A Film Canon

 

 

A late version of the cautionary tales of German Expressionism, Torment explicates their critique as one of the institution, rather than of those individuals who fall victim to its hypocrises and contradictions. As such, it reflects the presence of screenwriter Ingmar Bergman, who centres his narrative on Widgren (Alf Kjellin), a young student faced with two ostensibly different teachers - his girlfriend Pippi (Gösta Cederlund), who represents the same loose feminine virtue as Lulu or Lola-Lola, and his Latin master 'Caligula' (Stig Jarrel), whose sadistic methods inculcate an omniscient fear that finds its stylistic corollary in Sjöberg's taste for high-angle shots, around which the shifting power dynamics tend to arrange themselves. At a certain level, the film's originality lies in its incorporation of these stock figures into a narrative that resists their transparency and, more specifically, characterises female vice as the result of male vice, rather than an incentive to it - a reversal of the entire mythology of original sin that is in keeping with the classical, rather than biblical, register within which the school tends to couch itself, as well as Bergman's own profound religious scepticism. That said, a further subtext seems to reiterate Pippi's inferiority, albeit at an intellectual, rather than a sexual or moral level, as evinced in the troubling efficiency of Caligula's teaching methods, whose proximity to indoctrination, along with the pervasive atmosphere of surveillance, terror and conformity - all of which culminate with the final examination and graduation - subsumes this ambiguity into a surprisingly ambivalent characterisation of fascism, condemning its moral bankruptcy, while grudgingly crediting it with a certain intellectual rigour, and compelling internal logic.