The pre-eminent French film critic of the 1950s, André Bazin, stated that a key distinction between theatre and film lay in the priority of the actor: “The human being is all-important in the theater. The drama on the screen can exist without actors.”386 This statement omits any consideration of those occasions when characters disappear from view and an audience is essentially “left alone” in the theatre before an empty stage; such moments are not infrequent in theatre. For example, in Henrik
383 Ibid 22.
384 Ibid 22-23.
385 It is also worth noting that Bergman's employment of the interior of a shipping vessel as the site for two characters involved in an existential drama has a precedent in Agnès Varda’s film La Point-Courte (1954). Here it is a husband and wife and the sexual relationship is not incestuous. And here the ship is a new one that is under construction rather than the leaking “cellar” of Bachelard's “oneiric house.” But there is a connection to Bachelard himself, as Varda had studied with the philosopher at the Sorbonne. Varda’s work, particularly Cléo de 5 à 7, came to be discussed in the Swedish film journal Chaplin in 1963. See Mark Shiva, ”Agnès Varda,” Chaplin (no. 3, 5:36, 1963) 72-75; Torsten Manns, ”Flickan och döden,” Chaplin (no. 3, 5:36, 1963) 75-77.
386 André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema—Part Two,” What is Cinema? vol. 1 (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 2005) 102.
160 Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), the first act begins with the living room in Helmers’ apartment in full view, but empty of any characters.387 At the beginning of the third act, Mrs. Linde leaves the room to answer the front door and we hear footsteps and dialogue from offstage, but there is no one in view onstage.388 One can argue that these moments are merely passing, and that the actor or actors will quickly come into view again. This may be true, but that criteria applies to the majority of films as well as stage productions: in both cases, despite Bazin’s contention, we are seldom left for a long interval during a play or a film without having someone to look at; even when we are left looking at something, we are frequently either anticipating seeing a character of some sort appear on the stage or screen, or we are attending to some off-stage or off-screen event that we hear but do not see.
Bergman uses the setting of the foyer in Through a Glass Darkly precisely in such a manner, which clearly derives from theatrical precedent and practice, and does so to good cinematic effect. The foyer is a set constructed and used for filming at the SF studios at Råsunda, Stockholm. It is the site of a deliberate “onstage” and “offstage” within the film, and is used for the first time when Minus searches for his missing sister in the house. In a manner that recalls Ibsen, the character leaves the setting to search “offstage” while we, as audience, remain with an “empty” set before our eyes, listening to and imagining the “offstage” action. The camera remains fixed in a low-angle long shot, and the
perspective is identical with that of an ideal seat in a proscenium theatre. This shot is 20 seconds in length, 11 seconds of which are comprised by an “empty” set and offscreen action.
The foyer is employed again for an “offstage” conversation following Karin's apocalyptic encounter with the “spider God.” Following her account, while she is seated and sedated on the staircase, there is
387 Henrik Ibsen, “A Doll’s House,” Four Major Plays (New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1998) 1.
388 Ibsen 62.
161 a knock at the front door and her father crosses the foyer to answer, the camera swiveling in a panning motion to follow, but remaining stationary. David opens the door and converses with the helicopter ambulance pilot, or perhaps a paramedic: we never see this character or distinctly hear a voice; we only see and hear David speaking to someone “offstage.” This use of the foyer for an offstage event lasts 21 seconds.
In the final usage of this setting, Karin makes her last exit from the house. Again, the camera is in a low-angle, fixed long shot, offering an ideal proscenium perspective. She wears an overcoat and has put on dark sunglasses; she stands in the doorway, briefly, and then goes out without a word. Her husband and then her father, carrying her suitcase, follow behind, the front door closing behind them.
Minus remains alone in the foyer; he goes to the door, opens it, looks “offstage” for a long while, then closes the door, goes to “stage right”/camera left, and collapses, sobbing against the wall. After several seconds, we hear the helicopter motor start up. Minus gets to his feet and crosses to the door, opens it, and then steps outside. This usage lasts 46 seconds. This exit recalls the departure of Nora in Ibsen’s Doll’s House, but is also consonant with Bergman’s treatment of Nina in The Seagull during the same work period. Critic Kenneth Tynan commented: “Above all, I remember the moment in the last act when Bergman showed us Chekhov’s Nina, as opposed to the hysterical chit we normally see;
[the actress], when she made her final entrance, had changed from child to woman.”389 This emphasis on a transition to self-knowledge bears comparison with the Karin’s exit in Through a Glass Darkly.
389 Tynan 58. Tynan adds that, “One knew that [Nina] would survive ... and then go on, thus fledged, to become a good actress.” There may be autobiographical factors influencing this girl-to-woman reading of Karin and Nina by Bergman.
The actress Harriet Andersson and Bergman had been romantic partners in the early 1950s. It had been several years since their last collaboration, and Andersson had married and born a child shortly before the filming of Through a Glass Darkly.
Such factors may account for particular qualities in Andersson’s performance as Karin.
162 The camera in the first and last of these sequences remains fixed; all action is dependent upon actor movement, and most of the affective qualities of all three sequences (the searching, the conversation, the looking out) are solely dependent upon actors establishing a continuation of the play-world
“offstage.” Tynan remarked upon attending The Seagull that, “Swedish directors bring to their movies experience gained in the theatre. The two forms are constantly enriching one another.”390 Given that theatricality and the issue of identity go hand-in-hand in this film, it is interesting that Tynan asserted at this same time that, “the Swedish theatre today is perhaps the most eclectic in Europe, with all the variety and lack of identity that that implies.”391
An additional element contributing to the “theatricality” of this setting for Karin’s exit is the stone wall that is visible through these center doors: this wall constitutes a horizon line, and seems identical to the stone walls that we have seen throughout the film in numerous exterior sequences filmed on location in Fårö. But, in terms of actuality and continuity, the scale of this wall is out of proportion: it appears to either be much closer to the front doors of the house than anything previously established in the film, or it is a much taller wall than the wall that was used in the exterior shots. It is an
aesthetically balanced design, a wall that looks “as it should” to the eye observing the “theatre” of the foyer.
390 Ibid 57; emphasis added. Tynan immediately identifies Ekerot, Sjöberg, and Bergman as examples of this, adding that these three “are generally regarded as Sweden's best metteurs-en-scène.”
391 Ibid 58; emphasis added. Tynan also remarks that “Sweden's real luck consists in never having had a Shakespeare or a Racine; its only classic—Strindberg—is a modern, for whom no traditional style exists to inhibit adventurous directors.
Being thus uncommitted, it has been able to pick and choose, selecting what it needed from the production methods of Russia, France and Germany” (ibid). In Tynan's opinion: “The Swedish performing arts are homogeneous in personnel, flexible in technique, contemporary in outlook and international in scope, to an extent that would scarcely be possible in a bigger country with a strong and ancient theatrical tradition of its own” (ibid).
163 But why does this “theatrical” wall work rather than distract? It uses one of the strongest cultural constructions of spectatorial vision, the “ideal subject” perspective developed in painting, architecture, and theatre for centuries in Western art. Furthermore, the camera position in these shots replicates its position during the “play-within” at the lusthus, when the perspective associated with the diegetic spectator (David) is abandoned in favor of the centered “ideal subject” perspective on the drama. This same use of perspective occurs at other key moments in the film, such as Karin’s first “performance”
alone in the wallpapered room and Minus’ race to the house in the rain, discussed above. Rather than a static, “theatrical” use of the camera, Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist developed a motif based on this longstanding cultural practice.
VII. Summation
Ultimately, it can be argued that Karin deliberately and self-consciously chooses to live within that subjective reality that best suits her, the one that seems to her most real and sustainable. The Artistic Haunting; or, The Tomb of Illusions proves, by the end of the film, to have been a metaphor
encapsulating Karin’s place in the world, as well as the relationships of each of the male characters to Karin’s illness; in short, an existential reduction. This quality of reduction (bracket, epoche,
parentheses, etc.) is inevitable, as any enacted drama ostensible presents a metaphysical model. Or, as Goffman observed: “Scripts even in the hands of unpracticed players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing.”392
In the case studies examined above, the performance-within serves as an existential demonstration;
it is an affirmative gesture that contests the everyday, thereby disclosing different potentials for being in the world for both performer and spectator. It also makes conspicuous the effect that performance
392 Goffman 72.
164 has upon space and place, both in terms of pragmatics (preparation for production, set-building) and perception (poetic space). It also makes apparent the double character of performance that verisimilar representation seeks so often to cloak; and this in turn bares the relation between performance and language, not merely in terms of semiotics, but as an intrinsic component of existence: we know that we are here, we know that we make meanings, and this calls meaning into question. Hence, the aesthetic desire for unity in terms of place, time, and character reflects a longstanding desire for continuity (or homeostasis) for Karin in terms of dwelling, faith, and self.
Bachelard states in his introduction that he found it necessary to set aside “scientific prudence” in his project to “found a metaphysics of the imagination” because that prudence refused “to obey the immediate dynamics of the image.”393 The result was “a split in one’s thinking” with “great psychic repercussions,” that contained the “entire paradox of a phenomenology of the imagination”:
How can an image, at times very unusual, appear to be a concentration of the entire psyche? How—with no preparation—can this singular, short-lived event constituted by the appearance of an unusual poetic image, react on other minds and in other hearts, despite all the barriers of common sense, all the disciplined schools of thought, content in their immobility?394
This crisis, which concerns trans-subjective communication, is of a piece with the dramatic crisis studied in Through a Glass Darkly. It is evidenced in the appearance of the “cosmic cellar” or the wrecked ship, and is also symptomatic of Karin’s illness and her symbolic affinity with Minus, as seer to artist. The wrecked ship, the wall-papered room, and the lusthus are all linked in this respect: taboo desire, religious vision, and dramatic art.
393 Bachelard viii.
394 Ibid xviii-xix.
165 Bachelard, like Lakoff and Johnson after him, sees a need to go beyond objectivism and
subjectivism (“facts or impressions”) in order to discover “primary virtues” that can “reveal an attachment that is native in some way to the primary function of inhabiting”; one way to do this is by locating “the original shell” in every kind of dwelling.395 Lakoff and Johnson see Western culture as bound by two competing myths: the myth of objectivism and the myth of subjectivism.396 Lakoff and Johnson see this as an entrenched cultural binary in the West, an historical “tension” between truth and art, “with art viewed as illusion and allied, via its link with poetry and theater, to the tradition of public oratory.”397 Their alternative to these two camps is disclosed through metaphor, and they propose an
“experientialist synthesis” in which metaphor is recognized as “imaginative rationality”:
Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness. These endeavors of the imagination are not devoid of rationality: since they use metaphor, they employ an imaginative rationality.398
Bachelard anticipates this movement in his analysis of “the essential newness of the poetic image”
and the attendant “problem of the speaking being’s creativeness”: “Through this creativeness the imagining consciousness proves to be, very simply but very purely, an origin.”399 This “creativeness”
is a variant of authenticity, which has been a central issue in each film undertaken in this study: a performative “creative authenticity” that accommodates and incorporates precedent, pattern, influence,
395 Ibid 4.
396 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh 186-189.
397 Ibid 189.
398 Ibid 193.
399 Bachelard xxiv.
166 inter-textuality, etc., but which also allows for the quality of originality, that is to say, “the essential newness” (disclosure) that seems at once immanent in the image and immediate to perception.
The “speaking being’s creativeness” and the problem of “origin” are dramatized in a series of Bergman films following Through a Glass Darkly, from The Silence [Tystnaden] (1963) and Persona (1966) up through A Passion [En passion] (1969). In these films, the idea of speech is opposed to what is original or creative (authentic) in human existence. Looks (regards) may tyrannize, but language is presented as the greatest barrier. In the same vein, the problem of front- and back-stage behaviors discussed by Goffman persists in Bergman. What changes in terms of presenting these matters is a new variation of the performance-within and its implied metaphysics to include the exposure of the film itself. This effort derives from Bergman’s own ideas of verfremdungseffekt in tandem with an interest in alienation via language comparable with Antonin Artaud’s writings on theater. There is a corollary in the rise of post-structuralism and deconstruction at this time. This is not to suggest that Bergman was directly influenced in any way by someone such as Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida.
Rather, through exposure to the practice of theatre-making, and through the development of views that were influenced, at least in part, by Sartre and the implications of existentialism, Bergman was well-positioned to offer commentaries through his work that were contemporary and complementary with the trends in Continental philosophy during the 1960s.
The Poetics of Space, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and Through a Glass Darkly, produced within the same five year period, capture a timely fissure between the experience of self, which is social, fragmentary, performative, etc., and the awareness of continuity phenomenologically experienced through space and memory. A tension in expectations between 19th-century Romanticism, especially with respect to art and identity, and the consequences of existentialism and phenomenology in a movement toward what will become post-structuralism. This tension accounts for the dramatic