INGMAR BERGMAN ET “L’HEURE DU LOUP“ – LE PASSAGE DU « LUMEN OPACATUM » AU CRI EXPRESSIONNISTE

Abstract

Ingmar Bergman and the Hour of the Wolf – Shifting from “lumen opacatum” to the Expressionist Scream. In Wild Strawberries/Smultronstället (1957), but especially in Hour of the Wolf/Vargtimmen (1968), Ingmar Bergman resignifies the metaphorical heritage of the German Expressionism. The figure of the false death, the frightening image of the horologe without hands presented in a Gothic geometry, the reminiscences of the dead father, the intellectual in a frame of accumulated diagonals, the inexorable dying and the promised death are some extensive directions of this study. If the characters in these two films live in a morbid dimension of the “borrowed” time and their shadows emerge from a tenebrous world, an important principle remains the “non-organic life of things”, coupled with the process of “lyrical abstraction” (G. Deleuze). The German expressionist directors yearn nostalgically to relive the golden age by capturing melancholic landscapes. Therefore, Bergman’s expressionist techniques are transformed and combined with the surreal atmosphere or the stylized realism, a context in which the apocalyptic language of the painter Johan Borg (similar to that of August Strindberg in the poem The Wolves are Howling) reveals the ability of the expressionist spirit in amplifying and recombining his thoughts/thinking.