When I watched "Mask" for the first time, I thought I had watched another "Fight Club". The biggest doubt in my heart was probably whether Emma and Elizabeth were alone or two. At the beginning of the film, the child touched the faint faces on the glass with his hands. Liv Uman and Bibi Anderson's faces alternately overlapped. At the end, the faces of the two were joined again in a bright and dark light. They were very alike, almost like the same person. Later, when I thought about the relationship between the two people again, my doubts disappeared. The two people in the film are independent individuals. The question Bergman wants to ask is whether the individual can break the cage of cognition. Can the confused soul get a response? The relationship between the two is similar to the relationship between God and believers. What we present before us is the unknowability of others and the pain of faith.
Everywhere is full of scams of life
Emma is a nurse and Elizabeth is a patient who is suddenly aphasia. On the silent island of Faroe, Emma kept confiding her heart to Elizabeth, revealing the secret of her cheating with strangers and accidental pregnancy. In Elizabeth's letter to the doctor, she wrote: Feeling that her heart is healing, Emma pampers "I" in a secret way. It becomes very interesting to study such a person who feels inconsistent with his behavior. The letter was peeked by Emma, and the plot took a turn for the worse. Emma believes that Elizabeth's silence is a temptation to seduce herself to tell a secret, use her and abandon her at the same time. She tried her best to hope that Elizabeth could speak, so she did not hesitate to use various methods to hurt her, such as the glass ballast that could make Elizabeth hurt, splashing hot water on her.
Having said that, let’s look back and forth at what the doctor said:
The doctor seemed to have seen through the cause of the drama actor, and at the same time warned her that silence does not let go of the performance. The scams of life are everywhere. Emma who keeps talking is also a person who longs to be exposed and seen through, but the isolation between people is not just because of language. People are separated from the fog of unknowability, looking at each other’s face in the faint light of the morning, far away The self that is self-aware can not reach the self that others recognize.
God always hides in the flickering place
On the one hand, Emma constantly confided in her sadness and guilt, and on the other hand, Elizabeth’s silence. It is not difficult to think of believers' confession to God and God's aphasia.
In "The Seventh Seal", a similar dialogue took place between the knight and the god of death. The knight questioned the existence of God during the days of his life, believing that God would always hide in the light and dark places and refused to respond to people.
In "Mask", Emma, who had been talking all night, was lying on the table in the early morning as if she heard Elizabeth say "Go to bed" to her, and as if she felt Elizabeth touching her hair soothing her that morning. . After waking up, she asked Elizabeth if she had ever spoken to herself or visited her room. Elizabeth denied it. Undoubtedly, the only thing Elizabeth has said in the whole film is the "don't" facing the camera, which happened when Emma was excited to pour a pot of boiling hot water on him. But this aggravated Emma's pain, because such a response was out of fear and cowardice. The illusion that the two understood each other before was broken. Emma said that you also know that you are afraid. Look at what you are like. People.
Bergman created a person whose beliefs were wavering repeatedly, constantly questioning whether a god was really with him, and finally Emma fell on the beach in pain and yelled, "You won't give in, because there is no need."
In Bergman's self-reported book "The Magic Lamp," he also admitted that he suffered from this belief:
"I have dealt with the painful and unhappy relationship between me and God all my life. Faith and lack of faith, punishment, grace and renunciation, all of which are real to me and tyrannical. My prayers are flooded. With pain, pleading, trust, hatred, and despair. God has said nothing, but he hasn’t said anything. Don’t turn your face back to me."
Eternal understanding penetrates eternal unreality
I talked about the isolation and incomprehensibility of people. Let’s watch the last segment of the movie. Whether in a certain field, in a certain lie, understanding and collision can still occur between people, even if everything happens in a woven story, it can even be said to be a line of speech.
Emma saw the picture of Elizabeth covering her son with her hand, so in the tone of "Let me tell you what happened", she told a story that Elizabeth was accused by the audience of not having maternal love, so she barely gave birth to this son, and the son became herself Proof of hypocrisy and regret. This is certainly not the story of Elizabeth herself, nor is it the story that Emma has seen with her own eyes. But it hurts two people at the same time, and affects the sensitive memories of each other's lives. At this time, truth has lost its importance, and people can still understand and communicate in a wide range of perceptions.
I really want to mention that the piercing shots that appeared at the end of the film were a camera and two crew members. This shot, in my opinion, is the brilliance of the whole film. It creates a third dimension for the picture. Usually, a movie has only two dimensions, the relationship between the characters in the play and the viewer watching the people in the play. In this film, the exposure of this camera tells the audience very frankly that, yes, what you see is the camera presented to the audience. There is also a narrator forever between you, you and the film. The reality you desire to touch is created. How many such interlayers exist between your experience and the film itself. When I zoomed in on this scene with the screenshot, you would find that Liv Uman's face reflected in the camera, while the actual scene in the movie is Bibi Anderson. I am surprised that this is a Bergman's joke, a deep soul like you is going to suffer!
In the same way, does the child who touches the woman's face through the frosted glass also creates a mezzanine that exists before the transcendental reality?
Fortunately, I watched this film at this year’s Shanghai Film Festival. Before the screening, I presented a documentary interviewing Bergman. Bergman said that the film has been broadcast widely around the world and has also been interpreted in various ways. There are 1/8 second edits in the screening version. I was fortunate enough to see this 1/8 second, but it doesn’t seem to help the understanding of the film. Anyway, it may be Freud.
Finally, I want to respond to Bergman with a sentence from the optimistic Doon’s "Brothers Karamazov": "There is no sign from heaven, I believe your heart will not be shaken."
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