Apocalypto I Tystnad
en film av Ingmar Bergman
When Bergman made "Jungfrukällan," based on a folksong, he called it an homage to Kurosawa, while some saw reflections of his earlier, angry-young-man films like "Hets," "Kris" or even "Kvinna utan Ansikte," which was praised as "förtjusande omoget ibland."
Now at the Götterdämmerung of his career, Bergman has again confounded the critics and legions of aging film professors by shifting time periods, thematic elements and whole continents.
Having worked with American Actors before so pointlessly in "The Serpent’s Egg," ("Das Schlangenei") Bergman wrote the entire mise en scene based on an Aztec headdress he saw in The Old Shaman Store in the Atlanta Airport while he was in exile from the Swedish Tax Authorities.
What resulted was a radically atypical movie for a man who has devoted his long and illustrious career to breaking down barriers between sanity and depression, between being able to cope and wanting to curl up in the corner of a stone church in Uppland and calling on a God in whom you no longer believe.
While lacking Mel Gibson’s ecstatic/psychotic visions of Grand Guignol theo-catharsis, Bergman has the maturity to see through the outward paint and pyramidicall glitter of a sacrificial religion into the heart of those trapped in a system that their fathers were so good at, but which they don’t quite appreciate.
Foregoing the easy options of topless maidens in the tropics, Bergman has set "Ur majoretternas liv" not in the Yucatan jungle, but in the pre-Christian forests of Uppsala.
Bear Paw, the chief of the Viking raiders, is a reluctant slave trader who has lost faith in his community’s Vinterblot, the great sacrificial orgy of midwinter near the grave tumuli of the great chieftains.
Plagued by doubts, Bear Paw confesses his doubts to his wife, Synnove Snowbakken: "I go into the sacred grove to have Thor dissolve my resistance, to try to bond with Odin, the father figure I can never please enough, but my faith scurries away like mice when you throw Lutfisk at them.
"Our attempts to please the Aesir are futile. Life is futile. Spring will come again whether or not we sacrifice a single horse, let alone a person. This cannot go on."
The color has leached out of the film until this final scene when there is no color left, save flashes of Euros being pushed across the ticket office desk by Graduate Students in Film Studies desperate for a new Thesis for their Doctoral papers.
Cahiers du Cinema hails it as a masterpiece, "Entertainment Tonight" interviews the third girl from the left in the great Viking raid on Paris, and Pat Robertson issues a Fatwa against the pagan Scandinavians for endangering his trade in blood diamonds and African gold.
