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THE SERPENT’S EGG: Misfire In Exile Or Post-German Expressionist Curio?

THE SERPENT’S EGG: Misfire In Exile Or Post-German Expressionist Curio?

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THE SERPENT’S EGG: Misfire in Exile or Post-German Expressionist Curio?

In Woody Allen’s 1977 film, Annie Hall, Allen’s avatar Alvy Singer, in one of his many attempts to “culture” her, takes Annie to the movies to see the latest Ingmar Bergman film, Face to Face. Showing up a minute late, Alvy balks at not being able to see the opening credits, to which Annie replies, “But they’re in Swedish!” Made a year later and the scene would’ve lacked a punchline, as Bergman made The Serpent’s Egg, his second English-language film, and first with Hollywood money.

The Serpent’s Egg is Bergman’s exile film, made in Germany following his leave from Sweden due to soon-to-be-dropped charges of tax evasion. It’s about a depressed, out-of-work trapeze artist (played by David Carradine) arriving in Berlin to find his brother’s recent suicide and the imminent fascist rule.

A Filmmaker Out of Context

Film producer Dino De Laurentiis was interested in Bergman’s script and the filmmaker was able to score what he considered “a sizeable director’s fee” coming off Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage and The Magic Flute. He also finagled a rather large budget; Bavaria Studios built an entire street of Berlin to match a charcoal drawing Bergman found in a 1923 issue of the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus.

The financial support was not for nothing, as the set is lushly and bountifully featured in The Serpent’s Egg, but this exterior richness comes at the exchange of the piercing, urgent interior audits Bergman had garnered a reputation for. The film is emotionally distant and the script strangely off-key. In her capsule review, Pauline Kael called the film a “crackpot tragedy.” “Everything is strained, insufficient, underfelt,” she continued.

The film’s co-star, and Bergman regular, Liv Ullman, who provides one of the film’s bright spots, posits that the filmmaker’s emotionally interrogative style was often born from a lack of funding — with not much to allocate for set design, he chose to focus on faces — and The Serpent’s Egg forced him out of that comfort zone, not to mention working in the English language (his second attempt after 1971’s The Touch, although still a Swedish production).

THE SERPENT’S EGG: Misfire in Exile or Post-German Expressionist Curio?
source: Arrow Films

The Serpent’s Egg was recently released in high definition by two boutique home video labels: the Criterion Collection and Arrow Films, on their Arrow Academy line. While Arrow’s lone-disc release may come off as unfortunate timing next to Criterion’s, where it’s packaged among 38 other films in a monolithic set titled “Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema,” it actually begs for contemporary audiences to reconsider The Serpent’s Egg. Among a few other supplemental features on the disc, there’s a little five-minute archival feature with author and former film professor Marc Gervais, who talks about rediscovering the film after teaching a survey course in German Expressionism. He said the works of that movement are all over Bergman’s film, and give it an entirely new significance that has been overlooked under an auteuristic consideration.

Carradine Commentary

The other significant feature on Arrow’s disc is a feature-length commentary from Carradine, which proved more compelling than one might assume because of the unusual perspective an American brought to working with Bergman. The actor, who sports a tiny gold hoop in his left ear, frankly feels miscast — he wasn’t the director’s first choice (Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Peter Falk and others all fell through).

Bergman recounts working with Carradine in his book Images: My Life in Film:

“We were finally ready to begin. But when I met him for the first time, Carradine seemed absent-minded and a bit strange. To help him get into the right frame of mind for this film, we launched the shooting with a viewing session of two classic Berlin movies: Mutter Drausens Fahrt ins Glück and Ruttmann‘s Berlin – die Symphonie der Grosstadt. The minute the lights in the theater went out, Carradine fell asleep, snoring loudly. When he woke up I had no chance to discuss his role with him. Carradine‘s behavior repeated itself during the filming. He was right owl and kept falling asleep on the set. He was found slumped just about everywhere, sound asleep. At the same time he was hard-working, punctual, and well prepared. Because of this, among other factors, we finished the film within our planned time schedule. I was pleased, to say the least, and very proud of our accomplishment.”

It turns out the actor was also fond of his performance, and actually talks at length here about the mechanics of acting, generally, almost as much as he tells tales of being on set.

THE SERPENT’S EGG: Misfire in Exile or Post-German Expressionist Curio?
source: Arrow Films

Carradine frames much of his experience on The Serpent’s Egg as the film he shot after playing lead in Hal Ashby’s Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory. “I was pretty hot at the moment,” he says, and mostly distinguishes Ashby as a friendly collaborator to Bergman’s cold administrative style.

The most memorable commentary is in his regard for and recollection of working with cinematographer Sven Nykvist. Carradine compared the filming process to a ballet between himself and Nykvist, because The Serpent’s Egg is made up of many single-shot close-ups that follow Carradine around a room, or even from his eyes to his hands in motion. It required a constant calculation of the camera’s location and speed, and likewise, a consideration of the actor’s movement from Nykvist.

The Serpent’s Egg: Conclusion

Although many Bergman fans might have already invested in Criterion’s massive box set, and thus own The Serpent’s Egg, Arrow’s best supplements (Gervais and Carradine) aren’t included in the other presentation. But regardless of their comparative merits — the visual presentation is very comparable — Arrow’s set, next to Criterion’s, makes an interesting argument that perhaps The Serpent’s Egg is best viewed not as a Bergman misfire, but as a piece of post-German Expressionism.

The Serpent’s Egg is now available from Arrow Films.

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