What can you say about a man who obsessively collects photographs of people but refuses to take part in humanity himself? For the wife of this man who has no will of her own? What about Anna and Andreas? The former does her best to convince the world she's virtuous, while the latter tries desperately to convince himself that he is not.
The actors playing these wretched souls have plenty to say themselves. The short interludes which Bergman uses to cut up the action create a meta-commentary about the film during the film, a choice you either love or hate. My initial inclination when deciding for myself was that Bergman had to have been insecure about the inaccessibility of his characters and that his workaround seemed cheap.
But it became clear when noticing his aesthetics that Bergman is alluding to cinema's divide between reality and artifice and, as an extension, the misreading of one's own subjectivity. Bergman makes it very clear that these interviews themselves are staged or part of the film's fiction. Otherwise, how could he time the camera to rack focus or to increase the intensity of a light synchronically with the rhythm of the performances?
In The Passion of Anna, Bergman explores the idea that a person's perception of reality is shaped by their own experiences and that truth is always subjective. By showing the interludes as staged and artificial, he emphasizes that what we see in a film is always a representation of reality rather than reality itself; ultimately, what truths we see in ourselves are just as deficient.
The actors playing these wretched souls have plenty to say themselves. The short interludes which Bergman uses to cut up the action create a meta-commentary about the film during the film, a choice you either love or hate. My initial inclination when deciding for myself was that Bergman had to have been insecure about the inaccessibility of his characters and that his workaround seemed cheap.
But it became clear when noticing his aesthetics that Bergman is alluding to cinema's divide between reality and artifice and, as an extension, the misreading of one's own subjectivity. Bergman makes it very clear that these interviews themselves are staged or part of the film's fiction. Otherwise, how could he time the camera to rack focus or to increase the intensity of a light synchronically with the rhythm of the performances?
In The Passion of Anna, Bergman explores the idea that a person's perception of reality is shaped by their own experiences and that truth is always subjective. By showing the interludes as staged and artificial, he emphasizes that what we see in a film is always a representation of reality rather than reality itself; ultimately, what truths we see in ourselves are just as deficient.