Auteurs: Persona & Obsession

"If there must be a god in the house let him be one that does not speak."-Wallace Stevens

The first temptation is to call them the "Hemingways" of cinema. Two problems emerge immediately from that analogy. Both these men were more prolific than Hemingway, directing more feature length films than Hemingway wrote books - including books of short stories.

Also, there can only be one Hemingway. This singularity of status and creative identity, even of constructed persona, applies to both men I have in mind.

Akira Kurasawa and Ingmar Bergman.

These two were not in the business of living through a persona, per se. Hemingway seemed to have created a persona as a defense against his popularity. Assaulted by interviewers, publisher's meetings, and the general trappings of great fame, Hemingway began to make himself up. His public person is renowned to this day, almost a half century after his death.

The machismo, the adventure seeking, woman magnet (or should we say "magnate"?), Hemingway was not a man for everyone, but his projected image, inconsistent though it was, surrounded him even more so than his identity as a writer and artist. Though he received a Nobel prize for literature, he was the non-artist writer. The journalist whose story was humanity, more specifically humanity at war. His wars were various and sometimes internal, but I'll let the statement stand. He was a war journalist.

One constant aspect of his work was decidedly un-journalistic. He was always a character in it. Instead of sticking only to the facts and telling a story as he saw it unfold through people outside, in the world, he set his tales around himself, fencing in a narrow yard of activity. It was this narrowness that generated the intimacy of his stories, which made them sentimental, romantic; harrowing.

This is the point that connects Hemingway with the two directors. They put themselves at the center of their narratives.

Kurasawa, perhaps, was more willing than the others to blur the lines of distinction that can be said to define an individual, so that his protagonists were not only versions of himself but were "everyman". However, his repeated use of the same actor in his different films undermines the idea of common experience just enough to solidify the notion that this person on screen was, additionally, a real person off screen -namely, the director. We keep seeing the same man move through the (always moral) dilemmas of these films.

Watch Ikiru, or Seven Samurai, or Red Beard, and the humanism central to each story is noticeably a concern owned by the protagonist, who also turns the story.

These are narratives whose action is determined by two sets of forces. One: The World with its actors: business men, bandits, impoverished villagers. A force is active in so far as it presents the protagonist with a small set of choices from which he must select.

The second force, the real propelling force of the films, is the decision maker, the protagonist. Importantly, he can always choose to simply go on living, cut himself out of the drama created by The World. Of course, the character, as a person driven to acts of sympathy, big and small, elects to join the world at his peril.

This is the drama of Kurasawa. The choice of being part of the community and its drama, made at a stage in a character's life where it means more than the more simple, adolescent "social joining" for self-defense.

In Kurasawa, we see the director choosing to take up the human condition, and bring it inside his own small, fenced yard. Or, maybe a better way to put it is that we see Kurasawa tearing down the fence that separated his yard from the rest of the neighborhood.

But this is a metaphorical and metaphysical fence-and-yard. It can't be done away with so easily. The construction is one of perception, ego, psychological forces so deep as to be biological. The fence must remain, unless one reaches some kind of hyper-social enlightenment.

His films provide powerful images of real people - really the one person of the director - attempting to give up his defenses, weaves himself into the fabric of his society while knowing the act will bring pain, as a stream joining a polluted river, sharing in all the poisons there but headed anyway to the same final destination to begin something completely new as a larger being in the sea.

Bergman, as an auteur, is a very different story. Contrary to both Hemingway and Kurasawa, he is interested in the psychology of self. The frailty of the mind, the mysterious workings of dream, and the dynamic effect of one's relationships on the very idea of self all occupy a rotating center in his work.

The human is taken one person at a time here, unlike Kurasawa's sense of drama as linking one person to another. For Bergman, the drama is the isolation one feels in one's mind, in one's emotions, while possibly being linked to others familially or romantically.

Freud and Jung are everywhere in Bergman. In a lecture he gave in 1965 at LA's AFI, Bergman said he didn't know "anything about symbols", which is like Salvador Dali saying that he was "just painting clocks" without symbolic intention.

Regardless of the sincerity of that remark - which sounds elusive in the same way Hemingway often was in his comments on writing - Bergman utilizes an array of symbolic arrangements in his work. From dream sequences where mouths move without sound, men appear faceless, clocks have no hands, men sit enthroned intent on Shakespearean revenge dressed in Nordic war-robes, there is a clear and pervasive use of symbolism. And it works.

The methods employed here are evocative of a psychological catalogue that could be borrowed directly from Jung. Everything means something, even if we can't decide on the exact meaning.

What does it mean when the crusading knight sits down to play chess against death? I don't know. But you can't say it means nothing. It's ridiculous to say that the situation is not symbolic.

Perhaps Bergman would choose to see the arrangement otherwise because it is he playing chess in the guise of Max von Sydow. It is always him. He is the professor in Wild Strawberries. He is the maddened painter in The Hour of the Wolf. And like the lay musician he was, Bergman performs through his instrument (von Sydow) and allows the audience to interpret the meaning in the performance.

The writing method that has each artist place himself at the center of the story is interesting if only for the fact that not everyone does it.

Most stories have a protagonist, obviously, but usually that character is clearly different from the author. Dostoyevsky is not Roskolnikov. Not by a long shot. Melville may be Ishmael, but only in so far as he is not the protagonist of Moby Dick. He is the chorus explaining why Oedipus gouges out his eyes, not the one tormented, blinding himself.

So many stories concern themselves with interaction, with circumstances first and foremost. Think of heist stories, mysteries, magical realism, even Faulkner's novels of memory and cultural identity. None of these types take the author and stick him onto the pivot of the narrative.

It is interesting also to consider the primary interest that Hemingway, Bergman and Kurasawa hold in common. They sought to capture man's relationship to a higher power, to open his fenced-in yard to visits from a god, a truth, a mystery, that once arrived might let the author turn and finally leave the yard in favor of a sheltering house that for all the years has denied him entry.

Again, the yard cannot be done away with so easily. These artists asked the questions, how can I sort myself out? How do I fit? And their art followed from an experience of life as inextricably personal, sometimes excruciatingly so.

If they desired to come to terms with the meaning of being human, if they needed to know that there was a purpose to their dreams, a "divine" mandate for honor, a source of sympathies deep enough to justify all suffering, they stood in the yard in the rain and waited, telling stories, inviting everyone - gods and all - to lean on their fence and listen, and through the long night they never found the key to the dark house behind them.

We can hope that, from time to time, they were able to sleep, holding on to the dream of having chosen to stay in the yard, as a child on a warm summer night, curled up under the tent of the sky at home, at least, in their telling.