20:13 min., dvd, black and white, silent, 2008
„Winter Light“, the second film of Ingmar Bergman’s religious chamber series is a transitional film, both thematically and conceptually. It features a pastor who has lost his faith. As the film opens, the pastor plagued by lingering flue preaches about the betrayal of Christ by his disciples and then administers Communion.The freezing of Gunnar Björnstrand’s character is just one component of austere images below which the tension of a barely repressed apocalypse is sustained.God’s silence.
The film ends with him again conducting another service even when the only person attending the service is his agnostic lover (Ingrid Thulin) who suffers her own – purely secular – kind of abject love.
It is possible to see this as just going through the empty motions, but it is also possible to look at it as an acceptance that the motions are not empty, that it is the motions that matter, not the silence.
And is the absence the essence of holiness ?
„BLACK AND WHITE AND WITHOUT SOUND“ is build from 1309 single photographs taken with pinhole camera during the film being shown on the tv screen. Each photograph which was exposed for 2 second was later arranged with individual speed raging from split of second till 6 seconds, therefore building unique tempo and then blended with the same material which is composed backwards.
The frequent relentless close-up are formal and thematic key to many Bergman’s films. The intruding camera close-ups which only stop when a giant abstracted face fills the frame allow the viewer confront both different states of crisis and examine the role which the face plays as the communicative medium.Those final moments where the subject is almost reduced to pure flesh, the face seems to be beyond the dimensions of the frame and the world in normally exists.