Prison

An ex Maths teacher announces he's just been released from a lunatic asylum (as you do) to some people making a film. (He used to teach one of them). He says that he has ideas about the Devil. The filmmakers try to adapt those ideas into a screenplay. Apparently they reject those ideas -after making them - for this film presumably.

The meandering narrative seems to explore scenarios that surround some pretty miserable and uninteresting people. I think I read that it's Bergman's first film to look solely at mild horror and the place of the Devil, both in philosophy, film and in folklore. Suicide, alcoholism, prostitution, even drowning babies born to the under-aged get limp, clumsy and unconvincing treatment.

It's pretty impossible to follow and no doubt spoilt by knowing what gems came later from the Master of Darkness.

Best thing to come out of it was a line that I've slightly altered - "Life Itself is a terminal illness "

"Prison" (1949) is the first film in which Ingmar Bergman develops something like a style of his own.

We see various elements that reappear in later movies. There is the character of death (to reappear in "The seventh seal", 1957) and dreamsequences (to reappear in "Wild strawberries", 1957).

The most important sign for things to come is however the theme of the film. The film is about a director trying to make a film about a world governed by the devil. Is a world governed by the devil not very much like a wordl where God is silent? Later Bergman would make a trilogy around this theme consisting of the films "Through a glass darkly" (1961), "Winterlight" (1963) and "The silence" (1963).

So in "Prison" Bergman started to experiment with a personal style, but this style was not fully developed yet. There are good sequences (such as the dream sequence) but as a whole the film is somewhat cluttered and inaccessible. Moreover the film in a film format about a director struggling to make a film does not work very well in "Prison". It does work very well in "8,5" (1963, Federico Fellini), but the Bergman of 1949 is not the Fellini of 1963.

Bergman's first film where he wrote his own script, and had real artistic control (in exchange for a tiny budget.).

An aging film professor, just released from a mental asylum, visits an old student, now a successful director, and challenges him to make a film showing that the devil really rules the earth. While dismissive in the moment, the director is haunted by the idea, and a journalist friend suggests the film could take off from his experience interviewing a very young prostitute.

We then enter the prostitute's story, and it's (intentionally) never fully clear if what we're seeing is the film that arose from the concept, or the truth of the girl's life.

Beautifully photographed, and full of inventive touches (the main credits are spoken, not seen, over a long tracking shot of a dark cobblestone street), I was also surprised that it contained more of a dark sense of humor, about itself and the world, then most critics acknowledge. In turn, that keeps the film's occasional youthful over-obsession with despair from ever feeling unbearably sophomoric.

I will admit it lost steam for me in the last third, some of the performers aren't quite up to the heavy burdens of the script, and a few sequences are awkward and bespeak Bergman's comparative youth. But the next morning I found myself haunted by images and moments even if the whole only felt partly successful.

Entombed, constrained, confined, for the devil to feed upon and dine, in a world that never has been fair, we prance around as if we care, the battles rage, a constant fight, fair maidens walk the streets at night, the bottle stops us feeling pain, the new born child casually slain, our nightmares never let us sleep, Satan's slaves feeding the heap, trapped and cursed and punched and flogged, our lives lived out, with reality fogged.

The cells we cast around us and the barriers they enforce - it's a fascinating experience and contains some genuinely engaging performances but not the best the great man had created to date by a long chalk.

I am a big Begman fan, and in recent times I've gone back to some of the early films - initially just because I thought it might be interesting to see the "juvenilia", but gradually I realised that so many of them are wonderful. I've now seen Prison 4 times, and each time I am stunned by how moving and visually powerful it is. And the performance by Doris Svedlund is breath-taking. Is it the most polished film? Who cares!

Bergman did many dream sequences in films (e.g. Wild Strawberries, Face to Face) - really hard to make them un-cringey - but the one in Prison is about as good as it gets.

So wonderful artistically, and very moving in terms of human interest. There is an orthodoxy about peoples "great" films which often gets in the way of just seeing what is there - please do watch great Bergman film .. I hope you won't be disappointed!