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The time when people die and babies are born and nightmares materialize, happy hour for a tormented cinéaste. Meta-chatter ("Quiet... Rolling") behind stark credits, the gray view has Liv Ullmann stepping out of a desolate cabin to meet the camera, as befits a tale that is told. Murnau's deathboat brings her and her husband (Max von Sydow) to the island, empty wooden frames on a squeaky wheelbarrow precede "great, quiet darkness." Morbid irritation is the mood, the painter who can't sleep stares grimly at his wristwatch, the full weight of Godard's long minute (Bande à Part) is put to the test before dawn. "These seconds... You see how long they last?" A comedy of disintegration to follow Persona's tragedy of rupture, image after vehement image tumbling out of Ingmar Bergman's unconscious. Stewing in dread, his stand-in envisions Kafka's castle overrun by demonic snobs. The Baron (Erland Josephson) who's literally driven up the wall by jealousy, the baleful scholar (Ulf Johansson) whose job is to "finger people's souls and turn them inside out," the leering crone (Naima Wifstrand) who takes off her hat and with it her face. The towheaded lad with a concealed bite, fluttering birds out of Poe or Hitchcock, the malevolent Papageno (Georg Rydeberg) with feathers sprouting from tuxedo. "You see what you want to see!" The wife treasured for her "wholeness" gets a bullet or two, the true muse (Ingrid Thulin) turns up bare under a sheet in the mausoleum, cackling at the powdered, mascaraed fool. A well-placed peck at the artistic psyche, back into the bog it goes. Bergman's Vampyr, in other words, a simple matter of confronting the creative process head-on: "The mirror has been shattered. But what do the splinters reflect?" The Tenant, The Shining, Antichrist... With Gertrud Fridh, Gudrun Brost, and Bertil Anderberg. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |