not only could they make a living indirectly from their writings but lucrative university careers awaited them.

It was a whole new ballgame, only Harrison disliked the game and was determined to write books. Fiction was how money was made in America, not by writing poetry. So he began to write fiction in earnest. But poetry continued to fill in the gaps between and among stories.

He made his stories entertaining and believable; soon the novellas led to script-writing jobs in Hollywood. Some of these were involved dramatizing his own stories. During this period he met many of the leading literary and film-making figures of his day, such as Jack Nicholson, who was a friend and benefactor to many at a time when they badly needed one.

What could be better? Time would tell, and Harrison tells us in straightforward detail about this world of money, booze, and cocaine. He was to turn away from it in time and return to the woods of Northern Michigan and his wife and two daughters, who had put up with a lot of guff in the previous years.

He says without them and their steadfastness he probably wouldn't have survived. His earnestness in his memoir cannot be doubted. As always, Harrison is a good read.

BACK ISSUES of Kingfisher Journal
(Available only online)

<sub>Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 1, Poet Robert Sund Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 2, Iridescent Light Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 3, Sylvia Plath Issue;

Kingfisher Journal Vol.1, No. 4, James Wright Issue

Kingfisher Journal Vol.2, No.1, Richard Hugo Issue

Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 1, Theodore Roethke Commemorative Issue</sub>

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 2, No 3, W.S. Merwin/Richard Ford issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol.2, No. 4, Fishtown Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, William Stafford Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 2, David Wagoner Edition}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol. 3, No. 3, Edna O'Brien Issue}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 3, No. 4 Anthony Powell and Donald Justice issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 1, Robert Sund and Graham Greene Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 2 Saul Bellow  and Robert Creeley Issue.}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol 4, No. 3 Philip Whalen and Vincent Van Gogh Issue.}

_{Kingfdisher Journal, Vol. 4, Number 4, J. M. Coetzee, W. S. Merwin, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter)}

_{Kingfisher Journal, Vol.5, Number 1, Poet Frank O'Hara and Artist Larry Rivers}