Lucidno
Isolationism in Films:
The Physical, Social and Psychological (Part 1)
In the current global health crisis and social lockdown, it is interesting to note the many films in cinema history that have looked to themes and representations of isolation and, because of its ubiquitous human condition, these have been many and varied. It’s not just Hollywood that has dramatized these events, nor have they all been set in the future or in a fictionalized dystopia. In fact many fictional films, and also documentaries, have looked at the contemporary challenges and triumphs of the human soul in isolation, albeit some not necessarily ending this way.
What is also interesting to note is how many films about isolation have encompassed the loose umbrella of the metaphysical film and these have crossed film genres, formats and countries. A number of renowned directors who made films with solipsist anchor points have even found their individual works critically revised in more than one category. Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal (1957) belongs just as much to the existential as it does to the metaphysical and the same can be said for his other highly lauded film Wild Strawberries, from the same year.
The isolated soul in film is not just a compelling subject, it is also a recurrent one and provides some comfort in these times to know that it has always been part of the human condition, whether on screen or in reality. The so-called hero/main protagonist of a film, whether it be commercial or art house, has most often found themselves distanced from their supporting characters or environment. Below is a selected analysis from different time periods, genres and countries that have exemplified magnificently on screen that which can be used as collective empathy against the displacement and uncertainty the world is currently being subjected to.
Isolated in Europe
Two films from Ingmar Bergman, both from the same year but set in very different times, underline the luridness of isolation in a way that only a master director can. The Seventh Seal (1957) is set in Sweden during the Black Death and tells of the journey of a medieval knight who offers to play a game of Chess when he is confronted by the personification of Death. Based on Bergman’s own play, the film’s title comes from a passage in the Book of Revelation that refers to the "Silence of God" and is a prevailing theme of the film. Moreover, The Seventh Seal takes the medieval plague as a Faustian parable to mirror the then contemporary fear of a nuclear catastrophe. Through its seemingly simple plot, the engaging lyricism and powerful imagery would establish Bergman as a world-renowned director, containing scenes which have become iconic through homages, critical analysis, and even parodies.
Wild Strawberries, Bergman’s other masterpiece from 1957 is a drama film he also wrote (while hospitalized). In Swedish culture the title idiomatically signifies a place that often carries personal or sentimental value and this becomes the term of comfort for actor and director Victor Sjöström in his final screen performance as an old egotistical Professor of bacteriology, now widowed. On a long car ride from Stockholm to Lund University, to be awarded the degree of Doctor Jubilaris, he begins to reflect on his past. He is accompanied by his pregnant daughter-in-law who is estranged from his son and doesn’t care much for her father-in-law either. During the trip, he has nightmares, daydreams, and his old age and impending death make him re-evaluate his life in order to find a new sense of serenity. By exploring philosophical themes such as introspection and human existence, Wild Strawberries is often considered to be one of Bergman's greatest and most moving films and much closer to a true philosophical tragedy than even The Seventh Seal.
Michelangelo Antonioni was another director with a recurrent theme running through his films of the human condition and dis-communication, and his work was consistently preoccupied with the contemporary modern world. Ultimately, he can even be considered the best example of addressing isolationism in films because both his narratives and images represent the contemporary human void in society, a condition he projected with long-takes and sparse dialogues, at the same time blaming mankind for its own self-inflicted alienation because it has sustained its own rigid morality out of sheer laziness, something he considered in stark opposition to nature.
L'Avventura (1960), Antonioni’s most critically regarded film, which he co-wrote, is about the disappearance of a young woman during a boating trip in the Mediterranean. Her lover and best friend search for her then eventually abandon the search and become lovers themselves. The film is praised for its unusual pacing, visual composition, mood, and character study over traditional narrative development. Antonioni used the film to highlight how our sentiments go astray because our moral values and conventions have become outdated. Part of its appeal is how it attempts to get into the psyche of the rich and Antonioni chose to set the film in such an environment because he inferred that feelings there are not dependent on material circumstances.
Isolation can be surreal and play tricks on the mind at the best of times. In Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), both the characters and the audience are involuntary prisoners of a savage satire. When a sumptuous dinner party ends, the upper-class guests find that they are unable to leave the room. This initial surprise turns into hours and then days as the bourgeois group find their social mores gradually turning from snooty to savagery. Bunuel had a particularly fondness for attacking the bourgeois as he would also do in the appropriately named The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) a film that can also be considered a companion piece, although he would do so no more memorably and to more compelling effect than The Exterminating Angel’s hedonistic visual feast.
Mental illness or uncertainty is often recurrent in films about isolation and was also to be found in earlier works by Roman Polanski, including Repulsion (1965). Just as with Michelangelo Antonioni and Blow-Up (1966), Polanski was a renowned foreign director who chose to make a British film during the Swinging London scene of the mid-1960s. However, rather than celebrating the cultural scene, both directors chose to focus on the social distancing of its central character. In Repulsion Catherine Deneuve plays Carol, who is staying with her sister in an apartment in London’s South Kensington. When she rejects her boyfriend, loses her job and her sister goes on holiday with her partner, she is alone and starts to imagine that men are breaking in and raping her. The film subsequently becomes a vivid hallucinatory nightmare of sexual repulsion and sadistic schizophrenia and, along with a great lead performance from Deneuve, has some memorable sequences, not least the surrealism-influenced wall plaster that she imagines to be a clawing hand reaching out to grab her.
