The ghost in the machine

Abstract

This chapter is a reading of Ingmar Bergman’s last film, Saraband, directed for Swedish public service television in 2003. The film, which is structured like a chamber play, offers a kind of summary of Bergman’s cinematic universe, with a number of intertextual connections to several of his most important works, including Wild Strawberries (1957), The Magician (1958), Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), and, especially, Scenes from a Marriage (1973); Saraband can actually be interpreted as the sequel to the latter. Saraband contains open and hidden allusions to theological questions that have been recurrent in Bergman’s work. The mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) and his interpretation of Heaven and Hell, and especially the world of spirits, is present in allusions and conversations, as well as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) with his preludes to Existentialism. The reading of the film is guided by the concept of liminality. The characters are all in different stages of liminalities; and the borders between the living and the dead, as well as between one human soul and another, are constantly transcended or problematized. Bergman also returns to the kind of self-reflexive narration that he once introduced in Persona through the use of black-and-white film stills, and characters addressing the audience through the ‘fourth wall’. The film reflects upon itself as an artefact and as a work of fiction. This self-reflexivity, finally, is seen as the ‘ghost’, working in the machine of Bergman’s cinematic storytelling.