PRISON (SWEDEN/1949/INGMAR BERGMAN)

It is perhaps very fitting that the first film that Ingmar Bergman made from his own script was a meta-referencial, existential study of good and evil. Shot on a minute budget for the time, Prison follows Martin, a director whose life is changed by a suggestion made by his old maths teacher during a meal – life on Earth is Hell. Martin delights in amusing his friends with the idea, but decides to use it as the basis of a film project. The film then essentially begins again, and it soon becomes clear that we are now viewing the director’s project, both on and off screen. As Martin and his friends experience existential crises, their own lives begin to mirror the filmic hell that Martin is striving so hard to recreate.

Laden with verbal and visual puns alike, Prison is an unusual early exercise in recursive filmmaking, bolstered by a decent cast and cinematography. At moments, one might even be led to believe this is some modern film experiment riffing sarcastically on forties cinema. But as interesting a concept as the film presents, it isn’t in and of itself a significant film, besides manifesting the emergence of Bergman’s style. It’s almost as if Bergman created the meta-film element as an excuse to explore the histrionic potential of photography, and the title itself may have been a reference to his experience of working for studios. Watch out for the Méliès-style short film (later seen in Persona), which confusingly sits inside the film-within-a-film.

THE MARQUISE DE SADE (SWEDEN/1992/INGMAR BERGMAN)

Filmed for Swedish TV, Ingmar Bergman’s The Marquise de Sade, inspired by Yukio Mishima’s play Madame de Sade, places six women in the same room, all of whom had some form of connection with the Marquis de Sade. Despite the disapproval of her mother and sister, Renée de Sade often finds herself dreaming about her husband in an unusually favourable light, showing that her devotion has in some way blinkered her from his lasciviousness. La Comtesse de Saint-Ford, dressed in an androgynous yellow suit and jodhpurs, grills de Sade’s wife about their sexual activity with a sinister fascination.

The idea of evoking male dominance in sexuality through the accounts of women brings to mind de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom, which Pier Paolo Pasolini famously adapted in the seventies as Salò. Like Pasolini’s film, The Marquise de Sade is the result of countless revisions, keeping the Japanese music of Mishima’s play but reinventing the cast as Swedish noblewomen. In composing his play for television, Bergman balances theatre with cinema, taking advantage of close-ups to generate a sense of intimacy where necessary. There is a peculiar sensuality in the women’s dialogues which is echoed in the vibrant colour palette, and Dangerous Liaisons springs to mind more than once. De Sade’s absence is notable, but his hold over people is palpable as each woman deals with her individual morality. With superb performances by a familiar cast, The Marquise de Sade is further evidence that Bergman was a true master of dramaturgy.

CRISIS (SWEDEN/1946/INGMAR BERGMAN)

Ingmar Bergman’s first film as director, Crisis follows 18-year-old gamine Nelly, fostered into a family living in small-town Sweden. One day, completely out of the blue, her decidedly-fashionable birth mother Jenny comes to the house, keen to shepherd the daughter she abandoned back into her life. A ball Nelly attends becomes the perfect opportunity for the two mother figures to outdo each other, and soon it is made clear that “Aunt” Jenny is the hip, lively figure Nelly has needed for all these years. Soon, Nelly is ushered into the inner ring of Stockholm’s high society and, after encountering some unsavoury characters, comes to understand just how easily she had been lured into a world of empty beauty.

Photographically, there are occasional flourishes of Bergmanesque splendour (the lighting in particular is brilliant), but the film itself is nothing to write home about. The characters are maddeningly dull, some straight from lesser Hitchcock films, and their interactions are devoid of passion or credibility. The story, taken from Leck Fischer’s radio play Moderhjertet, is awkwardly paced, and by the end little seems to have changed, save for haircuts. It might be unfair to be so flippant about the early work of a man who went on to be hailed as one of the greatest directors of all time, but given the calibre of some of his greater films, it comes as a surprise to learn that he was ever at the helm of such an unremarkable project, or indeed one so derivative.