Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman by Alexis Luko

2019; Baldwin Wallace University; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bach.2019.0009

2767-4843

Elsie Walker,

Visual Culture and Art Theory

Reviewed by: Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman by Alexis Luko Elsie Walker (bio) Alexis Luko. Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (New York: Routledge, 2016). 292 pages. Alexis Luko begins her exemplary study of music and sound in the films of Ingmar Bergman with advice from the director himself: "listen and you shall hear." Anyone reading her book will perceive how closely she has pressed her ears against Bergman's films, and will marvel at the exactitude as well as the sensitivity of her approach. She teaches us to hear Bergman's life, work, spirit, ambition, and uniqueness better. Her study also tells us a great deal about how much Bergman's work resonates with the sounds of other aurally minded creators (notably August Strindberg) and reverberates with the many musical influences upon him. Drawing upon a multitude of sources, Luko makes a strong case for Bergman as "aural auteur." Luko first examines biographical details to establish Bergman's complex standing in a sonic world: his particular attachment to the piano, his gleeful imagining of himself as a conductor, his becoming deaf in the right ear from military duty, his suffering from hyperacusis (a hypersensitivity that makes normal sounds painfully amplified) (4), his stuttering problem as a child, his living with the mandatory religious music of his father's ministerial life, and his celebrated direction of operettas and operas after having served as production assistant to the Royal Swedish Opera. Luko does not use her auteurist analysis to isolate Bergman in ways that obfuscate the realities of collaboration; along with considering his individual experiences, she explores the numerous sonic collaborations that would shape so much of Bergman's legacy. She explores precisely how he worked closely with radio personnel, opera singers, orchestras, dancers, and composers, and how much he learned from his second wife, the celebrated concert pianist Käbi Laretei, with whom he shared a particular love of J. S. Bach. Luko also illuminates just how musically Bergman imagined cinema, much of which he developed from musical influences: his hearing Carl Orff's Carmina Burana in counterpoint with the buzz of an electric shaver provided the creative inspiration for The Seventh Seal (1957); The Silence (1963) "began with a piece of music, Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra"; Cries and Whispers (1972) was "spawned" from a Chopin mazurka as well as inspired by works by Stravinsky and Mozart; and he conceptualized both The Silence [End Page 303] and Cries and Whispers as "two-voice sonatas" (45–46). As Luko explains, some of his ideas are a revolution of cinematic form—the concept of the soundtrack did not work for Bergman since he conceived of film as music. He therefore proclaimed, "you cannot accompany music with music" (49). Bergman did not understand music as a subordinate form to the image. In this way, he anticipated the most current and cutting-edge scholarship on film soundtracks today, especially the many publications of Michel Chion. This book is much more than an elaborate cataloguing of Bergman's sonic experiences, musical passions, professional connections, and aural designs, although it does reveal the author's extremely thorough cataloguing of every sonic way we might understand his artistic legacy. Through her writing, strong themes emerge that transcend the limits of any literal documentation. In particular, Luko establishes some haunting conflicts in Bergman's contrary understandings of music; for the director, music could be both joy and suffering, both beauty and danger, both relief and pain, and both transcendence and despair. Luko writes of music as torture for a family in Saraband (2003), and of music in connection with spirituality, family, loss, and joy in To Joy (1950). She writes of the inadequacy of music (or of any Art) at times of war in Shame (1968), while also stressing the idea of an orchestra as utopian order in counterpoint to the violence in that film (98). More specifically, readers of this journal will be moved by her emphasis on Bergman's conflicted attachment to J. S. Bach's works: he wrote that "in the music of Sebastian Bach our homeless longing...