about Past scenes emerged from Alma's chaotic memory. She remembered reading her husband's diary. A woman in white appeared and told her the existence of these diaries. The camera focused on the diary that Alma was reading. The painter’s amazing imagination turned daily events on the island into anxious nightmares: John, who was self-enclosed, always had trouble falling asleep at night; the couple accepted the invitation to go to the neighboring castle Attend the party; the old lover Veronica is always lingering.
The puppet theater staged a fragment of "The Magic Flute" in the castle, and the party almost became an insulting performance. And the scene of the date with the lover is even more terrifying, the lover Veronica lying naked in the basement where the dead body is stored. In the sneer of the castle owner, John's pretense was distorted, which made his face look distorted. "It's still to the limit, the sperm is broken, but what will be reflected in the fragments?" John, who was overwhelmed by shame and guilt, said silently. The death of a child always haunts John's memory, and the child's body emerges from the water in a trance. John quarreled Alma by shooting, thinking that he had killed her, and then disappeared into the swamp. At the end of the film, Alma is like the beginning of the film, facing the audience alone, constantly exploring what happened.
For the first time in the film "Still in the Mirror", Bergman pointed the camera at the director Ferro where he lived. This time, the story still takes place in a space isolated from the outside world. The artist escaped from society because of fear, but encountered fear from his own creation in loneliness. The demons and ghosts that swallowed him were actually made by himself. After finishing this film, he accepted the filming of "Mask"-the background of both stories is on this island. In "Mask" and subsequent films, the character in Bergman's lens is almost her own incarnation, and he constantly expresses the pain of creation: "Abominable obligation, like the hate of gnashing teeth, has never left him. "
Bergman's art touches despair, showing his attempts at nihilism. People's flattery and praise to the artist will only further insult and destroy him. But is this objective social reality, or is it an illusion created by the painter's self-humiliation? Whichever the answer is. Everything stays in the movie. John explained the "wolf moment" to Alma in this way: "This is the moment when many people leave this world forever, the most real moment of nightmares, the most powerful moment of anxiety for people with insomnia, and the most raging moments of ghosts and demons. Moment is the moment when many children are born." They are also desperately waiting for the dawn to come, experiencing the night is also falling into hell.
Video is a jigsaw puzzle game, which greatly demonstrates the terrifying magic power of images swallowing all things. The artist's sketches of distorted and deformed human faces use his own fangs to attack and bite. Perhaps the vampire-like imagination, as a force to destroy life, has never been shown in such a terrifying way. When a woman takes off her hat and tears off her face like a rubber mask in the film, the reality of this fantasy tells people: If you use language to express the influence, it is not so much liberation, it is more deformed. "Haha Mirror Aesthetics" makes this film an exorcism film, and the object of exorcism is the death and disintegration that occurs in the reflection of the image narcissism.
Quoted from "Ingmar Bergman"
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