Hour of the Wolf and From the Life of the Marionettes: The Strength of Surrender

So how are we to watch these films—in particular, how are women to watch such unrelenting examples of male anger and entitlement, and what can we draw from the portrayals of the women who incur this wrath? In her 1996 essay collection Reel to Real, the feminist theorist bell hooks, addressing dominance in heterosexual relationships, observes that “there are moments when submission is a gesture of agency and power, [and] a distinction has to be made between conscious surrender, an act of choice, and the submission of someone who is victimized and without choice.” For hooks, love is something that can fortify the person who loves, regardless of whether it is reciprocated. Throughout From the Life of the Marionettes and Hour of the Wolf are moments of such conscious and complete love, offered at some point by each of the three women; the two wives, Katarina and Alma, at least, gain strength from them. As the men disintegrate both mentally and physically—hunching into their clothes, their faces twisted into expressions of pain—the women, independent and engaged with the world in ways their husbands are not, do not diminish. 

The key idea under investigation in From the Life of the Marionettes, adapted for German television from a longer script called Love with No Lovers, is the intertwining of passion and contempt—a theme that turns up time and again in Bergman’s work—which makes it difficult for either party in a relationship to break free. Through a series of vignettes, we observe the unraveling marriage of Peter and Katarina Egermann in the days leading up to Peter’s brutal murder and rape of the other Katarina. The Egermanns were first introduced as peripheral characters (played by Jan Malmsjö and Bibi Andersson) in Scenes from a Marriage, representing an alternative trajectory—they are unhappy but stay together—to that of the series’ central couple, Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson). Like Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage, Katarina Egermann is a more modern woman than the female characters in Bergman’s earlier films. Described disparagingly by the sleazy psychiatrist Mogens Jensen (Martin Benrath) as a “career woman”—a perspective that does not stop him from trying to sleep with her—Katarina represents an independence that thwarts Peter’s idea of what a wife should be. But while Peter harbors fantasies of murdering his spouse and at one point kicks her roughly in the face after he has been talked out of a suicide attempt, Katarina remains simultaneously autonomous and open to their relationship. Bergman here gives his female protagonist a fuller humanity and a better aptitude for life than he does her male counterpart—something that had been increasingly the case since the early days of his career. Unlike Hour of the Wolf’s Alma, who is partially reliant on Johan for her livelihood and becomes independent only after he disappears, Katarina does not need Peter, and continues to thrive once he is gone.

Yet this freedom is granted only to the married Katarina. Her sex-worker double, who offers one of Marionettes’ most startling images of conscious empathy, is denied any form of renewal. The scene between Peter and this Katarina is shown twice: the first image of the film—shot in color, as is the final scene—is of her shoulder. Then we see her open, curious face and her finger tracing the outline of Peter’s face—a Bergman motif. The first time the scene occurs, it is a generous, tender image that is then disrupted by Peter’s sudden violence. But the second time it plays out, just before the end of the film (and now, like the rest of the movie, in black and white), it becomes clear how radical this gesture is. By now, we know that she has felt unsettled by him. “Something about you is strange,” she says. “One of the girls wanted to stay here and keep an eye on things. Maybe it was stupid of me to send her away.” Despite this, she chooses to be empathetic. The fact that the film plays out conservatively and kills her off, in the long-standing cinematic tradition of punishing prostitutes, does not diminish the symbolic power of her action: it is not because she has chosen compassion that Katarina is murdered but because the system in which she is caught offers no escape. As Peter repeats throughout the film: “All ways are barred.”