The Hour of the Sheep

It is a pity that Ingmar Bergman’s films are little shown today.  Fifteen years ago, they seemed to be a permanent component of any independent cinema’s programming, providing vast but varied cycles of deep northern angst and spiritual torment.  Perhaps they were played as infrequently as now, but their impact on the first-time viewer was simply so profound and enduring that the cumulative memory was that of one great series.

One Bergman work in particular made a great impression on me.  The film was “The Hour of the Wolf”, and told the story of a typically tortured Bergman protagonist, an artist living on an isolated Nordic island with the inevitable Liv Ullmann – Bergman’s iconic actress – as his long-suffering companion.  This stark, black-and-white film charts his descent into madness through some striking nightmare sequences.  The title relates to the time around 3 o’clock in the morning when most suicides occur, and when supposedly the human spirit is at its lowest ebb.

Happily I have never experienced that particular existential nadir.  But I am only too familiar with the antipodean time, around three in the afternoon, which I have long been convinced is the Hour of the Sheep.

I am not sure when I first became aware of this special hour.  I have no recollections of it from school, but as soon as I started to work I was conscious of the unique position it occupied during the day.  For regardless of what I had done in the morning, or the night before, and irrespective of what I ate for lunch, I found that as the dreaded Hour of the Sheep approached, my entire body craved one thing: sleep.

Working at my desk was bad enough: I would find the visual field in front of me start to swim as my eyes began to lose the ability to focus.  Minutes would pass in this trance-like state until something would snap me out of it.  But worse, far worse, were the after-lunch meetings.  There I would find myself hopelessly trapped, unable even to get up and walk around to stave off this incipient dozing.  Instead I was conscious of my eyes staring wildly at objects several miles or several millimetres away, without reference to my surroundings.  I could feel my head begin to sag; fatally, I would tip it slightly back, only to wake up with a bone-crunching jolt as my head fell away behind me.  As I caught my boss’s outraged look I desperately tried to pretend this was a neck-stretching exercise, and repeated the ridiculous manoeuvre once or twice more .

But my worst experience was when on one occasion I had to interview someone at this particular time of day.  Incredibly boring, he proved unequal to the task of keeping me awake, and to my horror I found myself nodding off in the middle of his reply.  He did not get the job.  By all rights, I should have lost mine.

Clearly even this shocking story does not compare with Bergman’s.  As least I don’t think it does.  Because unfortunately both times that I saw “The Hour of the Wolf” was at The Hour of the Sheep.  Needless to say, I dropped off at various points, and as a result I have never been entirely sure about the film’s plot.

(23.2.92)

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