Doubling and Redoubling Bergman: Notes on the Dialectic of Disgrace and Disappearance

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper plots the interrelations of some of the oppositions pervading the work of Ingmar Bergman, particularly ones between Romanticism and Expressionism, a Scandinavian cinema and a German one identified with the natural and the stylized respectively, art cinema and traditional art, masculine and feminine, and face and mask. In each case, selecting one pole nevertheless leaves the other in play. The works’ unsettled status reflects their positioning between an art cinema that risks alienating audiences, and a tradition threatened by inauthenticity. Bergman’s concern with the dangers of the self’s visibility correlates with themes of shaming and with the difficulties of the actor’s status, which accentuate those of a modernity characterised by mobility. One consequence, a simultaneously real and metaphorical feminization of the male artistic self, entails a dual conceptualization of disappearance, which oscillates between the positive and the negative. Identity becomes always double, each face a mask, and vice versa.