A Film Canon

Like Fellini, Bergman returns to circus and vaudeville to suggest a crisis in cinematic language, but with a much greater prescience for the sadistic, militaristic, cuckolding demands of the cinematic audience, here deflected into the effeminate, aristocratic, theatrical mileu that prevents circus mingling with cinema, and reviving its demotic, vernacular potential. At its extreme, this audience reduces the circus performers to a series of overexposed faces suspended in murky, oily, amniotic slick, their bodies so many silhouetted repositories for the menagerie of lice, fleas and worms that repeat their feats in minutiae; or, alternatively, so many continuities with the rest of the animal kingdom, as if, in an eccentric take on foetal development, the face were the first, most rudimentary organ to develop. In the process, class struggle is equated with media struggle and, more specifically, the struggle between media of embodiment and disembodiment, as the central love triangle - the circus master's (Ake Gronberg) mistress' (Harriet Andersson) courtship of a stage actor (Hasse Ekman), whose proclivity for the role of jester identifies him as a potential common denominator between their respective worlds - culminates with a violent, if futile, attempt to reclaim the face's visceral potential, and rescue it from the mirrored spectrality that sets the affair in motion. In the end, Bergman's tentative solution is to equate this slick with the cinematic reel itself, suffusing the circus camp with the fluidity of a bundle of tracking-shots, and condensing audience pleasure to surfeit; irresistible disgust.