Bergman 25: The Passion of Anna (1969)

An intriguing sequel - of a sort - to Shame, also shot on Fårö and using some of the same locations. The film appears to turn Shame into the dream of Liv Ullmann's character here; she, alongside von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, and Erland Josephson, all turn in consistently strong performances. The film makes explicit the theme of the mismatch between character and expression, of how the most intense pain might leave no trace on the surface. (A theme related to one of Stanley Cavell's great preoccupations, in his work on film and elsewhere - the problem of skepticism, the dawning sense that there is no way of knowing other people.) It is not immediately clear to me whether the film means to underline this possibility; it seems just as likely that it intends to point towards its impossibility, that it would represent a fantasy of inexpressiveness as security, keeping the world at bay behind an impenetrable barrier. (Hence, I think, the deliberate paradox that the sporadic interviews, supposedly with the actors about their characters - in which von Sydow talks about the difficulty of expressing inexpressiveness - sound just as considers, as scripted, as the rest of the film. But I don't mean to say I know exactly who did the scripting.) It's remarkable to see what Bergman and Sven Nykvist do with Eastmancolor in this, only Bergman's second colour film (and All These Women feels like an exception proving some kind of rule anyway). It begins by seeming surprisingly informal, almost, in the use of handheld camera, and some quietly jagged editing. But it proceeds to draw some kind of distinction between inside and outside, and includes some extraordinary portraits - particularly of Ullmann and Andersson - that are simultaneously cruelly exposing and tenderly attentive. Von Sydow's front door is in stained glass, evoked by the redish tinge that colours his scenes with Andersson and the cold blue light of the television that plays on his and Ullmann's faces as they watch footage of the Vietnam war. Overexposure is also literalised into a visual metaphor, as when Josephson shines very bright lights at von Sydow in his photographic studio, but it can have contradictory effects. The bright white light on Andersson the morning after she sleeps with von Sydow is harsh (prompting her to ask him if he's noticed how ugly she is), but at the end of her "out of character" interview, the image is suddenly overexposed, turning her briefly into something literally radiant, beautiful and somehow inhuman at one and the same time.