Word: bergman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...find it exceedingly difficult to characterize Vigo's method of treating dreams and reality. It does not resemble Bergman's use of symbolism, Freudian or otherwise, and it is nothing like the way Jean Genet handles many layers of illusion. Rather, Vigo deliberately distorts his story, visually and dramatically. He injects the outre in the form of a headmaster who is three feet tall and a drawing that comes to life, and he slants his scenario so that the children win. Still, he never departs far enough from normal experience to enter the surreal, and this is precisely what makes...
Along with this fertile, if predictable, plot Bergman has his usual advantages of his troupe's superb acting and unparalleled camerawork by Gunnar Fischer. The story gives ample room for the irony of inversion, where good and bad are reversed, at which Bergman is so adroit. One wonders, then, how a director could possibly ruin the film...
...done it in a way that only Bergman could. He has overemphasized the character of the vicar, and used him as a vehicle to examine some very un-comic but typically Bergman questions. The vicar is naive; he is also a man of god. The problem of whether or not the vicar's naivete in some way protects him from the world in which he lives, or the question of how much of his faith is the result of his blindness to the facts of his own existence, are not fit topics for comedy. They may be of immense interest...
This lack of discipline and uncertainity of purpose on Bergman's part recurs constantly. He cannot fore-bear from adding an enigmatic sequence of pure symbolism, relating the legend of how Don Juan was carried to hell. It is a striking sequence, invested with Bergman's typicalaly nightmarish quality. But it makes no sense, and has no relation to the story. The vicar's wife, on hearing the legend, becomes upset and cries: "Life is a stupid comedy. No one can understand it." At this point, most of the audience is inclined to agree with...
...Devil's Eye is a film that does not do what it was intended to do, or even what it starts out to do. By posing questions more suited to a medieval morality play than to a fantasy of love and seduction, Bergman has lost his chance to produce what could have been one of the finest foreign films of the year...