Saturday, January 22, 2011

Hour of the Weird, I mean Wolf

I must say this is one of the strangest and most confusing movies I have ever seen in my nineteen years of life.

It takes a while to realize the entire movie is a huge flashback. However, once you get this idea in your mind and understand the structure of the film and its premise, you can see the underlying sexual themes and feelings expressed between the main man, Johan, and his ex-girlfriend Veronica. The easily noticeable attraction and sexual tension between the two of them makes this movie somewhat comical as she continues her advances on him despite the fact he is married. Johan obviously still has some sort of attraction to this woman as feeling her "dead" naked body from top to bottom is not only weird but shows the connection that he still has to her, dead or alive. The non censoring of her naked body when she arises shows audiences that Bergman was a sexual being, especially since this movie was created in the 1960s.

The sexual words and actions made by Corinne are also very dramatic helping to show the underlying message in this movie. Additional touching of the face and exclamations of pulling pantyhose as well as bruises on the pelvis make this movie very interesting for a time when limits on sexuality were being pushed and tested.

The little boy touches into Johan's desires of two ideas, pedophilia and homosexuality, which were definitely pushing the limits for this time period with pedophilia still being inappropriate and illegal now. All in all, besides being scary and spooky, sex is a major theme in the Hour of the Wolf.

1 comment:

  1. This is very true because when viewing the film I did forget what time period this film was made in and what the audience would have thought about the film. I realize that the most accepted view of the young boy on the rocks is Johan’s homosexual desires as a young boy and his struggle with this fact. However I agree with the idea of pedophilia being a motive since I have heard many people not understand the difference between pedophilia and homosexuality. I could easily see viewers in this time period not understanding the difference and believe that not only had he had an affair with another woman but also perhaps a young boy. To me this brings back ideas of the Catholic Church where homosexuality is often seen as the same thing as pedophilia. I think for me to have believed it was his sexuality as a young boy it would have worked better if he had seen two boys doing similar things as he did (this could be too much even for our current time period).

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