Oh my black and white control Bergman!
The cello, the fixed long shot, the soft light of the face and the emptiness and expanse of the background are all gloomy echoes of Scandinavia.
There is a line between the sea and the sky, the rain, and the damp space in the abandoned hull are all desires that are ubiquitous but cannot be placed. Under Bergman's lens, they swept through them one by one.
As the first of the Faith trilogy, the theme of the film should be God. In the end, the answer given by the author through the mouth of the characters is love. But in fact, the anxiety center of the whole film points to the desire of the wolf in the heart.
In the world of Freud, Jung, and Fromm, it is called the "indescribable thing" of the subconscious mind.
In the system of psychopathology, the focus of the heroine is obviously the loss of subconscious control, which is also the origin of almost all neuroses. Because he couldn't restrain the fear in his heart, Electra, and the most primitive sexual desire, the repressed feelings in the original family were all unleashed like a heaven and earth. So much so that she, who has no passion with her husband (who seems to be about the same age as her father, almost a substitute for patriarchy), can't help but fantasize about her younger brother who has no authority.
Authority is something she both fears and worships. The back is the wolf howl and the shadows in the middle of the night, the front is the bright God, fear and shelter are just two sides of one body. So when she followed the hallucinations upstairs, through the dark corridor, she would reach the bright hall. Because of this, when the god in the closet finally broke through the door, it was actually a diabolical spider.
God and the devil turned out to be just the difference in terms and signifiers. This is the same root.
From an etymological point of view, God is originally a concept with changing connotations. As Lao Tzu said, there is no way to name it, but if you have a strong name, it is called great. The magic of words is that they allow us to transform our fear of facing the ineffable into a conceptually framed sense of security. In short, we ourselves domesticate demons into gods.
However, the people in the play are always confused, like all the debates about belief in history, full of despair and confusion to find the legitimacy of belief. Facing the huge and dark "Array of Nothingness" in vain will make life too much delusional. So the father tried to commit suicide for this, or avoided the pain of his mother and daughter, until he found that he still loved himself and them deeply in his heart.
Love - also a confusing word. This is probably the most sacred existence since belief. However, with the changes of the times and the spread of secularization, the connotation of the word love has gradually been emptied. Hollywood has taken this flattening tendency to the extreme. Love has become a "positive value" word opposite to hate. It doesn't need explanation or hierarchy. And Bergman re-endowed love with the complex context it should have, and within a very small character frame, the connotation of love was supported to a very rich and full state.
Love is God's last possibility. Although the author himself was not quite sure when he said such a sentence, he only used I believe so.
The film ends with this question in suspense. And the author's thinking and answers should be left to his later two works to see the difference.
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