Word: johanness
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Those questions and more may soon be answered. Five hundred years after her fateful climb, the Inca maiden has returned to the world below the clouds. Her frozen body, along with those of two other youths, was discovered almost by accident last month by anthropologist Johan Reinhard and his Peruvian guide Miguel Zarate. Her tissues and bodily fluids were still intact. Researchers have found the mummified corpses of other Incas who were sacrificed, and four years ago, the freeze-dried remains of a 5,000-year-old man turned up in the Tyrolean Alps. But none were nearly as well...
...suspect that to Bergman, paranoia always has some foundation in truth. He paints high society as truly parasitic and unpleasant, partially vindicating Johan. In short tracts discussing the role of the artist, Bergman - complained that 1960s' society forced the artist to prostitute himself for funding...
Part of the problem, and also the cleverness of the film, is that every character has a Doppelganger, further blurring the real and surreal, often beyond distinction. The barons and baronesses Johan encounters appear to him sometimes as they are and other times as he merely imagines them. Only after Alma tells the camera that she herself began seeing their neighbors through his dark lens do we realize Johan has been fantasizing about them all along...
...sheer consistency, even Bergman's themes have Doppelgangers. The paranoid artist could be Bergman himself or it could be any artist. Johan might be skirting high society out of fear of sexual humiliation or from feelings of freakishness. His mania might derive more from sexual dissatisfaction with the rather homely Alma than from any frustration with the way his neighbors' treat him. Johan obviously suffers his insanity so we feel compassion for him, but his moods make him too unpleasant to be truly sympathetic...
Similar dualities predominate Bergman's camera work. While Johan paints on the heath, the grass appears soft and fresh, but when he has a flashback about killing a boy while fishing on the rocky bluffs, those cliffs become jagged and sinister. And when Johan retreats to the woods, he imagines vampires and ravens tearing him apart in a tangled ravine...