"I lack a declaration of faith and do not belong to any church. I have never needed any god or salvation or eternal life. I am my own god; I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will ever be able to scare my ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from the water out there and explode the silence with its call."
Enigmatic and yet mesmerizing, The Rite has three actors inextricably bound up in one another answering to a smug yet insecure functionary on charges that their performance is indecent. One of them, Hans (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is the sensible one and the leader, his wife Thea (Ingrid Thulin) is insecure and highly artistic, and their partner Sebastian (Anders Ek) is an irresponsible lecher, openly having an affair with Thea but unable to satisfy her sexually. The man judging them (Erik Hell) seems to enjoy needling them with deeply personal questions which are irrelevant to the matter at hand and humiliating to them, but privately he fears his own mortality.
The film originally aired over Swedish TV, and feels very much like a stage play, broken up into nine acts, all of which are interior. There is a symmetry to the work, which is laid out as follows:
Initial interview (Judge and all three actors) Hotel room (Thea and Sebastian) Individual interview (Judge and Sebastian) Confessional (Priest and Judge) Individual interview (Judge and Hans) Backstage (Thea and Hans) Individual interview (Judge and Thea) Meeting at the bar (Hans and Sebastian) Private performance (Judge and all three actors)
It's pretty clear that each of the three actors being questioned contain some element of Bergman's own persona, and each is tortured in his or her own way while being interviewed, just as the sensitive Bergman felt reprimanded and humiliated by administrators and critics. As he writes in Images My Life in Film, he had just ended his tenure as the head of the Royal Dramatic Theater, and his fury over the experience was channeled into this film. Bergman even puts himself in the position of being the priest who hears the judge's confession, which was also a nice littler inverted reference to The Seventh Seal.
Compare this line from Thea: "I'll tell you what a psychiatrist once told me. He said, 'You're not solid matter, you're a movement. You flow into others. They flow into you. Nothing's constant. When you realize this, your neurosis will go."
With Bergman's description of how he overcame his fear of death in real life: "That which had formerly been so enigmatic and frightening, namely, what might exist beyond this world, does not exist. Everything is of this world. Everything exists and happens inside us, and we flow into and out of one another. It's perfectly fine like that.
Here are a couple of other examples of the characters channeling the director, one from Sebastian: "I despise you, and I find your officiousness unbelievably ridiculous. Not bad to hobnob with three world-famous artists, your picture in the paper next to us. If feels good to pester us with humiliating questions under the pretense of decency and discretion. Pulling down our trousers and giving us a good spanking. I'll demand a judge who's on my level. You're unable to either understand or judge our work. You're dull!"
And another from Hans: "Is there something in me that invites humiliation? Really big artists are invulnerable, in their core, that is. I'm not one of them. My biggest fear is to be left alone."
Lastly, from Thea: "I play at ecstasy and talking to the holy virgin. Belief and unbelief. Defiance and doubt. It's all a game. But inside, I remain the same. Sometimes utterly tragic, sometimes exhilarated."
So it's fascinating to see these three aspects as depicted by Bergman, as inextricably intertwined and necessary for an artist to accomplish anything. As for the performance of the rite itself in the final act, it's not made clear, but it's a representation of an ancient Greek "elevation" ritual. Bergman writes:
"In ancient Greece, theater was inextricably tied to religious rituals. The audience arrived long before sunrise. At dawn the masked priests appeared. When the sun rose over the mountains, it illuminated the center of the stage, where a small altar was erected. The blood of a sacrificial animal was collected in a large vessel. One of the priests hid behind the others. He wore a golden mask, like that of a god. When the sun had risen even higher, two priests elevated the vessel at a precise moment, so that the audience could see the godly mask reflected in the blood. An orchestra of drums and pan flutes played, and the priests sang. After a few minutes the officiant lowered the vessel and drank the blood."
The Rite thus endures as a rebuke to critics and those who would constrain him as an artist, and also as performance being a ritual, sacred and a necessary communion in some ways, and yet humiliating in others. While the simplicity of the sets isn't going to blow anyone away, the depth for 72 minutes of television was impressive. I believe the top American shows at the time were Laugh-In and Gunsmoke.
Enigmatic and yet mesmerizing, The Rite has three actors inextricably bound up in one another answering to a smug yet insecure functionary on charges that their performance is indecent. One of them, Hans (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is the sensible one and the leader, his wife Thea (Ingrid Thulin) is insecure and highly artistic, and their partner Sebastian (Anders Ek) is an irresponsible lecher, openly having an affair with Thea but unable to satisfy her sexually. The man judging them (Erik Hell) seems to enjoy needling them with deeply personal questions which are irrelevant to the matter at hand and humiliating to them, but privately he fears his own mortality.
The film originally aired over Swedish TV, and feels very much like a stage play, broken up into nine acts, all of which are interior. There is a symmetry to the work, which is laid out as follows:
Initial interview (Judge and all three actors) Hotel room (Thea and Sebastian) Individual interview (Judge and Sebastian) Confessional (Priest and Judge) Individual interview (Judge and Hans) Backstage (Thea and Hans) Individual interview (Judge and Thea) Meeting at the bar (Hans and Sebastian) Private performance (Judge and all three actors)
It's pretty clear that each of the three actors being questioned contain some element of Bergman's own persona, and each is tortured in his or her own way while being interviewed, just as the sensitive Bergman felt reprimanded and humiliated by administrators and critics. As he writes in Images My Life in Film, he had just ended his tenure as the head of the Royal Dramatic Theater, and his fury over the experience was channeled into this film. Bergman even puts himself in the position of being the priest who hears the judge's confession, which was also a nice littler inverted reference to The Seventh Seal.
Compare this line from Thea: "I'll tell you what a psychiatrist once told me. He said, 'You're not solid matter, you're a movement. You flow into others. They flow into you. Nothing's constant. When you realize this, your neurosis will go."
With Bergman's description of how he overcame his fear of death in real life: "That which had formerly been so enigmatic and frightening, namely, what might exist beyond this world, does not exist. Everything is of this world. Everything exists and happens inside us, and we flow into and out of one another. It's perfectly fine like that.
Here are a couple of other examples of the characters channeling the director, one from Sebastian: "I despise you, and I find your officiousness unbelievably ridiculous. Not bad to hobnob with three world-famous artists, your picture in the paper next to us. If feels good to pester us with humiliating questions under the pretense of decency and discretion. Pulling down our trousers and giving us a good spanking. I'll demand a judge who's on my level. You're unable to either understand or judge our work. You're dull!"
And another from Hans: "Is there something in me that invites humiliation? Really big artists are invulnerable, in their core, that is. I'm not one of them. My biggest fear is to be left alone."
Lastly, from Thea: "I play at ecstasy and talking to the holy virgin. Belief and unbelief. Defiance and doubt. It's all a game. But inside, I remain the same. Sometimes utterly tragic, sometimes exhilarated."
So it's fascinating to see these three aspects as depicted by Bergman, as inextricably intertwined and necessary for an artist to accomplish anything. As for the performance of the rite itself in the final act, it's not made clear, but it's a representation of an ancient Greek "elevation" ritual. Bergman writes:
"In ancient Greece, theater was inextricably tied to religious rituals. The audience arrived long before sunrise. At dawn the masked priests appeared. When the sun rose over the mountains, it illuminated the center of the stage, where a small altar was erected. The blood of a sacrificial animal was collected in a large vessel. One of the priests hid behind the others. He wore a golden mask, like that of a god. When the sun had risen even higher, two priests elevated the vessel at a precise moment, so that the audience could see the godly mask reflected in the blood. An orchestra of drums and pan flutes played, and the priests sang. After a few minutes the officiant lowered the vessel and drank the blood."
The Rite thus endures as a rebuke to critics and those who would constrain him as an artist, and also as performance being a ritual, sacred and a necessary communion in some ways, and yet humiliating in others. While the simplicity of the sets isn't going to blow anyone away, the depth for 72 minutes of television was impressive. I believe the top American shows at the time were Laugh-In and Gunsmoke.