HOUR OF THE WOLF

Sweden, 1968, 90 minutes, Black and white.
Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin.
Directed by Ingmar Bergman.

Hour of the Wolf comes at the end of the 1960s, a grim time in world history, grim for Bergman with such films as Persona and Shame as well as Hour of the Wolf. Bergman had been grim in the early part of the 1960s with his trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence. He then did the light touch with Now About All These Women (also in colour). These films are significant in Bergman’s career and throw light on the issues and questions of the 1960s.

He uses many of his regular cast, highlighting Max von Sydow in these films of the late 60s and introducing Liv Ullmann to his films. Erland Josephson and Ingrid Thulin were regulars in his films.

The advertisement for Hour of the Wolf indicates that this is the hour between night and dawn, when most people die, the hour when the sleepless haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. Bergman is illustrating this in the life of an artist with his crisis, his nightmares, his telling his story to his wife.

1. The work of Ingmar Bergman? His career? Personal investment in his films? Psychological? Religious?

2. Black and white photography, for reality and dreams? The style, the editing, the music (and Mozart)? The use of the boy?

3. The framework of the voices: information, Alma and the talk? The build-up to the ending – and yet the people present?

4. The interest in personality? In a remote situation? The island? The artist? Alma – and the meaning of the word ‘soul’?

5. The boy, identification? Dreams, demons, cannibal? Reality and fantasy, destructive? In the hour of the wolf? Alma and her listening? Her own experiences?

6. Borg, the artist, his artistic style? Ordinary, arrival, the marriage, the seven years?

7. Moving to the extraordinary experiences? The diary and the people, especially Veronica Vogler? The boy, issues of homosexuality? Murder? The baron and the others? Visitations and invitations?

8. The visits, the meals, conversation, art and compulsion, torment?

9. The drawings, the dreams, the demons? The kinds of demons? The woman with no face? Veronica Vogler and the issues of sexuality? Participation in the dreams? Real or symbolic?

10. The character of Alma, her visits? Participating? Sharing her husband’s fear?

11. What had to be destroyed? What was destroyed? What disappeared?

12. Alma and her final speech?

13. The issues of the conscious, the unconscious, the subconscious? Ordinary and extraordinary experiences? Communication and sharing?

14. A film about truth, about fears, survival, love – and some optimism?