1950s – Page 3 – Scene by Green

Pyaasa (1957)

Guru Dutt | 2hr 33min

Often cited as the peak of Bollywood’s Golden Age, Pyaasa bursts with visual and musical splendour, adopting the passionate romanticism of the struggling Urdu poet at its centre. Vijay’s lyrical expressions range from melancholy laments over his nation’s social issues (“Where are those who are proud of India?”) to light-hearted jingles (“A single touch of this strong hand will dissipate all woes”), each imbued with the same sensitive eloquence which Guru Dutt carries in his performance and direction. On either side of him, two women vie for his love, though this is no simple repeat of Aar Paar from three years earlier. Pyaasa is far more sombre in tone, playing out the humanistic drama of Vijay’s personal tribulations, intimate desires, and efforts to have his work published. The wealthy Mr Ghosh could be the man to make those ambitions a reality, if only he wasn’t so jealous that Vijay was his wife’s first true love.

Clearly Vijay isn’t quite over his old flame either. Meena falls back into his life by chance as he mournfully sings of life’s sorrows up on a stage, before catching her face in the audience. Therein lies the romantic catalyst for what is Pyaasa’s defining cinematic moment – a surreal escape into the dreamscape of Vijay’s mind. A magnificent staircase winds its way up to a cloudy night sky, where Meena is gracefully silhouetted against a giant full moon. As she makes her way down among hanging baubles, Vijay walks through elaborate iron gates and across a mist-covered floor, where the two sing hypothetical questions of a revitalised love to acoustic guitar accompaniment in ‘Hum aapki aankhon mein’.

‘Hum aapki aankhon mein’ is the strongest Dutt has ever been in his impressive career, crafting an ethereal dreamscape of atmospheric lighting, giant sets, smoke machines, crane shots, and astonishing shot compositions.

Balloons and drapes billow in the light breeze around them, but most notably it is Dutt’s breathtaking camera movements through crane and dolly shots that lift the musical number into something truly transcendent. By the end of this song Meena has floated back up to the top of that stairway, just out of reach like some distant, celestial being, thereby set drastically apart from Vijay’s other love interest.

*Billowing curtains, falling balloons, hanging baubles, ornate lanterns – this musical number is designed to look as if Vijay and Meena are dancing atop clouds in their own personal heaven.*

Along a parallel narrative thread, we find local prostitute Gulabo, coming into the writer’s life one lonely night after his brothers have pawned off his manuscripts as wastepaper. While mourning his lost lyrics on a park bench though, he hears them being sung to him as a sly temptation. Entranced just as much by his desire to reclaim his papers as his romantic curiosity, he follows the seductress back to her home, while Dutt’s camera elegantly glides with them through magnificent colonnades and shifty alleyways. Though she spurns him after realising he is penniless, the discovery that he penned those words sees her undergo a change of heart. From here, Vijay’s relationship with Gulabo is defined by mutual compassion and gentle longing. As a sex worker, she has suffered a great deal of abuse at the hands of men, and so their romantic connection becomes a haven of sincere empathy.

*Tracking shots through colonnades when Vijay first meets Gulabo and follows her home. Dutt’s moving camera is crucial to the artistic success of Pyaasa.*

Dutt may have leant on his visual obstructions more heavily in previous films, but they very much play a key part in this romance too, frequently obscuring Vijay and Gulabo behind the stair bannisters of her apartment building. His oppressive use of set décor is also drawn throughout the rest of the film, imposing Calcutta’s urban infrastructure on crowded sets that emphasise the distance between lovers, such as the exquisitely poignant rooftop scene during the number ‘Aaj Sajan Mohe Aang Laga Lo’. On the occasion that Dutt does choose to shoot on location, this depth of field brings a raw grit to the drama, landing us on the riverbank of the Ganges when Vijay learns from his brothers of his mother’s passing and turning its industrial architecture into harsh backdrops.

*Dutt returns to these shot obstructions multiple times on the stairway up to Gulabo’s apartment – a visual device that he would emphasise more heavily in Aar Paar, but which is still potent here.*

*Some of the film’s best scenes are shot on location. Certainly this is inspired by the Italian neorealists, but Dutt continues it here in India by the Ganges.*

With poverty, sex work, corruption, and death underlying this narrative, Pyaasa proves to be a particularly morose, and at times even slightly neorealist film for Dutt. That his sullen brooding and understated reactions are so distinct from his comic performance in Aar Paar is a testament to his versatility as an actor too, though he and his fellow cast members are also lent immense gravity here with the camera so frequently dollying in on their faces illuminated by moody, low-key lighting setups.

*Always the dolly shots in on actors’ faces, drawing us in and out of their aura.*

Commanding a sombre tone with such grace is no easy feat, but Dutt pushes it even further in building his narrative to a Sullivan’s Travels-style third-act twist, seeing Vijay presumed dead in a train accident and temporarily rendered an amnesiac in a mental hospital. Even when his memories return, he is met with disbelief, all the while his poems he had been trying to get published have taken off thanks to Gulabo’s efforts of persuasion. Of course, to Mr Ghosh it is all just an opportunity to capitalise on recent tragedy, and even Vijay’s own brothers conspire with him to receive a cut of the profits by misidentifying the body of a homeless man.

*Dutt’s sets may be simple, but there is always so much detail in the way he frames them, here using the balcony like the famous Romeo and Juliet scene.*

*Detail and blocking even in throwaway shots, always framing Vijay against his surroundings and other characters.*

How quickly loyalties change though when he finally does manage to escape from the hospital on the anniversary of his ‘death’ and make a grand public appearance at his memorial service. Inside this magnificent hall, the scale of Dutt’s photography is colossal, symmetrically framing Vijay in the doorway between masses of grieving fans. Crane shots sweep over the crowd as they stand in unison, gazing in disbelief at this resurrected Christ figure who has returned to set things right. The editing too is especially involved in this sequence, subtly matching the rhythms of Vijay’s lyrical chastisement of Mr Ghosh’s greed in ‘Ye Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaye’.

“This world of palaces, of thrones, of crowns,

This world full of enemies of humanity,

This world which is only hungry for money,

Even if one could have this world, so what?”

*Another massive visual and musical highlight, as Vijay makes his Christ-like return to the world in a hall of adoring fans, and Dutt sweeps his camera in crane shots above them all.*

And of course, much like Christ himself, Vijay rejects the fame, riches, and power offered to him, right at the moment when he could have seized it all. The frustration that has accumulated towards society’s hypocrisy and materialism all through Pyaasa finally explodes with disenchanted anger, seeing him deny his own name and eventually retreat into obscurity with one last monologue.

“I complain against a society that tears away a man’s compassion. That makes a brother, a stranger, a friend an enemy for self-interest. I complain against a culture, a world which worships the dead, and tramples the living underfoot. Where it is considered cowardice to cry for the suffering of others, where it is considered a weakness to respect others. In such an atmosphere, I shall never find peace.”

How fitting it is that he turns to prose in this moment, exiting the room with Gulabo just as a gust of wind picks up his poetry and scatters it in a dramatic flurry of papers. Dutt is a master of kinetic imagery, punctuating this decisive character turn with an equally powerful composition, and effectively wiping Vijay’s slate clean for a more hopeful future. The idealist we met at the start of the film is not the man we see here, now resolving to give up on a ruined world and leave with his cherished love before society gets a chance to corrupt that too. Though Pyaasa flows with both incredible joy and profound cynicism, Dutt’s lyrical camerawork continues to guide us through broad sweeps of emotion with stylish bravado, bleeding a uniquely Indian sentiment that marks it as his crowning achievement.

A perfectly cynical yet sweet ending, seeing Vijay turn away his chance at fame having grown jaded with its corruption, accepting a much simpler life with Gulabo. His manuscripts blow across the room in a beautiful flurry, carelessly throwing his years of work to the wind.

Pyaasa is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Alain Resnais | 1hr 32min

Three years on from his landmark Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, Alain Resnais was posed a new challenge – to recreate a similar historical depiction of Hiroshima’s bombing. His inspiration to turn it into the narrative film Hiroshima Mon Amour wasn’t just driven by his reluctance to tread familiar ground though. His recognition of the impossibility to accurately portray such profound human suffering would also drive this decision.

The opening fifteen minutes of contradictions is an absolute refute of those who would suggest otherwise. Close-ups of arms and bodies locked in a romantic embrace weave images of pleasure into the raw pain of newsreels, re-enactments, and surviving artefacts, as observed by Emmanuelle Riva’s unnamed ‘Elle’ (Her).

“I saw the people walking around. The people walk around, lost in thought, among the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, among the photographs, the photographs, the reconstructions, for want of something else, the explanations, for want of something else. Four times at the museum of Hiroshima.”

For all of her observations though, Eiji Okada’s ‘Lui’ (Him) only ever provides the same variation on a single response.

“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”

*A beautifully hypnotic and magical realist opening, returning to these images of nuclear ash settling over a lover’s embrace.*

Nuclear ash falls on their naked bodies, smothering their love with echoes of past traumas, and yet they remain inexplicably divided over the details of those memories. Elle believes she has seen Hiroshima’s suffering, in much the same way we might think we have grasped the Holocaust through Resnais’ documentary, but she has not seen it in the same way as Him who lost his family to the tragedy. The combination of dolly shots rolling down hospital hallways, museum exhibitions, and through historical sites with the repetitive voiceover calls to mind similar scenes in both Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad, summoning us into a dreamlike reverie where words matter less than the rhythms they inspire. Montages like these are where Resnais is most comfortable, prompting melancholy considerations of what it means to truly “see” Hiroshima rather than making any misguided attempt to understand its horror.

A remarkable similar opening to scenes from Night and Fog (three years earlier) and Last Year at Marienbad (two years later). Voiceovers echo repetitive phrases in a mesmerising reverie, as the camera dollies through remnants of Hiroshima’s historical trauma.

This is a film of intersections – past and present, France and Japan, man and woman, conflicting sides of one war. An early shot of two wristwatches laid over each other clues us into this meeting of timelines. Over a decade has passed since the bombing of Hiroshima, and now Elle has arrived in the city to act in an antiwar film being shot there. The city is still marked by tragedy, but its people recognise the need to keep moving on. Lui stands among them, as much a personification of Hiroshima as she is of her own small French village, Nevers. “Hiroshima. That’s your name,” she tells him. “And your name is Nevers. Nevers in France,” he responds.

*A criss-cross of watches, forming an icon of crossed timelines.*

It isn’t unusual for Resnais to infuse his wistful allegories with such elusive subtlety, though it is tough to imagine how this magnificently cryptic film would have looked without Marguerite Duras’ poetic screenplay. At this point in her career, she was primarily a novelist, making Hiroshima Mon Amour her foray into the world of cinema. Her dialogue flows lyrically in conversations and voiceovers, pondering the sensitive memories which have come to define both Elle and Lui, but there is also extraordinary formal ambition in her to-and-fro flashbacks.

Hiroshima as we know it in the film exists in the present, separate from history. By shooting on location, Resnais captures the spark of life which has returned to its restless urban landscapes, piercing the dark sky with flickering city lights and imposing magnificent pieces of architecture on our characters’ pensive wandering. There is an implicit aversion to the cold stillness of death in Elle’s love of this vitality, expressing her admiration for “Cities where there’s always someone awake, day or night.” In blinding contrast, Resnais’ representation of her home back in Nevers is tarnished with memories of torture and grief. Her hope for the future died along with the German soldier she fell in love with during Nazi occupation, and unlike Lui, she is still trapped in her past.

*A composition of faces in close-up worthy of comparison to Ingmar Bergman, and Resnais even keeps his backgrounds dynamic with the flashing lights of the city.*

*The scenes of Elle’s past in Nevers are filled with tragedy of a different kind – the death of both love and freedom.*

As such, a paradox forms in Hiroshima Mon Amour. With these separate historical periods occupying the same space, time ceases to exist. Long dissolves frequently erase the years that divide one scene from the next, and as Elle walks the streets in one scene with Resnais’ dollying camera angled up at the surrounding buildings, he alternates between images of Hiroshima at night and Nevers in the day. All through this film, he is formally dedicated to studying this surprising proximity between such distant settings. Even while both exist thousands of kilometres apart, each are scarred by war in their own unfortunate ways.

*An incredibly inspired montage moving through the streets of Nevers in the daytime, and Hiroshima at night – two settings occupying a single point in time and space.*

Perhaps this is why Elle believes she can comprehend Hiroshima’s tragedy on some level. Even after being told it is an impossible task for those who weren’t there, she nonetheless continues trying to draw a connection, using her brief affair with Lui to relive her past relationship with the German soldier. Simply the way he twitches his hand in his sleep becomes a catalyst for reminiscence, launching her into a nostalgic rumination over her dead lover’s final moments.

Although Okada brings a poignant warmth to his part as Lui, it is Riva who commands the screen with her expressive face, constantly reliving events that are invisible to everyone but her. All around her though, Japan continues to strive forward. Even the accommodation where she is staying, Hotel New Hiroshima, stands as a testament to those efforts, forming ravishing modern backdrops to Elle and Lui’s fleeting romance. Some experiences of history are simply irreconcilable, despite their similarities. For all the devastation that the bombing of Hiroshoma wreaked on its citizens, the fateful event meant something very different for all those living in France.

“The end of the war.”

*The modern architecture of Hiroshima defines it as a city moving from the present into the future, allowing for some beautiful compositions of rigid lines and angles.*

The division between everything these two lovers represent is as simple as that. Just as these lives, cities, and eras have intersected at a specific point in time, they will also inevitably be ripped apart, set back on their own distinct paths. Resnais may spend time considering those tragedies which he never experienced firsthand in Hiroshima Mon Amour, but he realises that to try and evoke empathy through explicit artistic depiction would be futile. Cinema is a medium uniquely suited to the psychological study of time and subjectivity, and by narrowing such broad concepts down to a single catastrophe that echoed across nations and decades, he keeps digging deeper into the compounded layers of its mournful, enduring legacy.

Hiroshima Mon Amour is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

The Magician (1958)

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 40min

The Magician has neither the severity of Ingmar Bergman’s more metaphorical dramas nor the light-hearted grace of his comedies, and yet there is an offbeat blend of both here which thrives in the performative scams of one travelling troupe. Max von Sydow is their bearded leader, Albert, specialising in ‘animal magnetism’ and conducting an aura of mystery through his apparent muteness. He is joined by his talkative assistant Tubal, his wife Manda who publicly presents as her male alter ego Mr Aman, and Granny Vogler, an old crone with an affinity for potions. Their driver Simson guides the company’s carriage through stark landscapes and misty forests, wary of authorities who may be tracking them down, and yet as a collective they nevertheless relish their bohemian lifestyle.

*Bergman opens The Magician with these gorgeous long shots, framing his sharp horizons and misty forests to perfection.*

Their arrival in a small, Swedish village headed by the curious Consul Egerman offers them an audience of varied interests. Public officials bet on Albert’s apparently supernatural abilities, with Dr Vergerus leading the sceptical charge against them. Elsewhere, the consul’s wife Ottilia desperately requests that the travelling charlatan contact her dead daughter, and a pair of naïve maids fall easily for Granny’s stories. While Sanna fearfully submits to the lie that the old woman is a 200-year-old witch, Sara wilfully consumes rat poison that Granny has disguised as an aphrodisiac, and ventures off to dark room with Simson in tow.

If these are the spectators of Albert’s grand lies and performances, then the magician may be representative of Bergman himself – an artist who is as equally frustrated by his blindest followers as he is his harshest critics. Perhaps he lumps himself in that latter category as well. When Albert steps away from the stage, his insecurities rise to the surface, peeling off his fake beard with quiet regret and recognising the hollowness of his act. There is little reward to be found in this profession, eventually leading Granny to abandon it altogether, and Manda to confess her guilt to a smarmy Dr Vergerus.

“Pretense, false promises, double bottoms. A miserable, rotten lie through and through. We’re the most pathetic rabble you could find.”

*Bergman stages his actors across multiples layers of the frame with a magnificent depth of field, crafting tension in his ensemble.*

With an ensemble as rife with conflict as this, The Magician’s deep focus photography flourishes in its tensions and alliances, visually dividing them into units which themselves are internally fractured. Such rich illustrations of character relationships are not unusual for Bergman, who just the previous year delivered his strongest films to date in The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, but new to his stylistic repertoire here are the dolly shots pushing in on his actors’ faces. It is a fitting match for these characters who demand the attention of audiences. The shadows that Bergman elegantly passes across their features in these cropped close-ups draw us even deeper into their shame, fear, and menace, though he reserves his greatest plunge into an unstable mind for Albert’s greatest con.

*Cropped close-ups and sharp lighting drawing us into Max von Sydow’s largely silent performance.*

*Bergman’s blocking of faces is always on point, casting Sanna in a soft light and Granny’s with harsher lights as she looms over the young maid.*

After briefly humiliating the Police Superintendent’s wife and a local stableman with his hypnotic tricks, the charlatan appears to collapse onstage, dead from a heart attack. Dr Vergerus takes on the task of his conducting the autopsy, though soon he begins to feel the presence of some unsettled spirit. Bergman’s cinematography and storytelling here moves directly into the realm of psychological horror – disembodied hands creep slowly into frames, dirtied mirrors catch skewed angles of ghostly apparitions, and the production design itself seems to trap the doctor in its dusty, Gothic clutter. Albert lurks in the shadows, often cast in either pale light or complete darkness, eventually leaving his indistinct profile to loom over the face of a terrified Dr Vergerus.

*Bergman submits to psychological horror as Albert haunts his the sceptical Dr Vergerus, pulling out some magnificently eerie shots with his Gothic production design and lighting.*

This isn’t just an act of revenge for Albert, but an attempt to definitively prove that even the most hardened cynics can be duped with the right spectacle. Even then though, this struggle between faith and reason is not so easily put to rest. The arrival of police in the film’s final minutes might seem to be the end for these fugitive performers, giving Dr Vergerus good reason to gloat over their defeat – until they are extended an invitation to perform at the Royal Palace by the King’s own request. Bergman’s sharp and sudden veer into comedy at the film’s conclusion marks a final victory for his seemingly indestructible artists. They are scapegoats, bohemians, and cheats, but to root these parasitic entertainers out of a free society is an impossible task in The Magician. It is a nifty metaphor that the Swedish director uses here to turn a critical eye towards his own craft, and in his underhanded visual and narrative manipulations, he lightly exposes the fraud that unites him with his critics.

The Magician is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Aar Paar (1954)

Guru Dutt | 2hr 14min

With India’s newfound independence in 1947 came a boom in the nation’s creative industries, and Guru Dutt was right there at the forefront leading the Golden age of Hindi cinema. Though he made films before, it was Aar Paar in 1954 which effectively became his first blockbuster, capturing the attention of Indian moviegoers for its energetic Bollywood soundtrack and sumptuous stylings. There are no shimmering colours or extravagant budget to play with here, and yet Dutt is nevertheless resourceful in his spectacle, spinning off a simple love triangle into a thrilling crime plot, a rags-to-riches melodrama, and a spirited comedy.

Kalu is the charismatic rascal who Dutt casts himself as, coming out of prison with aspirations to make money and gain respect. He was previously convicted of causing a collision while speeding in his taxi, which now makes it difficult for him to get work again in his old profession. A brief stint at the local mechanic ends abruptly when he is caught flirting with the boss’ daughter, Nikki, leaving him to apply for work with the mysterious Captain – a gangster who will grant him work again as a taxi driver, though with a few shady caveats. The nightclub he operates out of also employs a young dancer who similarly catches Kalu’s eye, and who seems to keep running into him whether by chance or fate. Between each of these relationships, Dutt throws out comedic one-liners with ease, constantly charming his way into new circles and romances on his way up the social ladder.

*Dutt is a great director, but he also proves himself a talented actor in the pure charm that he exudes onscreen.*

Behind the camera, he is even more lively. Through staircases, prison bars, tree branches, and virtually anything that crosses his camera’s path, he purposefully obstructs his shots, keeping us at a slight distance to generate both suspense and tantalising romance. His pairing of the camera’s deep focus with a production design as sumptuously cluttered as a Josef von Sternberg film shows the hand of a genuine artist at work, understanding the potential of a magnificent set piece when used at the right time.

*Dutt obstructs the frame like Josef von Sternberg, finding these inventive angles through which he frames his characters.*

The Captain’s nightclub of grand circular arches and ornate wooden bannisters stands out as the finest of them all, surrounding the Dancer with extraordinary decadence as she takes the spotlight for her first solo number ‘Babuji Dheere Chalna’. Patrons sit at tables adorned with fringed lampshades, while cigarettes wafts of smoke from their cigarettes fill the air with a light haze. Through such a glorious display of mise-en-scène, the bewitching atmosphere is set for the Dancer’s indirect seduction of Kalu, offering a warning of the danger that awaits him should he choose her over Nikki.

“Mister, watch your step on the path of love, this path is full of treachery.”

*The nightclub where the Dancer works is Dutt’s most beautifully designed set piece with its circular archways, splendid decor, and patterned wallpaper.*

Among the most dominant aesthetic choices of the film though are the frames Dutt elegantly forms out of cars, angling his camera through windows as Kalu playfully pursues Nikki in the mechanic shop during the number ‘Sun Sun, Sun Sun Zalima, Pyar Humko Tumse Ho Gaya’, and later as he takes back up taxi driving again. His eye for visual composition is impeccable, using these shots to bind the two lovers together in their respective professions, and often panning his camera between them in breezy movements.

*Dutt uses the frames of car windows all through the film, leading to some marvellously creative compositions.*

Of course then, it is only natural that Dutt should lead his film towards a climactic car chase, where Kalu is in his element. Though the Captain initially intends to kill him for refusing to be the mob’s getaway driver, the Dancer offers an alternative – kidnap Nikki, and blackmail him into the job. Dutt’s editing through this bank robbery sequence is as tight and suspenseful as any American gangster movie, and Kalu’s decision to speed off halfway through and rescue his girlfriend is exactly the behaviour of a roguish action hero dedicated to setting things right.

The crime subplot of Aar Paar is well-integrated in Kalu’s rise up the social ladder, serving him for a time and eventually turning against him. Even here, he keeps using these frame obstructions to build suspense.

More than anything else, it is these choices which define the characters of Aar Paar. The title itself roughly translates to ‘This or That’, tearing Kalu between a pair of women, Nikki between her family and her lover, and the Dancer between her loyalties. At the same time, it is also this power of will which guides Kalu’s personal ambitions, allowing him to escape the shame of his past and become an honourable man. It is to this end that Dutt skilfully blends genres with high spirits and exquisite artistry, crafting a sublime musical spectacle that set a standard of Bollywood filmmaking for decades to come.

Aar Paar is not currently streaming in Australia.

Le Plaisir (1952)

Max Ophüls | 1hr 37min

Between the three short stories adapted in Le Plaisir, a span of eight years separates their original publication in the 1880s. Being that these were products of an incredibly fertile period for French author Guy de Maupassant, he did not intend them as a thematic trilogy, yet Max Ophüls nonetheless identifies a common thread in each that he weaves through even more purposefully with laughter and sorrow. Such a delicate balance of tones is essential to his film’s overarching thesis – that pleasure may exist in the absence of true happiness. This, he posits, is a much rarer gift. Armed with a camera that moves with all the elegance of a gentle breeze, and a sophisticated charm that lightly alternates between comedy and tragedy, Ophüls lays out his parables of elderly men, young prostitutes, and jaded lovers seeking out their own forms of gratification in late 19^th century France.

An omniscient narrator voiced by Jean Servais is our guide through these worlds, lifting passages straight from Maupassant’s stories to form the main basis of the script, while screenwriter Jacques Natanson works with Ophüls to compose the overarching framework. In each instance, the indulgences of our primary characters encounter some other humanistic ideal, starting with the “meeting of pleasure and love” in ‘La Masque.’

*Ophüls is one of the greatest innovators of camera movement in history, and he lets it dance and twirl here with the mysterious Monsieur Ambroise in the decadent nightclub.*

There, we are invited into the “rough, boisterous fun” of an elaborate club, within which men and women from across age and class boundaries dance to a lively orchestra. Ophüls isn’t one to deny his audience that excitement either. His mobile camera is entirely liberated here, eagerly tracking patrons who mull around the streets outside with lengthy dolly shots, and eventually dancing with them in the large, ornate hall. Perhaps there is even a bit of Josef von Sternberg in his cluttered production design of curved archways and flamboyant embellishments, though this aesthetic is far more luxurious than his Austrian counterpart’s imposing expressionism. On the occasion that he does deliver static shots, they often land at skewed angles, implicitly giving the impression that we are still moving with restless, garish scenery.

*Canted angles and visual obstructions all through the club like a Josef von Sternberg film, crowding his shots with stunning production design.*

The entrance of a mysterious, masked dandy who announces himself as the “great quadrille dancer, Monsieur Ambroise” draws eyes with his clumsy but enthusiastic dancing, and soon enough we become one with his movements, twirling and pivoting to the tune of upbeat strings. Only when he collapses in exhaustion and has his mask pulled off do we discover the face of an ageing man pining for the romance and energy of his youth. Meanwhile, his wife at home toils away to support his selfish habit. “I want him to live and carry on dancing,” she insists, revealing the love which upholds his pleasure.

The second tale our narrator imparts is ‘La Maison Tellier’, where a “meeting of pleasure and purity” unfolds at the First Communion of Madam Tellier’s niece, attended by all the prostitutes who work at her brothel. Ophüls’ inclination towards the perspectives of female characters would often see his films branded as ‘women’s pictures’, though this says more about the historical era he was working in than anything else. His depiction of these ladies offers them respect and complexity in equal measures, introducing them one by one by means of a crane shot that scales the walls of the building they work inside, and peers in through the windows. The curtains, blinds, and grilles which obstruct our view make for some particularly luscious frames here, keeping us at a distance from their work. Only when they exit the premises and embark on their lengthy train journey are those visual barriers removed.

Ophüls’ camera scales the side of this multi-story brothel and gazes through the windows, letting us meet each of the prostitutes while keeping the blinds, curtains, and grilles between them and the camera.

This community of amiable women makes for an amusing contrast to the male clients they leave back home, who start bickering over tax collector benefits the moment they are left alone. At the home of Tellier’s brother, Joseph, they lie awake in darkness, excited yet anxious for what awaits them the following day at church. At least there is come comfort to be found in Servais’ voiceover, poetically describing the “peaceful, penetrating silence that reached to the stars” on this quiet night.Though he often tells us exactly what we can see for ourselves, his narration acts as a companion to Ophüls’ stunning visuals, leading us from one deeply affecting composition to the next with lyrical grace. When we finally arrive at the Holy Communion, it leaves an even greater impact, hinting at a divine transcendence as we glide over the churchgoers and study the religious iconography surrounding them.

“Something superhuman seemed to hover above their heads, an all-pervading spirit, the powerful breath of an invisible, all-powerful being.”

*Ophüls lands several remarkable compositions as the women lie awake in the darkness, creating a delicate dream space.*

Eventually, the camera drifts back down to the faces of those lining the pews, each one moved by the deep sentiment of their visitors who are now brought to tears by the blessing of some mysterious, holy presence. Here, they are respected like any other woman, and even venerated as new members of Joseph’s family. Of the three tales presented in Le Plaisir, this is by far the longest, but it also acts as a subversion of the other two. While the first and final stories mirror each other in man’s attempt to draw happiness from their selfish indulgences, the women of ‘La Maison Tellier’ become physical emblems of pleasure, venturing forth from their home to find a pure, spiritual happiness.

*Superb use of religious iconography at the church as the voiceover speaks of the divine, uniting pleasure and purity.*

“Shall we now see pleasure confront death? Not a physical but a moral death,” our narrator rhetorically asks us, leading into the final tale of ‘Le Modèle’. For the first time too he reveals himself onscreen, taking part in the story as the friend of our main character – Jean the painter. Jean is infatuated with Joséphine from the moment he sees her, even before he discovers that she is a model. To him their romance is fated, and she quickly becomes his muse.

The story of their relationship’s breakdown is a simple one, as she becomes impatient with his introspective silences, and he grows frustrated with her constant talking. As always though, it is the pure stylistic panache of Ophüls filmmaking which fills this drama with such grand emotion, effortlessly shifting the camera between cinematic paintings that our main character could have created and instilling them with an incredibly rich depth of field. When the lovers’ mutual contempt reaches breaking point, Ophüls feverishly forces us into a wildly unhinged POV shot through Joséphine’s eyes, rushing up several flights of stairs and plummeting us out a window to meet the ground below.

*Ophüls has an admirable dedication to an aesthetic – the skewed camera angles, eloquent camera movements, and visual obstructions are used all through Le Plaisir to great effect.*

Her incidental survival ends their story on a strangely bittersweet note. Whether Jean’s decision to marry her is out of sympathy or a genuine change of heart, their future nonetheless looks stripped of the passion they once felt. As our narrator stands on the sidewalk with a friend and watches them pass by, he too ends his tale.

“He found love, glory, and fortune. Isn’t that happiness?

“Still, it’s very sad.”

“But my friend, there’s no joy in happiness.”

It is hard to imagine a filmmaker so suited to Maupassant’s eloquent literary prose as Ophüls, who finds a perfect formal match between these classical fables and his fluent, sweeping camerawork. True happiness for these characters can only be found in the absence of self-gratification, though it is so often the latter which they pursue to distract from their deep-rooted malaise. Only by separating oneself from such indulgent temptations can that special rarity be found in Le Plaisir – a state of true contentment, divorced from fleeting pleasures of a material world.

Le Plaisir is currently streaming in The Criterion Channel.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 31min

Within the first ten minutes of Wild Strawberries, a surreal nightmare unfolds in the mind of Professor Isak Borg, prompting a sudden shift in his travel plans. The empty city streets he anxiously wanders are blown out in high-contrast monochrome, blinding us with the glare of white pavement and dissolving shadows into inky voids. A clock without hands marks the timelessness of this dream space, but also warns of Isak’s own impending death. Time is running out. A man with a seemingly painted-on, scrunched-up face melts into a dark liquid, and a driverless carriage led by charcoal-coloured horses topples over, tossing a coffin out onto the road. Inside, Isak finds himself. He wakes with terror, and a mysterious new resolution – he will not take a plane to the ceremony where he will be receiving the honorary degree of Doctor Jubilaris that evening. Instead he will drive, and with his daughter-in-law Marianne in tow, he sets out on a physical and spiritual journey of self-reckoning.

Bergman delves into surrealism in Wild Strawberries in a way he had never done before. The over-exposed photography of the professor’s unsettling dream sequence is a brilliant wordless sequence, sinking him into an existential terror of his own mortality.

This existential search for life’s answers makes for a fascinating companion piece to the other Ingmar Bergman film that came out in 1957, The Seventh Seal, with both marking a new trajectory in his career towards more philosophically minded films. Their combined success also venerated him internationally as a filmmaker not to be underestimated, and there may even be a passing of the torch here from one acclaimed Swedish director to another in his casting of Victor Sjöström. Though Bergman had previously used him in To Joy as a supporting character, he is front and centre here as the elderly physician facing up to his troubled past and unsettling future, reflecting on them with sorrowful dissatisfaction. Despite his professional achievements, Isak is a man who has steadily distanced himself from those he once held dearest, and over the course of this road trip each arrive back into his life in the most unexpected ways.

This predominantly takes place through the bleeding together of dreams, memories, and symbols, drifting by on the powerful current of Bergman’s poetic screenplay. “The day’s clear reality dissolved into the even clearer images of memory that appeared before my eyes with the strength of a true stream of events,” Isak eloquently contemplates, as Bergman quite literally dissolves the barriers between his material and psychological worlds via his graceful scene transitions. When the professor rests against the car window and considers “something overpowering in these dreams that bored relentlessly into my mind,” his voiceover is visualised with a slow fade into the past, sending a murder of crows flying across his sleeping head.

*One of the film’s finest compositions arrives in this long dissolve, send a flock of crows flying across Isak’s head as we slip into his dreams.*

It is especially his visit to the summer house he visited throughout the first twenty years of his life that opens the floodgates of nostalgia, playing out his romance with the beautiful Sara who would eventually marry his brother, Sigfrid. While everyone else around Isak in these flashbacks is young, Sjöström continues to play Isak as his older self, fully inhabiting his own memories. As his white-clad peers gather and pray around a table in preparation for dinner, Bergman’s camera tracks forward into the room through a dark doorframe, and Sjöström lingers shamefully on the shadowy edges in his black attire, clearly set apart from these days of romantic idealism. In the present, Isak can’t help but draw comparisons between his old sweetheart and a hitchhiker similarly named Sara – and apparently neither can we, given that both iterations are flanked by rivalling suitors and played by frequent Bergman collaborator Bibi Andersson.

*A doorway opening from darkness into the light, visually drawing a threshold between Isak’s present self and his past.*

Bibi Andersson plays two roles in Wild Strawberries, both called Sara and both mirrors of each other. It isn’t just an impressive performance from her – it is a great piece of formal characterisation from Bergman too.

She isn’t the only modern surrogate calling back to Isak’s past either. When he picks up Sten and Berit, a married couple with a broken-down car, their mutual resentment reminds him of his own relationship with his late wife. It is a miracle that Bergman’s early scenes of Isak and Marianne alone in the front seat are so visually engaging with their piercing deep focus, but it is when he fills the car to the brim that the genius of his blocking is truly revealed, forming layered representations of Isak’s past and present. Right in the back we find Sara and her two men, calling back to his adolescence. In the middle seats, Sten and Berit’s bickering continues to fill him with raw regret over his marriage, and leaves everyone else to sit in awkward silence. And there in the front driver’s seat right by his side is Marianne, his sole connection to his estranged son, Evald.

Bergman’s blocking and marvellous depth of field serves more than just his stark aesthetic. There is so much information conveyed a single shot here, representing different layers of Isak’s memories across each row of car seats.

Gunnar Björnstrand makes minimal appearances in this role, but there are definitive resemblances between his and Sjöström’s performances, both being cynical, irritable men who care little for their wives. Clearly the sins of the father have been passed onto the son and perhaps even amplified, as Evald is quick to cut down Marianne’s desire to bear children. “Yours is a hellish desire to live and to create life,” he heartlessly proclaims in her flashback, sitting in the exact same car seat that Isak is in now. “I was an unwanted child in a hellish marriage.” To look back at this family history from the other direction, it is clear that Isak may have inherited the same prickly attitude from his own parents too – specifically his mother, who Marianne describes as “cold as ice, more forbidding than death.” During his short visit to her along the road trip, she hands him the gold watch that his father used to own, which in a disturbing turn of events is revealed to not have any hands much like those of his dream.

*We cut between the present and the past in this car, and just in his staging Bergman draws comparisons between Isak and his estranged son.*

Bergman had certainly dabbled in magical realism before, but surrealism as concentrated as this is new for him in 1957, penetrating the depths of his protagonist’s mind in such ways that can only be felt via absurd, impressionistic imagery. In a law court preside over by the quarrelling husband Sten, Isak is forced to read nonsense on a blackboard that he is informed translates to “A doctor’s first duty is to ask for forgiveness.” He stands charged of being incompetent, as well as many minor offences including “callousness, selfishness, ruthlessness,” each brought against him by his wife who is deceased in the reality, yet lives on in his mind. A rippling reflection in a dark pond bridges one dream world to the next, where he finds a memory of his wife carrying out an affair in the forest, and contemplating his impassive reaction back home when she eventually tells him of her infidelity. Soon, she and her consort disappear without a trace, and Sten becomes a dark reflection of Isak’s subconscious, considering the doctor’s meticulous method of emotional detachment.

“Gone. All are gone. Removed by an operation, Professor. A surgical masterpiece. No pain. Nothing that bleeds or trembles. How silent it is. A perfect achievement in its way, Professor.”

Perhaps he would have found more satisfaction in the university’s ostentatious ceremony the previous day, but now as he accepts his certificate and listens to speeches, there is a strange emptiness to the routine proceedings. Is this the legacy he has made for himself?

*We can always expect an array of marvellous compositions in Bergman’s dream sequences, catching the light of reflections in a rippling pond and often obstructing the camera.*

With his manifestations of old memories in his current reality though also comes second chances for all those still alive. “I can’t live without her,” Evald confesses to his father, resolutely deciding to stay by Marianne’s side through the birth of their child. Through his newfound appreciation of his daughter-in-law, he also uncovers the dormant love for his own wife that he never showed during her life. Such are the power of dreams in Wild Strawberries, mulling through decades of nostalgic and shameful memories to reveal greater truths about oneself. By turning Isak’s car into the vessel through which he navigates such fantasies too, Bergman grounds them all in a robust visual metaphor. As the elderly professor now drifts off to sleep though, his face is not tormented by dark musings, but lightened by a gentle peace. “If I have been worried or sad during the day, it often calms me to recall childhood memories,” his mind echoes, before finally slipping away into worlds untouched by bitterness and regret.

*A final escape into Isak’s dreams, though this time there is much greater peace in his resignation.*

Wild Strawberries is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Track of the Cat (1954)

William A. Wellman | 1hr 42min

Within the stark, black-and-white design of William A. Wellman’s snowy Western drama, vibrant colours are scarce to be found. The most striking of all is that blazing red coat which hangs on the wall of Curt Bridges’ bedroom, and the moment he puts it on, he automatically becomes the centrepiece of every scene. He is the second eldest of four siblings, and between his kind older brother Arthur, his weak-willed young brother Harold, and his spinster sister Grace, he is by far the most insolent of the lot. Perhaps the ruthlessness with which he tears into others shouldn’t be a surprise given their mother’s similarly mean streak, though hers derives more from her bible-thumping conservatism, while their drunk father wanders aimlessly through scenes detached from his surroundings.

All across the widescreen canvas of Wellman’s CinemaScope, he stages a textured web of strained family dynamics with incredible attention to detail. Just outside these claustrophobic confines though in the surrounding frozen mountains, they are haunted by the threat of a dangerous wild panther. As it lures the sons of the Bridges clan away from home and confronts them with a raw power mightier than they expect, layers of metaphors begin to emerge from its mystical presence.

*Black-and-white interiors and landscapes, mirroring a common sterility. It is Robert Mitchum’s aggressive red coat which is often the brightest burst of colour.*

Ranch hand Joe Sam carries his own superstitions around the creature, stemming from his Native American culture which views them as evil omens. Even the apprehension of its proximity is a deadly force too apparently – when Curt flees in terror and meets his downfall, Joe Sam identifies the source of his fear as coming from “In him.” The tension this panther generates is something which these masculine egos are simple not equipped to handle. In a stroke of inspired genius 21 years before Jaws would do the same, Wellman resists the urge to show us the animal, building greater suspense from its unseen presence than its physical form, and transforming it into an intangible embodiment of man’s inner darkness.

The hunt that Curt and Arthur embark on to put an end to this panther’s reign of terror separates them from the rest of the family early in Track of the Cat, and from there Wellman sets in a motion a pair of parallel narratives. Both are bound by the same monochrome palette, which is as fastidiously woven into the homestead’s dreary décor as it is the silhouetted trees and snowy mountains of Northern California’s alpine landscapes. Wellman himself stated that by effectively shooting a black-and-white film in colour, he was opening up the possibility to emphasise the sparse yet vivid hues which burst through the mise-en-scène. Here, he lets them manifest as an orange campfire, a box of blue matches, and of course that aforementioned crimson jacket.

Depth of field in Wellman’s blocking. This thorough commitment to building out the complex family dynamics through the dynamic visuals marks Track of the Cat as a major cinematic achievement for him.

Much like the panther, that piece of clothing becomes a masculine metaphor of a different kind, representing the virility that Curt obnoxiously wears everywhere he goes. Only when he sends it home with Arthur’s dead body does he give it up, exchanging it for his brother’s cow hide coat. Now assuming the appearance of the prey rather than the predator, his stature is greatly diminished, and we start to see this freezing mountain range absorb him into its icy caves and crevices.

With both elder brothers missing from home, an unfamiliar power vacuum opens in the Bridges family. The opportunity is right there for Harold to take charge and unify his family as its patriarch, and yet leadership does not come naturally to him. While he sat and waited over the years for Curt to offer him his share of the ranch, Curt waited for him to speak up and ask for it himself. When the judgemental Ma expresses her disdain for his sweetheart Gwen, he cannot summon the courage to mount a defence in her honour. His only real supporters here are Arthur, who is swiftly killed off by the panther by the end of the film’s first act, and Grace, who is effectively powerless yet wishes him a life better than her own.

*Frames and blocking in Wellman’s photography, binding them within the bare walls of the stables and home.*

Nothing can grow in the oppressive sterility of this colourless home, bound by bare weatherboard walls and unembellished furniture. Still, there is an austere, ravishing beauty to the way Wellman captures such drabness. He had previously proven his skilled hand at blocking ensembles in The Ox-Bow Incident, and yet there is an even clearer delineation between characters here as they stand upon narrow staircases, and are divided between the dark beams of the horse stables.

*The stable is a highlight of Wellman’s mise-en-scène, using the beams and barriers to split up the family at their weakest.*

*Pa becomes a static feature of the mise-en-scène here, slumped across the kitchen table and disengaged from the conversation in the background.*

The role his deep focus lens has to play in all of this certainly can’t be understated either, crafting some superb compositions that track multiple relationships at once across several layers of the frame, and even into neighbouring rooms. While conversations unfold in the kitchen, a drunken Pa slumps across the table in front of them all. As family members stand above an open grave, Wellman plants his camera right inside it at a low angle, catching each of them staggered into the background. Most impressive of all is the dark wooden bedframe that Arthur’s corpse lays on when he is brought back home, and which Ma feebly slouches behind in devastating grief, visually overcome by its giant, depressive mass.

*Just one shot of many emphasising the sheer size of the bed that Arthur’s cold body rests upon, towering over Ma like large, depressive mass.*

*Wellman hangs on this shot for a few minutes looking up from Arthur’s open grave, rearranging the family into different formations.*

It is no wonder that within this cast, those playing the thorniest characters are the ones who stand out the most. Beulah Bondi manages to draw a deep empathy out of the hypercritical Ma upon the death of her firstborn son, while Robert Mitchum steals virtually every scene as Curt, offering a brooding arrogance that corrupts everything around him. “This house is rotten with the gods you’ve made. Yours and Curt’s. With pride and money and greed,” Grace spits at her mother, defending those who have suffered under her. If Ma has been slowly draining this household of passion and love, then Curt has been thriving off the resulting misery and poured it into his ostentatious cruelty.

Track of the Cat is easily one of the more underrated Hollywood films of the era, and a very underrated performance from Mitchum. His character is far from likeable – an involving portrait of ego, colonialism, and western masculinity.

With characters as complex and quarrelsome as these, and a setting so vividly connected to its immediate family drama, it is no surprise that Track of the Cat is drawn from the work of American novelist Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Wellman seems to have a particular affinity for his literature, given that Clark similarly provided the source material for The Oxbow Incident. More specifically though, there is a shared interest between author and director in the psychological subtext of the western genre, rendered in Track of the Cat as an unassumingly spiritual consideration of colonial masculinity. The darkness that lurks in hearts of these emotionally inept men cannot be overcome by those trying to dominate their environment, but by the courage of those looking to break the harmful cycles of their own imprisonment. As the towering flames of a bonfire break up the stark, white landscape of Wellman’s very final shot too following this sweet victory, there may be no greater assurance that brighter days lie in the Bridges family’s future.

*A formally fitting final shot, breaking up the white of the snowy landscape with the bright bonfire in the distance.*

Track of the Cat is currently available to rent or buy on iTunes, YouTube, and Amazon Video.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 36min

Across the withering forests, squalid villages, and draughty castles of 14^th century Sweden, there is resounding silence. It echoes through Ingmar Bergman’s sparse minimalism, emerging not from the peasants who dance and sing as distraction from their grim circumstances, nor from the religious zealots who preach portentous warnings of Judgment Day. It doesn’t even come from Death himself, who stalks the land and takes lives without discrimination. This silence belongs to an absent God, whose apparent withdrawal from His own creation brings omens of an unavoidable reckoning. Drawn from the Book of Revelations, the verse which opens this meditation on faith sets the scene for Bergman’s theological questions, leading us towards the end times with a pained longing for answers.

“And when the Lamb broke the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour… And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.”

From this biblical quote also comes the title Bergman gives his film, The Seventh Seal, marking its events as the final catalyst for the Apocalypse. Seemingly every character from the cynics to the Christians acknowledges the dismal shift in the air too, as they spread rumours of supernatural occurrences and fearfully evade the Black Death.

*Death, pestilence, madness, and torture infest the land in The Seventh Seal, and Bergman’s austere photography reflects that in its impeccable staging.*

It isn’t hard to see why The Seventh Seal held immense cultural significance at the time of its release, speaking to audiences of 1957 who anticipated a nuclear winter during the early years of the Cold War. From a spiritual perspective though, it connects even more distinctly to Bergman’s own repressed upbringing as the son of a strict Lutheran minister. This did not inspire a rebellious attitude in him, but rather an instinct for curiosity, prompting him to search for traces of God in a world simultaneously obsessed with and disconnected from His holy virtues.

It makes sense then that Bergman gives his own philosophical quandaries in The Seventh Seal to disenchanted knight Antonius Block, played by Max von Sydow with intelligence, sorrow, and a desperate glimmer of hope. Having returned from the Crusades, Block is no stranger to serving the Catholic Church, and yet he has not found the spiritual fulfilment that was promised. “My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning,”he laments, “But I will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed.” And yet where can one find such a purpose, if not from God?

*Max von Sydow is served well by an all-time great script, but it takes a talented actor with a firm handle on such profound material to do it justice.*

This paradox underlies Block’s journey in The Seventh Seal, driving him to seek wisdom from a mad woman who claims to have consorted with the Devil, as well as a priest who, as he eventually discovers, is in fact Death in disguise. When the knight first meets this mysterious, pale-faced entity on a rocky shoreline, he is told his time is up, and yet he is not ready. “My flesh is afraid, but I am not,” he confesses, before challenging Death to a game of chess – the stakes being his own life. Bergman pensively returns to this rich allegorical conceit throughout the film, with Death outsmarting Block at virtually every turn, and as such a timer is effectively placed on the knight’s uncertain quest to find meaning before his adversary checkmates him.

The first actors who should be praised for their work in The Seventh Seal are Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstand, and Bibi Andersson – but Bengt Ekerot’s literal embodiment of Death has become an icon in pop culture for good reason.

*The chess game that unfolds between Antonius Block and Death is a symbol of fate and futility, and Bergman uses it as a superb frame here for the knight’s travelling companions in the background.*

Bergman’s indelible iconography is woven all through The Seventh Seal, and yet it is this infamous image of von Sydow challenging Death which effectively escaped its niche corner of world cinema and spread into mainstream culture at large. Though Bergman clearly identifies with the doubtful knight, perhaps he also sees a bit of himself in the church painter, who the cynical squire Jons finds illustrating a large fresco depicting the Dance of Death. “I’m only painting things as they are. Everyone else can do as he likes,” he explains, handing the power of interpretation over to viewers of his work.

*Theological questions are on Bergman’s mind, taking visual form in this exquisite composition that von Sydow walks into early on.*

For as long as the artwork remains in Bergman’s hands though, he is a perfectionistic craftsman, painstakingly shaping his blocking and lighting into expressions of profound wonder, and instilling his austere imagery with a razor-sharp depth of field. In close-ups and mid-shots, he studies the expansive emotional range that crosses his ensemble’s faces as they confront their impending deaths with terror, confusion, anger, and awe. In wides as well though, he imposes a stark, greyscale beauty on his medieval scenery, confining these characters to barren lands upon which nothing fruitful can grow.

Blocking faces is right in Bergman’s wheelhouse, and The Seventh Seal bears some of his strongest compositions in this aspect, turning them at angles, staggering them through his depth of field, and obstructing them with his mise-en-scène.

Everywhere that Block goes with his steadily growing band of companions, a disconcerting rot eats away at the minds and bodies of the common people. In one scene that has taken root in pop culture (most prevalently through Monty Python and the Holy Grail) a comical performance by jesters is interrupted by a procession of God-fearing flagellants and monks, carrying a giant cross through the village streets and whipping themselves as self-punishment. Bergman keeps his camera close to the ground as they trample over us, chanting their mournful ‘Dies Irae’ motif which continues to weave into the score like a harbinger of doom.

One of the great scenes of the film, which would later be parodied by Monty Python. We sit at a low angle as a procession of monks, preachers, and flagellants interrupt a comical performance, dampening spirits with a deathly gloom.

At this moment, an astonishingly composed cutaway to the expressions of Block, Jons, and a mute girl they have picked up reveals their utter disdain, staggering their faces into the background. Bergman then follows up this shot with his camera tracking along a line of villagers, one by one kneeling to the ground in fearful reverence. The sermonising preacher who takes the stage effectively shifts attention away from the troupe of performers entirely, though in case we are driven to sympathise with any of them, Bergman also draws our attention to the affair their leader Skat is conducting with the wife of the town blacksmith. Through local cheaters, thieves, and self-righteous evangelists, moral debasement runs deep in this setting, and The Seventh Seal never fails to match such austerity with an equally severe visual style.

*During the procession of monks, Bergman lands one powerful image after another, cutting between the sceptics and the believers.*

Each time we return to scenes with naïve actor Jof and his family though, small sparks of levity quietly emerge in this story. His glimpse of a woman walking with her child may be brushed off as a hallucination, but he is convinced that they represent the Mother Mary and an infant Jesus. His other visions aren’t so easily dismissed, and even appear prophetic in nature – after all, he seems to be the only one outside of Block who can see Death playing their fatal game of chess. Our wandering knight’s brief picnic with Jof’s family on a hillside is the first moment of serenity that he finds in his journey, and as they share in wild strawberries to the peaceful sound of a lyre, Block starts to uncover the meaning of life he has pursued for so long.

*The meaning of life begins to dawn on our troubled knight, as he joins these representatives of Mary, Joseph, and Christ for a picnic on a hillside.*

And therein lies one of Bergman’s most significant symbols of The Seventh Seal, turning Jof, Mia, and their baby into surrogates of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Humanity’s salvation does not lie in dour warnings of doom, self-indulgence, or existential searches for purpose, as Block discovers, but in the birth and nourishment of new life. As for the one meaningful deed he wishes to accomplish, it presents itself as a selfless sacrifice during his last few rounds of chess. A clumsy toppling of the board may seem to his opponent a desperate way to try and escape his fate, and yet it is the first time Death has truly been outwitted. Not even he can comprehend total self-sacrifice as a strategic move, as he is distracted by Block’s deliberate blunder long enough for Jof and his family flee unnoticed.

“When we meet again, you and your companions’ time will be up,” Death informs his prey before departing, and indeed as Block finally returns home to his castle with his fellow travellers, a quiet recognition that they will not see the stormy night through settles over them. Recalling the peaceful meal he shared with Jof and his family, Block and his fellowship partake in a last supper together, while his wife reads out from the same chapter of Revelations which opened the film. Death enters the room silently but powerfully, his presence only revealed to us by the slow turning of faces towards a point just behind the camera, each one precisely arranged across the frame in expressions of disbelief. Only Block refuses Death eye contact, instead choosing to look up to the heavens and pray in the background. The window of light that Bergman frames right behind his head is the perfect finishing touch to this immaculate composition.

Bergman separates von Sydow from the rest of the ensemble in this shot, relegating him to the background and pouring in light above his head. He is the only one here not looking straight at Death, who stands just behind the camera.

Is it a flash of transcendent wonder which grants the mute girl Christ’s words as he hung on the cross, “It is finished,” or is her proclamation the result of some divine miracle, ending God’s crushing silence? There is beauty in this ambiguity, and all throughout his film Bergman deliberately balances such interpretations on a knife’s edge, denying us the comfort of conventional explanations. The Seventh Seal is a film of thought-provoking symbolism, but there should be no understating its achievement of screenwriting either, effectively reframing the classical hero’s journey within an expedition of biblical and philosophical significance. Its poetic dialogue too effortlessly flows from one existential contemplation to the next, delivering the sort of lines one might find quoted by theologians and sceptics alike. Especially as the surviving Jof spies their tiny silhouettes performing the Dance of Death atop a hill, he describes their movements with lyrical eloquence, allegorically detailing the transition from one life to the next.

“The strict master Death bids them dance. He wants them to hold hands and to tread the dance in a long line. At the head goes the strict master with the scythe and hourglass. But the Fool brings up the rear with his lute. They move away from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands, while the rain cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears.”

Perhaps those more religiously minded characters might view the parting clouds and fresh sunlight as a sign of Christ’s second coming. Bergman would never be so obvious though. The Seventh Seal stands among history’s greatest pieces of theological cinema, not for the moral lessons it imparts, but the questions it provokes, cutting to the core of our existential search for something larger than ourselves. Maybe there is also salvation in the opposite though – an acceptance of the “unknowing,” allowing one to graciously hand themselves over to the great equaliser of Death. Bergman remains torn between faith and doubt right to the end of his grand medieval fable, though only a director with as keen an eye for spiritual iconography as him could build both ideals to such a tender, hopeful resolution, recognising their essential place in humanity’s ever-expanding self-awareness.

*The Dance of Death is an icon that stretches back to the Late Middle Ages, and Bergman wisely chooses to end his film on its image.*

The Seventh Seal is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel and Kanopy, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 48min

Over the centuries of stories based around Europe’s Midsummer festivities, there has often been a dreamy magic hanging in the air between lovers on its strange, shortened night, reconsidering old passions and finding new beginnings within its otherworldly aura. Most famously, it is the setting upon which Shakespeare’s ensemble of characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream fall under the love spells of the forest fey. Its influence on Ingmar Bergman’s lusty romp Smiles of a Summer Night is evident right there in the name, though this is no direct adaptation of the Bard’s fantastical comedy. Class satire runs sharply through Bergman’s targeting of wealthy aristocrats, bringing them down to the level of the carefree servants who roll around in fields and blithely indulge in their carnal passions. Although there are no whimsical forces guiding these self-conceited characters into each other’s arms, it very much feels that way to those wrapped up in its intoxicating atmosphere.

Before we even arrive at this fateful Midsummer party, Bergman lays out the formal groundwork of each character, examining their place in this intricate web. Several of his regular collaborators are here – Gunnar Björnstrand as successful lawyer Fredrik, Eva Dahlbeck as his ex-lover Desiree, and Harriet Andersson as his housemaid Petra. Jarl Kulle and Margit Carlqvist are also present, both having taken more minor roles in previous Bergman films, and now being given more screen time as Desiree’s consort, Count Carl-Magnus, and his wife, Countess Charlotte. It is near impossible to pick the greatest performance among them. Björnstrand may claim the largest role, but with Andersson’s swaying hips, Dahlbeck’s shrewd scheming, and Kulle’s comical turns of phrase, each actor stands out during their time in the spotlight.

*Bergman features one of his signature shots here – the parallel faces lying down, one obscuring the other.*

Bergman is an actor’s director, and not just in guiding their performances. He blocks and lights their faces to perfection, emphasising their expressive eyes and shrouding them in darkness when the scene calls for it.

Like so many others, Kulle’s Count lacks total integrity, in one moment threatening that “One can rally with my wife, but touch my mistress and I’m a tiger!” and later inverting it when it is the Countess who he is at risk of losing. The extreme moods of these characters shift with the whims of their desire, filling them with jealousy, anger, and passion, but very little substance. Desiree even shows some self-awareness of this while arguing with Fredrik, digging herself deeper into a rage that she can’t remember the reason for.

“I’m speaking! I will speak, even if I have nothing to say! You’ve made so furious, that I forgot what I was thinking!”

*Bergman relishes working with a large ensemble, as the relationships he draws between each individual emerges in his blocking.*

Petra on the other hand is the most easy-going character of the bunch, right next to Desiree’s servant, Frid. There is something of a bohemian nature to both as they laugh and merrily recite poetry, which any of their masters might brush off as silly behaviour. “The summer night has three smiles,” Frid starts. “This is the first, between midnight and dawn, when young lovers open their hearts and loins.” The second comes “for the jesters, the fools, and the incorrigible” – perhaps Petra and Frid themselves, who bask in the glory of life while the others engage in petty games and affairs.

“And the summer night smiled for the third time!” he finally announces as the sun rises, “for the sad and dejected, for the sleepless and lost souls, for the frightened and the lonely.” Bergman proves his hand as a skilled comedic writer in Smiles of a Summer Night, and yet in littering his screenplay with such thoughtful reflections he also deepens its joyful wonder, stepping back to observe these tiny figures within the context of something far grander than they realise.

Petra and Frid are light, easygoing counterparts to the complicated romances of the upper classes. Bergman mostly plays out their storyline in the bright open air, in contrast to the dark interiors where affairs and betrayals unfold.

This isn’t to say that Bergman himself is not willing to engage with their trivial drama though. His usual flair for blocking actors using a remarkable depth of field serves a practical purpose here in teasing out the complex web of betrayals, seductions, and alliances at play. Eavesdroppers lurk behind doors in the foreground, listening to private conversations in the next room over, while elsewhere delicate romances flourish in the reflections of ornately framed mirrors and quiet ponds. Unlike many of his previous films which frequently focus on one or two characters per shot, the ensemble dynamic here often forces his camera out into wides rather than close-ups, making for ripe stylistic and narrative comparisons to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.

*An eavesdropper lurks in the foreground, as a conversation plays out through this dark doorframe.*

*A playful romance caught in the exquisite reflection of the courtyard’s pond.*

Bergman capitalises particularly well on this staging at the Midsummer’s Eve dinner party, where Desiree herself plots to manipulate specific relationships based on her seating arrangements. It is an elaborately Gothic set piece in its design, framing characters between melted candelabras, and shrinking them behind a cluttered banquet table of flowers, fruit, bowls, and decorative ornaments. It is also the perfect setting for couples to start breaking apart at the seams – a discussion over whether men or woman are better seducers sets in motion the Countess’ plot to ensnare Fredrik, while he observes his own marriage to 19-year-old Anne crumble as she falls for his son, Henrik. His head laying on the table and her comforting hand on his shoulder are the first things we will notice in this shot, and yet Bergman is sure to block Fredrik’s resentful expression lurking right behind them, signalling a subtle shift in his affection for her.

The cluttered dining scene makes for an absolutely ravishing set piece. Melted candelabras, goblets, and platters of food obstruct frames, within which Bergman arranges his actors into spectacular compositions.

The eventual consummation of this young, scandalous love comes as a whimsically fated development, shedding that mysterious Midsummer magic of Shakespeare’s play over their unexpected encounter. An earlier reveal of a secret lever which wheels in a bed from a neighbouring room returns by pure chance, as when Henrik attempts suicide over his attraction to his stepmother, he accidentally activates it. Perhaps in this loose take on Shakespeare’s play, Bergman himself is playing the role of the mischievous sprite Puck through his behind-the-scenes manipulations, as who else should be laying in that bed at that exact time but the one Henrik has been longing for? To him, it could very well be a dying vision, while to the slowly waking Anne, it is a sensual dream. Still, that tiny nudge from the universe is all it takes for them to elope, creating a knock-on effect which neatly ties up the remaining strings Bergman has been slyly pulling this whole time.

*Long dissolves are well-suited to this reinterpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whimsically and dreamily bridging one scene to the next.*

“Love is a loathsome business,” Anne piercingly proclaims to the Countess at one point, and the suffering it entails for those who corrupt its purity certainly frame it as such. Much like the game of croquet the upper-class men play on the lawn, it turns “an innocent game into an offensive battle of prestige,” wherein each player keeps one-upping the others until egos and relationships are destroyed. On a night such as Midsummer’s Eve though, the universe seems to be resetting itself by way of playful chaos to make way for fresh new starts, and such grievances need not last long. Even beyond its class satire and complex characters, Bergman buries a profound wisdom deep in Smiles of a Summer Night, blessing his noble fools and foolish nobles alike with second chances that let them simultaneously embrace new possibilities, and learn to appreciate those they had forgotten.

Smiles of a Summer Night is currently streaming The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.

Dreams (1955)

Ingmar Bergman | 1hr 27min

The romantic dreams that young model Doris and her agent Susanne each chase down in the city of Gothenburg are blindly hinged on the belief that men are not inherently disappointing creatures. Both women are separated in age by about a decade or so, and the gap in maturity shows. While Doris thoughtlessly breaks up with her boyfriend and passionately launches herself into a new affair with the first man to shower her with affection, Susanne slowly unravels as she rides into the city where an old flame resides. Lights from outside the carriage pass rhythmically across her sweaty face, we follow her rapidly shifting gaze between ‘open’ and ‘shut’ signs, and as she mutters an apprehensive resolution to “see him,” Ingmar Bergman maps out the psychological terrain of her anxious, compulsive desire.

*Susanne slowly unravels on the train to Gothenburg, and Bergman puts his penchant for lighting and close-ups to excellent use as we enter her anxious mind.*

Dreams arrived in 1955 a mere two years before Bergman’s major breakthroughs The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, and though critical praise was lukewarm at the time, within it are sure signs of a maturing artistic voice moving towards a higher level of filmmaking. The first five minutes of this film are spent in the wordless silence of Susanne’s modelling studio – fresh prints are brought to the agency owner, an assistant lights her cigarette, and finally Doris arrives on set, where the photographer arranges her in elegant poses. It is especially one fat man’s lustful, impatient finger tapping which breaks through Bergman’s subdued sound design of luxurious lounge music and ruffling clothes, creating an atmosphere which begs for escape from its own stifled repression. It is only when Susanne and Doris arrive in Gothenburg on their work trip though that any sort of catharsis starts to feel tangible.

*An suspenseful five minutes to open the film, examining the tensions between characters on this model photo shoot without a word of dialogue.*

This is not a film about the bond between two women though. Bergman keeps them separate throughout most of Dreams, alternating between their parallel stories. His visual compositions are precise and considerate, especially in the constant presence of reflections around Doris as she gazes through shop windows and lets herself be swept away by Gunnar Björnstrand’s wealthy middle-aged consul, Otto. Mirrors follow her into the dressmaker’s shop where he buys her a new gown too, inviting her into his superficial, material world, and she returns the affection as she takes him out to an amusement park. There, Bergman fixes his camera to rollercoasters and spinning rides, letting it fly in manic movements and cutting its footage up into violent montages within a ghost train. While she screams with delight, he is visibly queasy, and though he regains his composure upon taking her home to his giant manor, that uneasy dynamic soon returns.

*Bergman weaves in reflections of Doris through her early wanderings around Gothenburg, centring the world around her.*

*Vigorous excitement as Bergman plants his camera on a rollercoaster and spinning rides, joining Doris and Otto on their date.*

This time though, Otto’s reservations seem to stem from quiet guilt rather than nausea. A painting of his wife on the wall bears significant resemblance to Doris, but she has been dead for some time now, according to him. When a third party enters the scene, it comes as a surprise – Otto’s daughter’s entrance is framed in a doorway that Doris is peering through, and she immediately launches into a disdainful chastisement of her father’s arrogance.

“You disgust me. I find you ridiculous and repulsive.”

*An elegant frame as Otto’s daughter unexpectedly enters the picture, bringing Doris’ dreams to an end.*

Otto’s wife is not dead, as it turns out, but in a psychiatric hospital he refuses to visit. He is stingy with spending money on his own family, but apparently not on Doris. “Lust overcame tightness this time. It’s a laughable sight,” his daughter derisively proclaims, before quickly realising that he has even gifted her valuable family jewellery. For the first time, there is cold detachment in Bergman’s blocking, poignantly facing Otto and Doris out a window before she awkwardly departs with the realisation she has walked in on a sad, wounded family, and pulled them even further apart.

*Parallel faces in Bergman’s blocking, expressing sober disappointment.*

At least Doris has the excuse of naïve youth behind her though. With Susanne’s extra years of experience, she should know exactly what she is walking back into with her old lover, Henrik. For a time, she dances around the decision, silently passing through forests where she spies on his home, and eventually making the call to meet up. Once again, Bergman chooses to carry this stretch of storytelling without dialogue, absorbing us in elegantly composed shots which themselves become expressions of her silent emotional journey.

*A picturesque frame in the forest as Susanne watches her old lover from afar.*

The contrast between the Susanne we see in these lonely moments and the woman in control of a modelling agency is quite striking. When Doris misses a shoot, Susanne proves herself to be a harsh, assertive woman, though evidently one simply using this severe demeanour as a cover for her own insecurities. Deep down she is “sick with hatred” for Henrik’s wife, even wishing her dead, and yet this intense loathing frightens her. The further we get into Dreams, the more this seemingly confident woman is layered with internal conflicts.

Quite essential to our reading of Susanne’s vulnerability is also the ways Bergman lights close-ups to perfection, especially his dimming of the backlight to emphasise the contours of each expression passing across her face during her rendezvous with Henrik. For a brief time, she is swept away by his romance and invitation to join him in Oslo for a work trip, though such fantasies are short-lived with the arrival of his shrewd, perceptive wife. Her words are cutting – there is no substance to this man whatsoever. He is lazy and tired, and any illusions one might have about carrying on affair with him would be quickly destroyed by his own inability to commit to anyone. Henrik meekly lingers in the background of this scene, framed right between the two women, and with this succinct visual blocking, Bergman definitively proves his inadequacy.

Bergman’s arrangement of faces is just as important as the performances themselves, here pushing a shameful Henrik into the background and turning him away from the camera as his wife and old paramour trap him on either side – while between them, there is a whole other story unfolding.

Dreams is bookended with a return to the modelling studio it started in, signalling a withdrawal to the ordinary lives Doris and Susanne have always known, and effectively putting an end to those far-flung fantasies suggested in its title. Even here though, Bergman continues to draw a brilliant formal contrast between these two heartbreaks, letting the wildly emotional Doris emerge with renewed optimism and love for her boyfriend. Meanwhile, Susanne is driven further into her cynicism, tearing up Henrik’s apology letter and re-invitation to meet him in Oslo. She has evidently been in Doris’ situation before and forgotten how deeply this misery could cut her. Perhaps this is just part of life’s cycles though, Bergman posits, leading both young adults and their older, wiser counterparts down the same paths of inevitable disappointment.

*A bookended return to the photo studio, bringing Susanne and Doris’ parallel journeys full circle.*

Dreams is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel, and is available to rent or buy on iTunes.