Bergman's Dialogues: Strindberg, Munch and the medieval frescoes

Abstract

The article deals with Bergman's dramatic search in addressing the theater through the figures of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen, the dialogue between Bergman's cinematic style and Edvard Munch's canvases, as well as the influence of medieval and Renaissance motifs on the creation of the film «The Seventh Seal» and its visual solution. Remaining the last modernist in the history of cinema, Ingmar Bergman demonstrates in his films the vast marginalities of intertext, wandering in their diversity from theater productions to monumental painting. This study has a strong tendency to combine art forms into integral complexes, at the intersection of which an additional semantic context arises, expanding and deepening the understanding of each element. Its basis was the search for interconnections and parallel comparison of Bergman's cinema with other art forms. The extensive illustrative content of the article makes it possible to analyze and compare not only emerging thought forms, but also specific compositional, stylistic, and artistic decisions in Bergman's filmography. Thus, the possibility of a horizontal reading of motives makes it possible to place the emphasis not on Bergman himself, but on what is around him, in the semantic field of his idea and the content of the embodiment of this idea.