Ohm Phanphiroj | All That I Desire / 2017

voyeurs of desire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ohm Phanphiroj (director) All That I Desire / 2017 [6 minutes]

Thai-American director Ohm Phanphiroj’s All That I Desire is a three-panel installation film that represents, clearly, three aspects of the filmmaker’s notions of desire. On the far left from the viewer’s vantage-point is a cute nude Caucasian boy over which the camera hovers as a hand slowly caresses his body parts, face, chest, legs, penis, etc. moving up and down the body several times over the 6 minutes of the video. Obviously, this is a gesture of desire and perhaps even infatuation, a gentle desire that doesn’t quite dare to fully embrace and engage the all-white image which the owner of the hand nonetheless clear desires.

    Subliminally, given the slightly darker tone of the presumably Asian hand that strokes the all-white boy, there is clearly a racial statement implied in this portion of film, particularly when compared with the middle image of an Asian boy at which is regularly expelled a white liquid that can only remind one of semen. Over and over again the Asian boy is drenched with a load of the white liquid accompanied by the sound of a bang or shot, as if he were engaged in a Bukkake session.

 

     At least, in the second image the individual (or group) is somewhat sexually engaged with the  figure as opposed to simply expressing adoration or a distant fetish; but in this instance the sexuality if also a kind of abuse—although certainly one which some gay men take pleasure in (indeed the man on the screen may be the artist himself)—that if nothing else does not suggest the gentle intimacy of the first panel’s gestures. Perhaps, if this barrage of semen is being produced by only one individual instead of the usual group, we can at least presume that the aggressor is highly excited by the Asian boy, and ready to engage in ejaculation over and over, suggesting a total sexual excitation. But it is not the kind of sex one generally has with a single lover, but is suggestive more of simply sexual excitement, the kind that results in orgies and group participation. The repository of the several loads of semen in a Bukkake session may be willing, but he is nonetheless, still an unengaged stimulus or even a victim whose own sexual desires and urges are not attended to, resulting in a sense of abuse—even if it may be also enjoyable.

 

    The third panel shows ocean waters undergoing vast tsunami like waves, a violent act that suggests perhaps an appreciation for violence. Yet this is described as being part of what the artist “desires,” so we have to imagine that violence on a large scale, vast numbers of individual effected is also one of the filmmaker’s expressed desires. There is, of course, also great beauty and power in the third screens images, an expression of the ineffable force of nature itself which may be behind all obsession or deep desire. If we watch the first with a sense of eroticism, the second with a sensation of true sexual action, the third becomes something from which we must stand apart, appreciating its beauty without wanting at all to become involved with its highly destructive powers.

     All three also engage a kind of body, the passive and still male body being admired in the first panel, the male face being abusively used as source of stimulus for sexual action in the second, and a body of water demanding our astonishment and fear in the third and final panel.

     One might characterize the first image, finally, as representing “adoration,” the second as “use or abuse,” and the third “terror,” all of them strangely separating, ultimately, he who desires and the thing he desires.

      In each case, moreover, the humans at the center remain basically passive and submissive. In the first, although the boy gets a very slight erection, his role is simply as the adored being, touched without real sexual stimulation. In the second, while he is the cause, presumably, of the white liquid being catapulted upon his face and hair, he remains the uninvolved recipient. And, in the third, the viewer remains, if he is to survive, outside and apart from the wondrously violent presentation of nature which he observes as an observer.

      In all three panels, in fact, the viewer is also, in some respect, a voyeur, not fully engaged with the activities he desires—just as we too become voyeurs of this artist’s desires.

      As in so many of this Bangkok-born artist’s work, he raises the question of desire, its price (financially, socially, and spiritually) and effects upon our lives and others involved.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2024).

John Maloof and Charles Siskel | Finding Vivian Maier / 2013

god’s spy

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Maloof and Charles Siskel (directors) Finding Vivian Maier / 2013

 

             Come, let’s away to prison;

We two alone will sing like birds I’ the cage:

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness: and we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,

Who loses, and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;

And take upon’s the mystery of things,

As if we were God’s spies; and we’ll wear out,

In a wall’d prison, packs and sets of great ones

That ebb and flow by the moon.

                                            King Lear, ACT V, Sc. 2

 

John Maloof’s and Charles Siskel’s 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier begins with several of the interviewees—former employers of Maier’s, children for whom she served as nanny, and art critics—seemingly being momentarily speechless, apparently since they have just been asked to describe their central emotion regarding the figure at the center of this film.

     If they express slightly different responses, all of them, nonetheless express a kind of bemused wonderment and confusion about this fascinating woman’s existence—that is except for the art critic’s expression of envy of the film’s narrator, Maloof, who uncovered the vast cache of photographs (most of them still undeveloped), payment stubs, pins, toys, medals, and newspapers that Maier had left behind.

    What gradually becomes apparent through the nearly hour and a half that follows is that Maier was a brilliant outsider artist working within numerous traditions of street photography that might be compared with photographs as different as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and Gordon Parks to Cartier-Bresson and numerous other older U.S. and international photographers, while still remaining absolutely original.

     Maier was a true talent, who evidently (so we eventually discover) perceived photography as her major endeavor, yet never printed or apparently even saw most of the images she shot. The art establishment, accordingly, has had a difficult time in characterizing and evaluating her work: an outsider artist is one thing, but an outsider who never even attempted to reveal most of her artifacts and, literally, hid them away, is quite another. Who was this woman, who worked throughout most of her life as a nanny, and yet appeared to many of her families as aloof and apart, a figure, much like the stereotype of an artist, who often treated their own children with a certain, objective, aloofness and even disdain that might even have put them in harm’s way?

 

    While some of those interviewed attest to her love of children and their love of her, others—including a couple of those children grown up—admit to a darker side of Maier’s personality that when revealed puts them at the center of what sounds like mild child abuse: force-feeding, slaps, and even somewhat compulsive behavior (as when one young girl’s purchase of trinkets is hosed down in a highly ammoniac concentration of water). Films Maier left behind show her sometimes gently questioning and frolicking with her young charges, while at other times she appears to be following in the tracks of a famous murder victim as described in the daily headlines.

     Maier, it appears, was also a kind of pack-rat, saving an enormously large collection of newspapers whose lurid headlines shouted out murders and other horrific deeds with which she as morbidly fascinated. One senses a desire, when she combines this with her photography, to play, at least temporarily, the role of journalist. I, too, occasionally save newspaper articles which may later find their way into my annual writings; but I clip out particular pieces and rarely save them after I’ve put them to use or realized that these possibly interesting subjects nonetheless remain separate from my specific concerns. Maier saved them all in total, almost as a librarian might, hinting she saw them not only as sources for her art but as a kind of record of or testament about the cruelty she found in the world.

     What becomes an open question of this often clear-headed and yet sometimes obscurantist film is what happened to Vivian Maier as a young girl that led her to compulsively explore the dark side of human behavior. It is apparent that some sort of abuse she had experienced or observed drove her to art. At times she appeared to be interested merely in people going about their everyday business, working people smiling, simply enjoying themselves; but far more often her figures, human and animal, appear to have been abandoned by the society around them, abused, punished, even tortured. Like the German artist, Hans Bellmer, she appears to be utterly fascinated by the naked manikins in store windows, lying about without heads, arms, and legs. At one point a child with whom she associated, hit by a car, is objectified by her camera as a victim. And many of her street encounters concern figures clearly victimized by the society around them, representing children in tears, a small Black boy shining the shoes of another white boy of the same age, the poor forced into manual labor in order to survive.            A tall woman, with what is described by all as an overly-strident and determined gait, Maier apparently saw himself as a kind of monstrous Cyclops (in one memorable photo her figure rises up as a dark shadow at the center of which lays the reflected image of the camera lens, the tool of her art being more realistically registered than the artist behind it) surrounded by the trolls for whom she was caring.

     In some respects, her choice of occupation makes perfect sense: her job as children’s caretaker allowed her complete entry into wealthy homes, food, housing, at least a regular, if small, salary, and an opportunity to move out into the community with her charges in tow. An office job, clearly, would never have allowed her to carry her camera daily around her neck as she was allowed by her rather open-minded parents, or the possibility of movement throughout the city—although there is some evidence that she was chastised for taking the children into disreputable neighborhoods.

      What her nanny job also permitted was for Maier to declare her own space as inviolable, a sacred domain in which no one was allowed entry. Her employers evidently felt that she deserved this small concession (sometimes along with the larger ones she demanded). But what was even more strange is the fact that, although to her employers she was a fairly open figure named Vivian Maier, to most others she intentionally remained shadowy, refusing to give up even a name or address to tradesmen and others whose lives were lived outside of the circle of her temporary home position. Possibly, Maier even affected a French-Alsatian accent in an attempt to further hide her American identity.*

      It was almost as if, in practicing her art—an art that seemed to be concerned with a documentation of her world and a testifying to the evils in it—she felt the need to be incognito, to be a secret agent, or a kind “God’s spy” determined to reveal the details of the evil she had discovered in mankind’s heart, while she operated, meanwhile, in a kind of protected cocoon of innocence—surely also a sort of prison—in which the children around her existed. While Maier—who was very much, it appears, in touch with the world around her and aware of cultural precedents—cannot precisely be described as an outsider artist, although she shares some kinship, it appears, with Henry Darger, who felt compelled to tell, in painting, collages, and writing, of the terrible adventures of the innocent yet sometimes brutal young girls—oddly enough, named the Vivian girls—who lived in a world that threatened them with murder and mayhem.  

      What we are left with in the thousands of rolls of photographs and films she left behind, no matter how brilliantly imaged, lit, and framed, seem to be part of a larger whole which we never will fully comprehend. Perhaps, as this documentary implies, Maier saw herself as a grand documentarian, as a purposely mysterious figure whose purpose was to take down in her images the realities of human behavior that resulted in suffering, hurt, pain, even torture. Clearly, she saw the human situation, at certain moments, from the other end of the looking glass; many of works, indeed, reveal the possibilities of joy and meaning in life. But one feels that, at heart, Vivien Maier saw a more important role as witness to the horrors of the 20th century, and that, even for her hard-working, smiling figures (as in the works of Arbus) another darker drama lay behind their lives. If her street scenes are often vibrant, so too are they fraught with danger, or simultaneously imply that there are darker realities just behind the frame. Her Rolleflex camera hanging between her breasts, freed her to look straight into the face of her dissembling believers while trapping the despair she sensed that surrounded them. 

 

*Although Maier was born in the US, her mother was apparently from Alsace, and Maier herself traveled there at least twice for periods of time.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2015).

Robert Altman | The Company / 2003

difficult dances

by Douglas Messerli

 

Barbara Turner (screenplay, based on a story by Turner and Neve Campbell), Robert Altman (director) The Company / 2003

 

Roger Ebert describes Robert Altman’s penultimate film, The Company as, strangely enough, an autobiographical film—even though when the director was first presented with the script by former dance Barbara Turner, he responded, "Barbara, I read your script and I don't get it. I don't understand. I don't know what it is. I'm just the wrong guy for this."

      Yet, he was clearly not the “wrong” guy, perceiving that the ensemble performative elements of the Robert Joffrey ballet company and the persona of Gerald Arpino, renamed in this work Alberto Antonelli (Malcolm McDowell), and the vast group activities did, in fact, have a great deal in common with his directorial activities: both Mr. A’s (Altman and Arpino) had always to deal with the large egos of their performers and the impossible costs of mounting such exuberant and often experimental works.

      Ballet stars, however, are paid, as this film makes clear, far less that their Hollywood counterparts, often having to work extra jobs just to pay the rent, or, even worse than the balletic star of this film, Neve Campbell, having to camp out on the floors of other ballet members’ small apartments. Although the vicious hierarchal star system of Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes as represented in Michael Powell’s and Eric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes may have been obliterated by the shifting casting of the Joffrey company, the various shifts of plum roles still riffle long-time company members. And the serious commitments these endlessly-working performers must make to their career clearly interfere with any possibilities of their love-lives. 

      Although Campbell (playing a character named Loretta 'Ry' Ryan) falls in love with the seemingly perfect young man, a young chef, played by James Franco, she fails to show up on time for his lovely late-night meal. How she possibly maintains her daytime dancing career and her night-time activities, moreover, is not entirely explained.

      Even more importantly, dancers, unlike the Hollywood actors with whom Altman works, live in a fragile world not unlike beloved race horses: at any moment the strenuous imposition of legs, feet, and other limbs forced to disobey the obvious laws of gravity, endanger not only their careers by their lives.

     Both the popular dancers, Michael Jackson and Prince, one must remember, suffered so much pain that they sought relief in opioids and other drugs. These Joffrey dancers must not only bind their feet—a bit like the ancient Chinese women—but daily suffer pain that, particularly for the older major dancer of the group, often ends in broken tendons which end their careers. It is important to remember, also, that Joffrey’s own life ended in AIDS, a fact that the Arpino character, Joffrey’s real-life companion, memorializes in his comments on the AIDS-rrelated deaths of several of his greatest male dancers. Being gay and the so-called "gay plague" of the 1980s and 90s is still very much an issue for this company.

       Far more than great sports figures, moreover, dancers generally have, for many reasons, extremely short careers. Great dancers are basically lean young men and women who can accomplish incredible acts of bodily movement for a few years at most. Ten years, as one dancer indirectly argues, is a long time to perform with the company, even if her interpretations are still respected.

     And, finally, if Joffrey and Arpino were not tyrants in the way that Diaghilev was to Nijinksy and the rest of his corps, Mr. A. can certainly be a difficult and dismissive man, castigating his dancers, whom he perceives as rebellious children, at the very moment he praises them in a way that they cannot know whether he is serious or not. And guest choreographers, such as Robert Desrosiers can dismiss central dancers, endangering their careers and certainly deflating their egos, with a flick of his wrist.

      Altman, amazingly enough, says all of this while actually stating very little. The actual Joffrey ballet company primarily practices and performs their works, with only intermittent staged episodes, engaging primarily the “actors” of his work. Any conclusions we might make about this “company,” is presented in small gestures: the crack of a tendon which ends the career of a great ballerina, a voice raised in anger over the contradictory orders of Mr. A, a series of band-aids and bandages removed from a ballerina’s foot each night, the indignity of having to move to another barre simply to do one’s morning exercises, a work-out of an older ballerina before the younger ones arrive, the dancers’ mockery of their ballet masters at a private Christmas party, a late night dinner missed. Yet, the director, through these little gestures, reveals so much that he didn’t bother to shout.

 

    On top of that, Altman seems genuinely interested in actually showing ballet. Unlike so many contemporary directors who seem to think dance is something better left to the camera, Altman moves his camera back, time and again, to let us actually see the performers in full perspective. Yes, at moments, just as HD Met Opera, he pushes in to see the expression of his performers (Joffrey was an advocate of that very expressive quality in his dancing, “pretty” dancing “by the beat” being his self-declared enemy), but Altman generally moves out to let us actually encounter the entire performances of great works such as Alwin Nikolais’s Tensile Involvement, the film’s opening piece, Arpino’s Light Rain, Suite Saint-Saëns and Trinity, Moses Pendleton’s White Widow, Lar Lubovitch’s My Funny Valentine (performed in an open Chicago park during a sudden rainstorm), and even Desrosiers’s somewhat ridiculous dance drama The Blue Snake. Although some dance critics did not perceive Altman’s mastery, anyone who truly loves dance will want to see this film. And I’d argue that it represents some of the fortuitous filming a dance history of any film ever made.

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2016).

Alf Sjöberg | Hets (Torment) / 1944

tormenting desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ingmar Bergman (screenplay), Alf Sjöberg (director) Hets (Torment) / 1944

 

Alf Sjöberg’s memorable movie, Torment, begins with an incident wherein a young boy arrives late for school, missing early morning prayers. As he enters the towering staircases, trying to  escape detection, he is watched over by a teacher who, when the boy tries to escape into a classroom, follows him. Together the two play what almost might be described as a kind of hide-and-seek as the determined elder hunts down his smaller prey, evidently so that he can identify and punish him. In this slightly perverted game, we recognize the terror of the tardy child, who does everything he can to maneuver himself out of harm’s way.

      In the very next scene, we see that things are not much different for the seniors of this school, particularly in the classroom of their Latin teacher, who they have nicknamed, with good reason, “Caligula” (Stig Järrel), who torments them during their attempts to translate Latin passages into Swedish, threatening and demeaning them upon even slight infractions, and demanding immediate rote memory of Latin endings. Like the teacher in the first scene, Caligula seems to delight in their petty errors and his gratified by serious failures, awarding demerits.   
   Although all these young men are terrorized by and hate him, one handsome student, Jan-Erik Widgren (Alf Kjellin) is clearly Caligula’s favorite target, continually putting the diligent Jan-Erik to the test, and threatening him, pointing stick in hand, for even the most minor of mistranslations and for his use even of the Swedish language.

     Although neither the director nor the screenwriter, Ingmar Bergman, openly suggest any sexual reasons behind Caligula’s torture of the boy, it is apparent that, as in the film’s first scene, there is something perverse in the teacher’s obvious focus on Jan-Erik, certainly the best-looking boy in the classroom; if his behavior isn’t a manifestation of a sublimated sexual attraction, it is, nonetheless, possible that the ugly older man is envious of young charge, and determined, for that very reason, to do him in.

      Throughout the film, moreover, Caligula admits to others and the headmaster that he has recently been “sick,” implying that his intolerance of his students has something to do with a recent illness from which he has apparently not yet completely recovered. He never makes clear what this illness might have been, but surely it must have a relationship to his treatment of Jan-Erik

      When, soon after, we discover that the sleazy teacher also has his eye on a young worker in the local tobacconist shop, Bertha, we perceive that this “sickness” is even deeper that we might have imagined. If he, at least, pushes Jan-Erik away from him or, more simply, wishes to control him, his attempts to woe Bertha are far more nefarious and disgusting.

       Caligula, we soon discover, has been following and, possibly, threatening Bertha for some time, leading her to drink. When Jan-Erik, after a night out with his classmate, discovers her  stumbling down a staircase, utterly drunk, he kindly attempts to help her, discovering her address, and leading her to her home.

     Terrified that her mysterious stalker will try to enter her apartment—even though she has changed the lock on her door—she begs her underage savior to stay with her, not only depriving him of his needed study time, but ultimately seducing him—in an act that today we would brand as child-abuse—into her bed.

     At least her “abuse” is of the pleasant kind, and this young Werther—Jan-Erik imagines falling in love with one woman for whom he will play his violin—quickly falls madly in love with her, abandoning his studies to be in her presence.

      If Caligula has long stalked her, with Jan-Erik’s interest in Bertha he becomes even more compelled to torment the woman—and, in his own version of child-abuse—his young male charge.

     One night Jan-Erik arrives to find his lover dead, with Caligula hiding in her clothes closet. Many have compared the scene which reveals Jan-Erik’s discovery of the presumed murderer as resembling scenes from Murnau’s Nosferatu, but I think the images more closely resemble the depiction of another child-murderer, Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert, in Fritz Lang’s M. Like Beckert, Caligula seems to know no sexual bounds in his destruction of the young and beautiful.

     Although Jan-Erik calls the police, accusing Caligula as having murdered Bertha, like all the adult beings in this film, the police dismiss the boy’s assertions, finding that Bertha died of a heart attack, freeing Caligula to not only slap Jan-Erik in front of the far gentler headmaster (Olof Winnerstrand) but to demand the boy’s expulsion.

     The original film ended darkly, with Jan-Erik attending Bertha’s funeral, expelled from school, while his peers celebrate their graduation.

     Given the public criticisms of this first version, Sjöberg and Bergman added a final scene wherein, after all the other students have graduated, the headmaster visits Jan-Erik, now inhabiting Bertha’s old apartment, telling him that he will help him to get back on track and find a new life.

     Caligula arrives to seek forgiveness for his behavior, but his former student turns from him, walking into the light, now free from all the “educational” abuse that even the family doctor has described as something closer to living in a concentration camp (a theme which is underscored by a scene showing Caligula reading Dagposten, the Swedish Nazi newspaper).

     Many critics have proclaimed that the teacher called “Caligula” represents the increasing fascist elements taking over in Europe, and there is quite obviously enough in this film to give their viewpoint credence. As commentator Tom Brayton suggests in his on-line review in Alternate Ending:

     

“The film is part of the long, glorious tradition of movies similar, but worse than, Jean Vigo's 1933 masterpiece Zero for Conduct. At a school in Stockholm, several boys nearing the end of their secondary school careers are suffering under the tyrannic rule of a Latin teacher they have taken to referring as "Caligula" (Stig Järrel). He treats his classroom like a kingdom - or more to the point, a dictatorship. Given the first draft's 1942 composition date, and the 1944 release date, it hardly seems reasonable to doubt that we have, in front of us, a metaphor for the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, though I do not know that either Sjöberg or Bergman ever claimed as much. Still, given Sweden's very particular situation during the Second World War - officially neutral but geographically close enough to Germany that it somewhat nervously acceded to German influence - and Bergman's own youthful fascination with Hitler's charisma, before the developments of the late '30s shocked that out of him, it is exceedingly hard not to see this as a story about contemporary politics, and not just a coming-of-age story about a student finding it in himself to resist a single teacher's casual brutality.”

 

      Yet even more commentators have continued to puzzle over the reasons for the professor’s behavior to his fellow students, some hinting that the lack of motivation weakens the film, and turns it into a mere melodrama. Obviously, Caligula is a kind of sadist, but so common, as the writer of The Film Sufi review argues, not to even be taken too seriously. This reviewer even dismisses the political interpretations, arguing that it is simply an exaggerated vision of the student, Jan-Erik, himself:

 

“But I think such interpretations offer an overly externalized picture.  I see the film as primarily an internalized nightmare on the part of the young protagonist, Jan-Erik.  When you are young and impressionable like Jan-Erik, the world seems to have an overabundance of threatening characters like Caligula. Actually, the Caligula character, while objectionable, is not all that unusual – you have probably run into many instances of people of his type. These people are troublesome, but they are usually not monstrous ogres, and anyway there are just too many of them. Here, it is true that Caligula’s insidious hectoring of the alcoholic and vulnerable Bertha contributed to her heart attack, but, regrettably, there are many such people, and we do not have grounds for having them all arrested. We have to deal with them in a civil way and carry on with our higher pursuits.  This is what Jan-Erik has to do at the end of the film. So, yes, Torment is essentially a mood-piece about the traumas of youth.”

 

     Strangely, this argument seems to only concur with most of the adults of this film, who do not even take Bertha’s death seriously, and certainly couldn’t be bothered by the horrified reports of what they see merely as merely an overwrought youth. In this case the critic appears to be siding with the villains of the piece, the society which looks the other way when it encounters a system—in this case the state of education in the day—which, again as the good doctor has observed (as summarized by the Film Sufi commentator) “overworks the students with pedantic, narrow, and meaningless exercise of no good purpose.”

      I would argue that all we need do is return to Caligula’s own assessment of himself: he has been sick, he insists. That sickness fits the pattern of a closeted gay man’s recognition of his own attraction to men, or in this case, young boys. It seems quite apparent to me that, as I hint above, it is his own attraction to Jan-Erik that forces him to keep at the greatest distance that keep’s the boy by constantly enforcing various punishments to maintain a hostile relationship and at arm’s length. The metaphor of the teacher on the chase has already been established in the very first scene of this film, and Caligula is careful that he might not fall into that pattern.

      A common resolution to such feelings in closeted men is to search out a woman who might be attracted or needy enough to involve herself in a sexual relationship with the individual, thus proving to himself that he is a heterosexual at heart. Caligula has seemed to find such a figure in the alcoholic shop clerk Bertha. And despite her abhorrence and fear of him, he literally stalks her as a solution to his increasing attraction to his student.

      Inevitably, when he discovers that his student and his would-be heterosexual solution have joined up in their own sexual relationship, his entire world collapses; he has lost both his originally sublimated lover and its mediating alternative. Such a diseased mind, a self-hating homophobe in love with a boy, now has only the choice of destroying both if he can. In this case, it is the professor who is the tormented beast, who, in turn, torments the others around him as a palliative to his own sickened condition.

       The tacked on last scene, accordingly, is not at all in accordance with the rest of the film, and actually weakens the original horror story which is not that different from many a later psychological nightmare Bergman would create.

       For that last scene, Sjöberg was absent, having other commitments, enabling the young Bergman—the man who would eventually rise to take over Sjöberg’s position as the most noted of Swedish directors—to direct his very first scene.

      Yet this picture is still very much Sjöberg’s film, with its intense use of deep blacks and luminescent whites, along with the director’s fascination with winding and treacherous staircases—clearly representing the terrifying paths these young students have daily to undertake in order to become adults—and the many mirrored images which the children (and audience) perceive but seemingly have little effect on the frozen-minded and visually blind adults, who like vampires, cannot see themselves for who they truly are in the mirrors images.

 

Los Angeles, April 17, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).