Establishing shot: Vogler’s approach to Spegel

Early in The Face (aka The Magician) [Ansiktet] (1958), an itinerant group of performers, Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theatre, stops in the middle of a wood in response to a mysterious cry. The company is comprised of 5 people: the coachman, Simson, the company’s manager, Tubal, an old woman named Granny who claims supernatural abilities and who concocts various potions and remedies, the

magician and mesmerist, Albert Emmanuel Vogler, and his assistant, a young man named Aman. All are flamboyantly costumed, in keeping with the film’s mid-19^th century setting. But Vogler and Aman are also in disguise; the magician wears a black wig and beard, and refuses to speak, while Aman is really the magician’s wife dressed in men’s clothing. The company is on the run from Danish authorities and is trying to return to Stockholm without incident. But the cry has terrified the coachman and the journey has been halted. Vogler ventures out to find the source, and discovers neither a demon nor an animal, but a dying actor, Spegel, who promptly asks Vogler if he, too, is an actor.

Before Spegel poses this question linking identity to performance, the film has already presented this challenge to the viewer through the conspicuous make-up and costuming of Vogler and Aman:

Are we to accept these as earnest representations, or anticipate some kind of de-masking? Should we accept things at face value, or be skeptical of what appears before us on the screen? A second such

159 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 255-256.

54 challenge is embedded in Vogler’s approach to Spegel, and relies upon a bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand. Moving toward the cry (which is never actually heard by us), Vogler is shown in a long shot: he leaves the troupe’s carriage and moves forward toward the camera, crossing a creek, and then proceeds to walk on land as the camera dollies backwards in a tracking shot. This shot does not cut until after the dolly track has itself been exposed in the frame. It is doubtful that the inclusion was simply overlooked, and therefore odd that the footage was retained; it amounts to less than two seconds of film and Vogler’s path and direction have already been well-established by the shot. One could argue that the shot’s length is a rhythmical unit and not merely visual or in the service of continuity editing, and that the extra second-and-one-half therefore keeps a certain tempo intact. Bergman was then making a certain kind of aesthetic gamble that no spectator would be consciously aware of the dolly-track being briefly visible. This shot amounts to a challenge of the spectator, a test of how objective one’s attention truly is. Bergman (like Vogler or Aman) seems to be begging for someone to call his bluff, to notice what is really going on and respond. The film provokes a comparison between Bergman’s idea of the cinema spectator as one who is “hypnotized” with his idea of the theatre spectator as one in the presence of a medium that “reminds.”¹⁶⁰

This chapter continues to investigate the relationship between film and theatre via the performance-within and embodied performance. This examination demonstrates the unique attributes of

performance as a means of exploring and developing philosophical concerns. The very fact of embodied performance is always emphasized by the device of the performance-within. Here, three performances-within in The Face are analyzed: the cross-dressed performance constituting Aman; an encounter between the dead (or resurrected) actor, Spegel, and Vogler’s magic lantern; and a formally

160 Marker and Marker, A Life in the Theatre 32.

55 devised performance-within called “The Invisible Chains.” As in Sawdust and Tinsel, the

performance-within proves an effective means by which to amplify and magnify the concerns of the drama proper. From considering the histories of these intermedial performances, we are able to ask questions and discover answers that otherwise would be unobtainable through conventional approaches to film and theatre scholarship: how were these roles and performances were conceived, what

commentaries are being offered through them, and how these performances-within instantiate prominent philosophical issues prevalent in the mid-20^th-century.

In this chapter, important contributions by collaborators are considered, and Bergman’s direct exposure to existential drama and philosophy is examined, particularly the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Face offers a dramatic instantiation of a key component of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential philosophy, namely the regard (look) of the Other. In a development away from the existential structure of Sawdust and Tinsel, death is de-emphasized as the source of existential anxiety; instead, The Face focuses on the protagonist-subject’s relation to Others. While death is certainly present in the film, the emphasis on control of the regard in human inter-relations is clearly dominant. In fact, the regard of the Other links spectatorship to the potential annihilation of the performer-subject.

Sartre’s influence is evident in the film, but has been largely overlooked in previous scholarship. It is present through multiple channels, particularly the performances-within, as well as the sub-textual interplay between actors, and the manner of filming these phenomena. Bergman emphasized the primacy of Sartre as an influence during the 1940s: “Then came existentialism—Sartre and Camus.

Above all, Sartre. Camus came later, with a sort of refined existentialism. I came into contact with it in the theatre.”¹⁶¹ However, Bergman never directed any play by Sartre, and only directed a single

161 Björkman, et al 12-13; emphasis added.

56 play by Camus: Caligula at Göteborg Municipal Theatre in 1946. Allowing that Sartre preceded

Camus as a philosophical influence acquired through the practice of theatre, productions of Sartre in Sweden prior to 1946, as well as later productions of both Sartre and Camus, need to be considered with respect to Bergman’s own conterminous projects. Accounting for the means by which Bergman’s work reflects that of Sartre’s is to undertake an assessment of how philosophical ideas may be

acquired, developed, and imparted through the processes of performance, from one performance medium into another, and through knowledge acquired by embodied performance.