To Joy

Ingmar Bergman's "To Joy" (Till glädje) is one of his earlier films. It opens and ends with a community orchestra and choir playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

The story features the courtship and marriage of Stig Eriksson and Marta Olsson, who met while playing violin in the orchestra. Victor Sjöström, who stars in "Wild Strawberries" is the conductor of the orchestra. At the beginning of the film we learn that Marta has been killed in an accident at their summer cottage. It's followed by a long flashback about their tempestuous relationship.

Stig believes himself a skilled player and dreams of a solo career, but his hopes are dashed in one disastrous performance. Stig and Marta have a troubled relationship, but the last several years have seen reconciliation and joy.

It is said the film is semi-autobiographical about Bergman's first two marriages. I found the film an engaging reflection of a couple working through their first six or seven years of marriage.

This is my favourite film. It is perceptive, gentle, full of deep human understanding. Inspirational, running the whole gamut of the human condition, leaving one sad, but also feeling and understanding what true joy really is. Sublime.

Ingmar Bergman has rapidly become one of my favourite and most admired directors. He did go on to better things than To Joy and his other early films, but a lot of promise can be seen here. The characters are not as dimensional or compelling in their realism, like in the best of Bergman's films, Marta can be seen as too perfect and Stig is not an easy person to like at all. However, the acting is very good. Stig Olin and Maj-Brit Nilsson give strong performances but Victor Sjostrom gives the best performance. As ever with Bergman, To Joy is superbly directed, while the script is thoughtful and the film itself is beautifully shot. The story is intriguing and paced well, and there are some good themes that are well done they were written even more compellingly in Bergman's later films. The music is amazing and utilised beautifully. Overall, one of the better Bergman films if not among his better overall ones. 8/10 Bethany Cox

When you set up shop and form a marriage, you need to acquire a rather large carriage, to shackle yourselves to, and fill it with you, just make sure you've got plenty of storage. Now your carriage will have many seals, but occasionally these become unpeeled, you'll both try and unpick, then resolutely re-stick, as you turn it into a big wheal. Far too often the damage is done, and the carriage just runs out of fun, so you fill it with distraction, which leads to inaction, the start of the end has begun. This all happened to Stig and to Marta, but they managed to find a big plaster, until one fateful day, something got in the way, with a carriage derailing disaster.

There are some things you can't foresee but they usually result because of a lack of vision.

This seems to be a deeply personal work for Bergman, and it's interesting that the backdrop to the story is classical music. We get extended sequences of an orchestra practicing or performing, and the music exudes a feeling of being grand, joyful, perfect, and immortal, whereas by contrast the lives of these characters are small, sad, flawed, and fleeting. It's hard to know how much of the story is Bergman flagellating himself for the failure of his second marriage and his inadequacies as a young artist, but regardless, I love the film for its raw honesty, and for showing the husband to be the childish, insecure, and selfish one in this couple's marriage. They both seem to seek authenticity and meaning early on in their relationship, and start off their marriage promising to be honest and kind to one another, but inevitably things deteriorate, the entropy of which is (in various forms) a recurring theme in Bergman's work.

I loved the shot on the boy at the end, it's powerful, but in the overall scene, I would have preferred an even more somber sequence amidst that soaring music. (It's hard to believe I'm saying I would have preferred something being more somber in a Bergman film, so I hope that's not saying more about me than I'm saying about the film, hehe) Anyway, it was wonderful to see legendary director Victor Sjöström as the cranky orchestra conductor, just as he'd appear later for Bergman in 'Wild Strawberries,' and look for Bergman himself in a cameo in the doctor's office.

A few quotes: Bergman seemingly through Stig (Stig Eriksson): "I'll tell you the secret of real art. It's created when you're unhappy. I prefer being unhappy. God knows it's the state I usually find myself in."

And maybe Bergman through Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson): "There's so much misery, laziness, and indifference, in body and in mind. In the end you don't believe in anything. You think that's just how it is. That's the whole meaning. (Stig: There doesn't have to be a meaning.) Yes there does. If there isn't, you make you one up. Otherwise you can't go on living."

And lastly this one, Bergman on music in 1960: "I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been my great source of recreation and stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically."