Hour of the Wolf (1968)

 Ingmar Bergman's "Hour of the Wolf"

Once you make a masterpiece like "Persona," where else is there really for you to go? Ingmar Bergman faced this issue after his 1966 masterpiece and went into a state of creative crisis. It seemed almost too spot on to convey this creative crisis through his next project, which would end up being 1968's "Hour of the Wolf." 

The film centers on a mentally unstable artist living with his pregnant wife on the small island of Baltrum. The artist, Johan, is having creative blocks and experiencing insomnia and episodes of mild madness. After being invited to a dinner party at the island's wealthy proprietors, Johan learns that they are deep admirers of his work. After learning that his former lover is visiting them as well, he returns to their home a few days later and experiences delusions, madness, and a total mental collapse.

I think author Dan Williams puts it best when he describes the film as a "story of the self-destructive artist unable to maintain a relationship with reality." It's clear that Johan acts as a stand-in for Bergman, who had claimed to feel similar existential episodes after his work on "Persona." Bergman uses this fictional lens to illustrate his internal strife. The artist is no innocent sufferer however, he is demented, violent, and depraved. Bergman uses "Hour of the Wolf" to shed any would-be protective aura around him and instead opts for a humiliation ritual whereby he is portrayed in the most foul and debased ways possible. 

Bergman infuses "Hour of the Wolf" with horror elements pulled from folk legend. Although not explicit, vampirism, cannibalism, werewolf legend, and other folk horror elements are constantly on the periphery of what is happening. These elements, mixed with the psychological breakdown of the main character, gives "Hour of the Wolf" the classification of 'horror' by many film scholars. This would certainly make it the only horror film in Bergman's enormous catalog.

To aid in this horror element, Bergman visually paints his film with brushstrokes of expressionism, surrealism, and gothic imagery. It becomes hard to tell what aspects of the film's story is real or imagined, and what is objective and what is subjective. 

Through the protagonist's confused dreams and fantasies, it becomes clear that Bergman is reconciling with his own warped perspective on reality, a reality that has been tainted with artistic fantasy. He is also reconciling with his own internal struggles. Specifically, sexual struggles. Through the horror and psychological elements of the film, one motif continues to spawn up: sexuality. There are allusions to homosexual repressions, as Johan continues painting characters with a repressed homosexuality. Johan is also shown to be sexually perverse. As Professor Frank Gado notes, Johan's "perversity manifests itself in transvestism, masochism, and necrophilia." 

In one of the final shots of Johan's most intense episodes of madness, Bergman frames Johan in a state of humiliation in a close-up with a naked woman in frame. It is the scene after Johan falls into a trap set by the wealthy family luring him into this humiliation with his former lover, Veronika, naked on a table. In this spell, Johan is being ridiculed for being lured in by sex and death. Both concepts have been a staple of Bergman's thematic oeuvre and with this, Bergman acknowledges his own shame in these perverse fascinations.

Speaking of the wealthy family, they seem to partially symbolize Bergman's financial benefactors (like studio financers). Throughout the film, they seem to fawn over him and yet also seem to have some sort of authority over him, as well. Their relationship to Johan is exploitative, using Johan for their own interests, simultaneously praising him for his great art while also mocking him for his sensitivity and perservisty. 

All in all, "Hour of the Wolf" asserts itself as a creative force in Bergman's oeuvre. Although not as comparable as "Persona," it demonstrates the creative paranoia Bergman was feeling after making one of the greatest works of art ever put to screen. "Hour of the Wolf" is Bergman reaching into his psyche and pulling out something disgusting, horrified, perverted, unstable, and downright vulnerable.