The “stage house” was purpose-built, and was based on a design found on the neighboring island of Gotland. It was constructed with the labor of local carpenters and masons, who were unaccustomed to building a house strictly for the short term.338 This in itself is characteristic of set construction for both theatre and film: one builds for short-term purposes, for representation, presentation, and play; in short, for ludic activity. While the medium, period, and cultures differ, the trans-historical record indicates a great deal of human effort invested in the construction of temporary arenas for make-believe play and exhibition. Included in this activity is the more typical sort of set construction within permanent structures such as theatres, opera houses, or film studios.339 In terms of production, film and theatre (as well as circus, opera, ballet, etc.) build with a sense of impermanence; there is always an element of the makeshift that accompanies the kinds of construction related to performance. Permanence is reserved for the infrastructures of distribution and exhibition, not for the world or worlds that are represented. This is not just something in common between theatre and film; this is something that originates in theatre and continues into film.
338 Fårö Tour lecture, Bergman Week Festival June 2010.
339 One might object that theatre and film differ in that the spaces in which film sets are built are not designed to
accommodate public audiences. But the intended site of distribution for films throughout most of the 20th-century was in fact a “theatre” based on the model of the 19th-century proscenium playhouse.
141 The purpose-built house on Fårö was a theatrical edifice in the tradition of the Greek skene. It served as backdrop, but also as an implied interior; we see characters enter and exit the house, for example, but the camera is never situated so as to capture both the exterior and the interior; the house is a space into which characters disappear and re-emerge. The sole exception is when, at the
conclusion of the “promenade” after the performance of the play-within, we see Karin still in her costume as the Castilian princess saying goodnight to her father from the window of her bedroom.
This action alone, with Minus fencing in the foreground, still in costume, links the purpose-built house to the “tiring house” of the Elizabethan theater. The “stage house” built on Fårö derived from and exhibited its links to theatrical traditions; therefore, the house and the literal “theatre” in the film, the lusthus, clearly complement one another.
The film also provides us with a subjective experience of space, specifically that of the house, through the person of Karin. This is dependent not only upon seeing spaces cinematographically, but by witnessing the actor’s encounter with space, an encounter which “takes us into a world within the world itself,” and is not really due to “the illusory, the mimetic, or the representational” but to “a certain kind of actual” visually and aurally, “to which we join our being.”340 The primary structures presented in this manner are the house and some of its interior rooms, the lusthus, and a wrecked shipping vessel.341 The interior spaces are David’s study, Martin and Karin’s bedroom, the house’s
340 States 46; original emphasis.
341 Other exterior spaces represented include a second outbuilding located between the lusthus and the house, and a fishing shack by the shoreline. The first structure, a sort of storage shed near the lusthus, seems particularly significant and is linked to theatre practice. This building is distinguished by a feminine masthead that stands by the door; this feature recalls the statue in the stage design for the first act of Bergman’s production of The Seagull. In the film, this outbuilding serves as a backdrop skene to a scene between Minus and Karin associated with language (Latin), sex (pornography), cigarettes, and secrets. This is a space that is never opened, but seems to belong, as does the lusthus, to the relationship between Minus and Karin. When Karin returns to the house after the incest in the wrecked ship, Minus hides behind the second outbuilding.
142 front foyer, the kitchen, Minus’ small bedroom, the interior back entrance, and a staircase leading to the unused second floor of the house. We also see a hallway on this floor, some exposed attic space, and a wall-papered room (possibly a former nursery).
This spatial experience is delivered cinematically, but is derived from theatrical practice and precedent. Furthermore, through the actor, it is phenomenologically constructed, drawing on our experiences of space and spatial perception. This quality of space in the film has been a source of criticism; one critic complained that the film was “bone-pared: a drab house, drab people, a stony seascape,” that was “all very disciplined and renunciatory and carefully composed,” and expressly theatrical.342 But this construction of phenomenological space is clearly an expression of Karin’s being.
Through a Glass Darkly was filmed between 12 July and 16 September 1960. Approximately 40%
of the shooting schedule was devoted to interior settings that were filmed at the Svensk Filmindustri studios in Råsunda; the other 60% of the schedule was devoted to exterior scenes shot on-location on the island of Fårö. Bergman has related, in different interviews, an immediate affinity with the island of Fårö upon his first visit there scouting locations for Through a Glass Darkly.343 Bergman said, “If one wished to be solemn, it could be said that I had found my landscape, my real home; if one wished to be funny, one could talk about love at first sight. I told Sven Nykvist I wanted to live on the island for the rest of my life and that I would build a house just where the film’s stage house stood.”344
342 Vernon Young, “Two Swedish Casualties,” Film Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Summer 1962) 53. Young adds that, “there's little that's cinematic in this movie, which could as well have been a play. [...] I'll re-insist that the aesthetic self-sufficiency of an art is the unarguable principle of its impressive existence.”
343 Bergman, Magic Lantern 207-208.
344 Ibid; emphasis added.
143 There is an important correlation to the idea of a théâtre verité in this, one appropriate to describe the ludic activity linking theatre and cinema to the basic phenomenon of performance. There is a taking up of real space and sites for the purposes of enactment as well as the augmentation of such spaces by temporary construction and playing. The lusthus typifies this activity and makes it
conspicuous. Similarly, the purpose-built house on Fårö needs to be considered as a phenomenon in its own right, not merely as a location, or a set, or as just an element of a mise-en-scène. The house is a pervasive presence in the film in a manner that is unitary to the drama.345
The exterior “stage house” and the interior settings need to be considered as spheres of performance in their own right. There is also the fictive “house” as it is aesthetically established, represented, and experienced through viewing the film, and the relations that this phenomenon has to theatrical practice.
In terms of spectator affect, the “house” in the diegesis of the drama may still be described as a unitary phenomenon, much as the “house” in a production of Chekhov, Ibsen, or Miller might be described and analyzed, or a “house” as it is available to the reader of a novel, short story, or poem. In this respect, Bergman’s “house” bears a remarkable similarity with the phenomenological analysis of the house in literature presented by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space.
B. The “poetics of space” in Through a Glass Darkly
Bachelard’s text and Bergman’s film both indicate a desire for psychic wholeness through the experience of the unity of space; however, this unity eludes the performative identity of the social self.
Bachelard considers the house “a privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values
345 It is important to note that the house built on Fårö was used for exteriors, whereas the interior scenes were filmed in the studios of Svensk Filmindustri at Råsunda. While one must acknowledge these as separate sets for the playing of specific scenes, each one was nevertheless a “stage.”
144 of inside space” when taken “in both its unity and its complexity.”346 It is safe to say that the “house”
is a setting as well as one of the most pervasive metaphors employed in 20th-century Western drama.
Its significance as a metaphor must not be underestimated: “The most fundamental values in a culture will be coherent with the metaphorical structure of the most fundamental concepts in the culture.”347 Bachelard finds the house to be primordial in its associations with the shell and the hut.348 Similar associations are evoked by the emergence of the four characters from the sea at the beginning of the film. The need for shelter is implicit as the characters stand before the stony edifice of the sommarhus.
While the house is used in a fairly typical manner for a cinematic establishing shot near the beginning of the film, the full dramatic potential of the house is reserved for a moment of dramatic crisis. Having discovered Karin undergoing a deeply perturbed psychical episode in the hold of a wrecked ship, Minus races on foot back to the house to fetch a blanket for her. In a low angle long shot, we see him run through the rain to and into the house; the camera is placed in perfect parallel with the plane of the house, centered on the doorway, thus presenting the house for the first time in the film in full view, exposing its complete symmetry. The summer home is disclosed in this framing as the skene of classic tragedy, a composition as formal as that used in “The Artistic Haunting” when the perspective on the play-within shifted from that of David to the “ideal spectator.” The house in its full tragic structure dominates the figure of the young man racing toward it. This shot is followed by an interior shot where Minus, still viewed from behind, rushes into his small bedroom adjacent to the kitchen, grabs a blanket off the bed, and then abruptly falls to the floor and silent prays, almost in a
346 Bachelard 3.
347 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 22.
348 Bachelard 30; 132.
145 fetal position. He lifts himself up and says, or mouths, “God” a single time. The drama moves on, and this frontal symmetry is never replicated again; but, its selective employment testifies to the influence and power of theatrical effect in cinema.
Performance space and Conceptual Metaphor
To appreciate the significance of the house in drama or poetry, it is important to account for its effect as a metaphor. This was part of Bachelard’s project in undertaking a phenomenology of the imagination and this is what undergirds the emotional and “theatrical” effect of the house in Through a Glass Darkly. Accounting for this lies in the fundamental presence of dwelling places in human cultures, and how these experiences have informed conceptual structures in language, specifically conceptual metaphors. This has been treated exhaustively in the works of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In discussing common conceptual metaphors that are present in everyday speech, Lakoff and Johnson stress that the BUILDING metaphor, which would include the house as described by
Bachelard and as constructed (literally and figuratively) in Through a Glass Darkly, is unique. In the BUILDING metaphor:
The surface is the outer shell and foundation, which define an interior for a building. But in the BUILDING metaphor, unlike the CONTAINER metaphor, the content is not in the interior; instead, the foundation and outer shell constitute the content.349
In other words, the BUILDING metaphor, such as the house, is impregnated with meaning; hence, we use it in everyday ways such as “The foundation of your argument does not have enough content to support your claims” and “The framework of your argument does not have enough substance to
349 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh 99-100.
146 withstand criticism.”350 The artistic elaboration of metaphor is a development in thinking. Metaphor
“is not merely a matter of language,” but “a matter of conceptual structure,” and conceptual structure is not merely intellectual but “involves all the natural dimensions of our experience, including aspects of our sense experiences: color, shape, texture, sound, etc.,” dimensions which structure both mundane and aesthetic experience.351 The house in Bergman’s film and the longstanding presence of “the house” in drama evidence this claim, and demonstrates how theatre and film may be said to think through images in a manner related to language but not reducible to semiotic analysis.
The CONTAINER and BUILDING metaphors are the foundation of Bergman’s sense of theatre and metaphysics: it is why there is so often always a performance-within his work on some level, which discloses the greater performance that is presented as “reality.” Lakoff and Johnson see language and physical experience as inseparable: “In actuality we feel that no metaphor can ever be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis.”352 Similarly, Bachelard argues that only “phenomenology—that is to say, a consideration of the onset of the image in an individual consciousness—can help to restore the subjectivity of images and measure their fullness, their strength, and their transsubjectivity.”353 Taken together, these provide a starting point in accounting for why the metaphor of the “house” in drama, in general, and specifically in Through a Glass Darkly manages to be at once powerfully resonant but still never didactic, an experience as opposed to a sign.
350 Ibid 100.
351 Ibid 235.
352 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 19. Due to embodied processes, the numerous spatial metaphors used in everyday speech remain cognitively salient; the same areas of the brain that are activated in actual sensorimotor endeavors are similarly active in the employment of spatial metaphors.
353 Bachelard xix. Bachelard adds: “These subjectivities and transsubjectivities cannot be determined once and for all, for the poetic image is essentially variational, and not, as in the case of the concept, constitutive.”
147 Looking to the necessity and message of the house in Through a Glass Darkly, one can see both its function as a playhouse and its gravitas as a tragic skene, as well as its primordial conceptual structure.
It is home to both artist and to seer, Minus and Karin, brother and sister. The isolated house of the film and the relationship between these two figures reflect what Bachelard sees a loss to contemporary existence owing to a slackening of the “anthropocosmic ties” and their “first attachment in the universe of the house.”354 In fact, Bergman’s film specifically addresses this “lack,” participating in a similar project as Bachelard’s.
Through a Glass Darkly is pre-eminently concerned with shelter, extending from the individual through the social to the metaphysical. While certainly troubled by the idea of God, the film also hesitates before the idea of existential atheism. This hesitancy corresponds with Bachelard’s criticism of what he sees as a surfeit of “abstract, ‘world-conscious’ philosophers who discover a universe by means of the dialectical game of the I and the non-I.” 355 These same (among whom it seems safe to include Sartre) “know the universe before they know the house, the far horizon before the resting-place; whereas the real beginnings of images, if we study them phenomenologically, will give concrete evidence of the values of inhabited space, of the non-I that protects the I.”356 Through a Glass Darkly is far less confident, however. The protective “non-I” (the Other, especially the Other-as-parent) seems exactly what both Minus and Karin languish after. To understand this more fully, it is necessary to consider the interiors, both as sets and, ultimately, as aspects of “the house” as we experience it through the film.
354 Ibid 4.
355 Ibid 4-5.
356 Ibid 5.
148 C. Interiors
Bachelard’s observations on the house in literature have an uncanny correspondence with the values and properties of the house in Through a Glass Darkly, and the idea of the house in drama generally.
In the film, the interiors of the house, in particular, are intimately connected with the space of the lusthus as disclosed in the performance-within of “The Artistic Haunting”; the link between each of these spaces is the figure of Karin. The interior spaces of the house are not effectively open to us until after the performance-within, and it is primarily Karin who makes these interiors available to us.
Bachelard emphasizes that the fictional house, which evokes autobiographical associations from our common experiences of houses, distills the “house” most effectively: “Through poems, perhaps more than through recollections, we touch the ultimate poetic depth of the space of the house,” which he maintains is “one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind.”357 Bachelard identifies two basic, connecting themes in representations of the house in French literature: “1) A house is imagined as a vertical being. It rises upward. It differentiates itself in terms of its verticality. It is one of the appeals of our consciousness of verticality. 2) A house is imagined as a concentrated being. It appeals to our consciousness of centrality.”358 A key component, and one that is found in the film, is a sense of verticality that “is ensured by the polarity of cellar and attic, the marks of which are so deep that, in a way, they open up two very different perspectives for a phenomenology of the imagination.”359 “Verticality” was purportedly a guiding concept for the film; it was to be “a story that moves vertically, not horizontally” and “a film that went into an untested
357 Ibid 6.
358 Ibid 17.
359 Ibid.
149 dimension of depth.”360 The axis for this vertical movement is comprised by the poles of the upstairs room and the “cosmic cellar” of the wrecked ship; the embodied mind, which reflects our experience as vertical creatures, is the source of this verticality.
The upstairs room
An interior setting directly linked to the idea of verticality and to performance is the upstairs room where Karin goes to speak with oracular voices and to await God. The working title for the film was
“The Wallpaper” [“Tapeten”], and Karin communicates with her voices through a pronounced gash in the wallpaper of what would be the northern wall of the room; this scenic feature was used in both the film and a later stage version. The shooting schedule also identifies the room as “tapet-rummet” [“the wallpaper-room”].361 However, there is also an idiomatic expression in Swedish, “vara på tapeten”
translatable as “to be the topic of discussion.” This suggests that the events in this room are the thesis of the film itself; the wallpaper may simultaneously be taken as suggesting an idiomatic phrase and as part of the decor. In performance, the conceptual acquires physical presence, even in the case of a film, which afterwards offers a reproduction of that presence.
Bachelard is concerned with the poetic image in literature, but what obtains for the image evoked
Bachelard is concerned with the poetic image in literature, but what obtains for the image evoked