Scenes from a Marriage

It’s an ironic result of the advent of DVD and TiVo that television has been revealed as an art with the same or even greater status than film. Freed of its arbitrary push-technology and mind-numbing interruption by commercials, the small screen has become the locus for the best of cinema, while the big screen goes the way of bloated blockbusters and movies that aspire to the condition of amusement park rides or live action comic books, instead of art. Case in point: Ingmar Bergman’s masterful Scenes from a Marriage, which was released to international acclaim as 168-minute feature in the Seventies, and is now finally revealed by this recent Criterion Collection release in its original and transcendent form, as a Swedish tv series of six 50-minute hours. No wonder it became the sort of tv phenomenon that empties the streets of a country for an hour each week. The medium suits Bergman’s style well: interior and intimate, intense and spare. His dialogue retains the sting of documentary veracity while coming across as an artful construction, somehow lofty and pared down at the same time. And if you are going to spend five hours in very close company with two ordinary characters, you could hardly find two better actors than Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. He’s a prematurely stodgy academic gradually realizing the hollowness of his great expectations and wised-up certainties. She’s a divorce lawyer who is also a submissive wife, until her husband walks out on her, giving her the opportunity to become a genuine person. Neither is really likable, but both win our sympathy, however wincing the self-recognition. This is aestheticized talk therapy of the highest order. (1973, dvd, r.) *9-*

Consider the following in appraising my claim for the artistic supremacy of television: Poland’s Decalogue, Italy’s Best of Youth, Germany’s Heimat, Britain’s Bleak House or The Office, America’s HBO series such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood and others, not to mention the various broadcast programs that only reveal their true genius when viewed like a novel, with sustained attention -- Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freaks & Geeks being two that I am passionate about. Of course the general range of TV is easily as trashy as the movies, I’m merely arguing that the peaks are at least as high.