Ingmar Bergman's Såsom i en spegel / Through a Glass Darkly (1961) revolves around a mere four characters in a short timespan (twnety-four hours or so). It's not exactly a Thanksgiving gathering, but all of these chracters are family. There's David, the emotionally paralysed father, a writer who has spent most of his time avoiding the rest of them. There are his two children, teenager Minus (Lars Passgård), a student and aspiring playwright, and Karin (Harriet Andersson), an adult recently released from a mental institution where she's been treated for schizophrenia and subjected to electro-shock therapy. Finally, there's Karin's husband, Martin, apparently a professor, or perhaps a doctor who also teaches (it was unclear to me from the sparse dialogue, but he carries a medical kit and mentions dealing with his students). Martin is played by Max von Sydow and David by Gunnar Björnstrand. Not incidentally, in Bergman's Det sjunde inseglet / The Seventh Seal (1957), the former portrays a crusader knight and the latter, his squire.
Cool movie, beautifully shot in black and white on Fårö, an elemental Baltic Sea island.
Karin slips in and out of "two worlds" -- the mundane (pragmatic) and mystical-disordered (schizophrenic). The way everyone relates to each other seems very true, and Harriet Andersson is superb in flipping the switch on Karin's state of mind, so to speak.
I've known two schizophrenics, both very smart people. One, in North Carolina for a while, was a physicist and the other, in London, a landscape architect. Both of them would go off into mystical musings while seeming to retain an awareness that they were, or sounded, quite strange compared to those around them. I still remember some of the eerie things they would say. Tasked with conveying messages to both (years apart) and seeing to it that neither did self-harm or lurched into trouble, I also experienced other wild fluctuations in their behavior firsthand. As far as electroshock, it elicits memory loss to varying degrees, from what I've seen.
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| Bergman's influence extends to the Rolling Stones |
Today's Rune: Gateway.
2 comments:
I've known a few schizophrenics, although none very closely. Fascinating to listen to them.
Erik, I also find schizophrenics amazing. Our minds do work in complex ways.
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