All of Film History, Bergman, and Persona as double.

What can be said about Film History?
Consider then, these innovators, who qualify on two axis; pure cinema and advance of the art.
PC, pure cinema, already has a problem in the sense of purity, that depends on definition.
We are taught to think in pictures and sound and, much of the world goes by without speech.
We are presented with movies of no dialogue. We have films whose quality is obviously deeper than other films, but then there is kitsch, which is in fact contained in cinema, but part of a larger picture than just the movies.

What Romantic ideas can be associate with cinema.

Perhaps best is to explain the primary example...based on one's own recognition in second thought confirmed by all the others as the best of  the go to's. In other words, the best as mentioned by the best. Which is Bergman.
Ingmar Bergman.

Now, this is illustrative, lets switch to the technical...those who advanced the art, AA, insofar telling a good story, but having this extra technique that enabled a story where no story could be before...literally exemplified by the invention of sound, but that also applies to other innovations, such as small cameras creating a street realism...officially called Neo Realism.

Neo Realism is a baseline style, having no recourse to sound while shooting immediately post WW2. It is worth mentioning as probably the best of the genres and styles. In the hands of the Italians, though a few would want to disagree, there is less of a street, more of a heart, but not too sentimental, emphasizing clarity over conventional or convivial.

Innovations as in the case of New Realism, were purely by necessity and not by the mere marshalling of resources made available by an office.
Finding footage in the rubble of WW2. Having no microphones...these retrieved cameras meant for reportage...news imagery only. Yet, this created a set of movies...touching on communism, absurdism, sentiment of place, in not very spectacular ways.

Other stylistic uses emerged over the years...people sorta steadily innovated year by year in the movies. An invention that has yet to stop developing, wherein, a mere simple camera development, like lux sensitivity enough to shoot in star light.

So, in this mechanical and editorial techniques we track the viccitudes within generations, over the ages, inputting each filmmaker by age.

Purest cinema, in this case, where the mechanical and editorial techniques are fully and completely realized...not calling attention but used in virtuosity, is attributed to Bergman. Watching Bergman is just that bit of TV boring that and all the pre 70's canon has, its dated in technology of course.
But this submerges with great finality once you, the audience member, settle into the experience that a movie can become...with you.
You might not always get along, I did not always, as Bergman was presented in college. Yet, I watched The Seventh Seal a second time, on video, and it was a real pure cinema event. Even then, not the same as Persona which seems to capture the most essential Bergman drives toward...and this means the double, and on we go with Phillip K. Dick as the best example of post Bergman Modernism. Yet Bergman is in the middle of the 20th century modern, possessing a kind of authority there, understanding it fullness, seeing from where it came, and seeing where it would end still being a bit mysterious though!

Even then, there is something extra ordinary even how Bergman purifies or essentializes cinema that gets to new psychic energy, like many of the users of the new techniques...stop motion, or Depth of Field, or cross cutting...etc.  Yet Bergman does not depend on new techniques, using the means of old essential craft: sound and vision.
I will describe my own feeling of it, which is if a drama is clamorous, and makes increasing noise...then Bergman seems to have found the silent spot in such a talkie.
Added to that photographic compositions, wherein, the fleeting sense one also gets from the Abstractionist of the early Moderns wherein, the shapes of shadow and light fit the clamorous and quiet moments. The Mondrian and the Malevich. Or Rothko, Motherwell...we are seeing original visualizations in the same sense of abstraction having less yet still managing to convey a meaning...that special place of the Late-Modern painters, contemporaneous in biography.

The motion is theater virtuoso,but one is in that theater mode closer, wherien, we are not zooming around with flying camera in realistic 3-d worlds, but are instead controlled as in a theater director...who, knowing that cinema breaks down the theater and invents a psychological blurring of the boundaries.
In other words, the timing, the look of the eye shifting around the scene, the camera movement possessing a second person, more frequently and always in some way edited in, these are not blocked or timed to mix together as theater, but one can sense that horizon is not entirely forsaken...and this is not because of the anachronism of the old style cameras lack of mobility, but in seeing and communicating to us that horizon that began in the silent era.
Blocking, the actors fully within ambiguous and divided scenes...dramatizing moments we turn away from...our shames and dumb assumptions...simply what theater is suppossed to address and make comprehensive...almost to Bergman fault he would fit in with a State message of self understanding. Well, those post WW2 examinations, on the wing of Christianities left behind, though still feeling guilt and shame.

All having a transparent mastery, you really dont notice it and it doesn't care to call attention to itself, though, sometimes is does in startling ways.
Many other filmmakers then seem more limited by tricks and treats.

So, lets move then to Hitchcock, who also steps out of the swarm of Artists emerging as they use the new "film crafts"...perhaps only second to Bergman, but once we name someone second...we name a multitude, no?

Hitchcock is a dramatist, but he is interested in the drama of manipulation, more so than Bergman. Discovery in Bergman is not so often associated with murder.
To a kind of obsession goes Hitchcock. Bergman would seems like your normal neighbor, while Hitch a little too interested in the police.
Bergman seems obsessed as well, but there is a wider range of dramas and settings than Hitchcock, where the difficult subjects like human flaw, obsessions, unkind passions, resentment, rage, has a comfort with the release of theater, in a room, to think about and depend a grasp of one's own character and others.
Hitch liked the street, and the bad guys were simply bad guys. Yet, this is opposite in a way, for Hitchcock is almost always contemporaneously set in his times. Rebecca is perhaps the exception?

Hitchcock seems more spectacle, and in so doing, a host of other movies down to today seem more spectacle, yet, then if one remembers and compares that to a Bergman movie...one that you got...I got Persona, the memory is more marked...the evil was more real, common, and closer.

If one compares, there is a spectacle in Bergman perhaps related most to the visual light and dark that mixes so enchantingly, or in so fitting a way with the characters, words, and drama...

....remember, Bergman is a modernist and so informed; I sense Suprematism, or a deck of visual cues built out of shadow and light...that tell its own story, and often seem to be commentary on Abstraction in hi Modernism itself.
It fits into the Jazz purity, of Pollock, of Kerouac at the most eloquent, at Joyce, but never so much as the experiments that did not work.

Bergman lived in a world of print, but you know, he seems like someone least influenced, but capable of working in...the written word. Which makes him a figure of study worthy to be central to the Millennial.
Not Absurdist but influenced by Ionesco. Bergman is narrative strong, as if Bergman is to Beckett, Hitchcock is to Bergman.


It might be useful now, to review who are the  most important technical innovators: Mizoguchi, Welles, (Neo Realists), Ozu, Godard, Truffaut...really, the thirties through the fifties wherein most ideas were explored. TV took over, the pace changed, movies changed too, and became not so significant.

These days, the difference is digital and of a another scale...I can set up Mocap in my living room..., and the later innovations in Film History, post fifties, are more nuance, still working in the direction of pure cinema.

But not so is Ozu. This if often overlooked, but those rhythms that count down, to pause, to open up in the moment that gesture or posture which is meant, at that moment to reveal and shift the meaning...which is quite often done in all movies, but, those of Bergman and Ozu, these sets up are not like Hollywood, while Bergman seems to have a use of it, perhaps the axial dialogue shot as frequent as a chorus or even chord, but Ozu has no "180 rule", which actually is not 180 degrees, except in Ozu where it is. Heh.
The Camera is lower in Ozu movies than all other filmmakers and looks straight in eye to eye. Dialogue in most other movies is arranged slightly off center, looking in slightly askance...most of the time.
As you made a graph of the average height every film has been ever shot it, and Ozu's would the one visible line standing out below the others.
People stared into the cameras and delivered lines. A lot, weirdly so. It works...it works and in other movies, but you dont notice it. Here, Ozu found magic. The eye to eye contact is also axial around the low perspective...there is a lot of scenes at the table.
This forms a kind of backbone in all the movies...for they are all about family and of course, all of the Ozu movies I have seen have eating at the table scenes.
Family, insofar as you exclude the outside world idea of family. The line that makes everything beyond family, that things that are not family...whatever it may be...school, society, government.
Ozu explores this...its not Social Consciousness. No, its meditation by a calmer mind on the Generations, but not without centering family the way America used to on 70's sitcoms and dramas.
Since we as Americans got a huge heaping helping of this subject on TV, what Ozu did was before this American TV consumption. However, it doesn't change the message and so Ozu falls a bit flat.
Everyone is more or less well adjusted. Bergman's movie decline a bit in that a lot of people are insane.

Lastly, Ozu skips time, like David Lnych, or like Godard except Godard its off the cuff, gee whiz, criminal glee, while this is a formal idea for Ozu. He is searching for something, but I never saw it...again, like some Bergman movies, I'd rather watch Mad Max Fury Road, but, these movies stood out strongly against all other images....as if all the images were compressing in memory and stylization, in some near death reviewing experience, to feel in what you see, true differences, human voices in the roar, or chorus (its not always Beckets nightmare howling void), those being also Wells.

The real genius of Wells can be presented simply in the opening; seven different styles of filmmaking, from news realism to fantasy...which deconstructs into a simple coinage available as technique, see? Set alongside each other, they are no longer so illusory.
The effect of banishing overtakes even the 'visual survey of all cinematic style', in effect, you see all the spectacles present one after the other, and then the story begins, post spectacle.
And what it is about? How a Man's false impression of himself, leads to meaning less than a Human SHOULD mean. Which is a Bergmanesque theme too, but we are Europeans and obsessed with self.

Mizoguchi is less memorable in exactitude, but, that filmmaker used Asian painting styles, angular isometric, and seemed to shift perspective in some ways different than the real virtuosos of 30's movies, who were?
Not Hitchcock, but probably Lang, even though post Busby Berkeley, the cameras started shifting and around and the sound improved. I can mention Mamoulian, Lubitsh, Cukor but then it is like now, such a empowerment that they all moved out in the same direction at the same time, and seemed slightly more sensitive in technique than the usual horde of careerist hacks.

Overall the history of movie making, the central essential sequence, the shot reverse shot, is a neat trick. It followed from out of the Silent Era, began a kind of increasing range of motion for the camera, first a shift here, a move, a sally, jumps, runs, dives, leaps, lingers, drifting, zooms...one extra per year, as in a constant steady progress in camera movement/technique up to today.

One could mention Murnau, but, in fact, that is the kind of lighting technique, or feel, perhaps a better experience with sidereal light...coming from being up North in Sweden where the light changes more radical than in Hollywood, or down in Europe. Sven and Ingmar get it too, and better than Murnau.

But looking at Mizoguchi is I think best because Kenji tried NOT to be like Hollywood, and it worked, though, thats still a derivation. Ozu, though, stands out as the oddest in technique, odd where it consciously different and not meant to call attention to itself and, not odd to disorient, but to make more clear. Yet, odd in subject matter as spectacle,
Family, and then so near perfectly pure cinema.

Bergman has no easy to point shifts in technique, no editing styles. The style might be called minimal, and Raymond Carver has a similar quietitude or measure.
Clearly, we understand Bergman got the sense to make real what is on stage. That works in Cinema when the camera moves out of the chair and onto the stage, and then becomes part of the actors relationships. Yeah, Bergman understood more fully and deeply what this really meant, which was a kind of Munchian increase in psychology, in society.
As if everyone were reading and discussing the latest Psychology Today article...but not in a superficial way, as if everyone had a seemingly mature psyche, but the obsession with self eroding many people identity.

The great wide spectacle of action so longed for in the limitations of the stage and realized when cameras went outside and were mounted on cars.
Well, Bergman's film are not the kinematics of George Miller, but, Bergman controls psychological action so well, the otherwise more tame kinematics have the near dynamic, just not the magnitude.

And, another filmic factor than kinematics, and this is true in many good directors, is with Speilberg and Ridley Scott well exemplified, wherein, lighting is used in great effect.
This use of lighting that does not take itself for advantage and subsequently, indicates an uncanny sense of mood and tone. Bergman's sense of light is as good, but, in fact builds over time, from this lit scene to that change in lighting in that scene, and that change in lighting in the change of angle...this builds up better perhaps in Bergman's more quiet movies, wherein, our eyes are hearing sounds and seeing lighting, but not the spectacles in every Speilberg or Scott movie.
Though I would say those two have a better sense of such things than most others.

Both the fimmakers, Ozu and Bergman are quiet. The emphasis being on visual, not spectacle...not audio programming but a exploration of sound to try out, discover, new mixtures of sound, drama and visuals.
Not taking advantage of the great range in special effects, wherein, Ozu or Bergman would be creating the same films...but, some other spectacle has ensued, which is no longer Industrial Modern.
We see it close, and in closing, have the similar shape to the Medieval, the Classical, the Rennaisance, or the Enlightenment. Its no longer the mystery of being within context, for the context has been mastered in so great a degree in digital.

In this, the movie format may dwindle as has the Novel format. The entry will not be where the seekers go, instead, there is another place they will go which we can all recognize is interactive,
Meanwhile these forms grow static and age, with the minimal necessity to reach the same audience decade after decade,
Ozu and Bergman have grown past, though there is something in their technique...certainly not the story telling, as the ages have changed, unless, these stories are universal.
Bergman ranges over relationships, like Ozu, but as explained, the family content from all of the 70's? And Bergman not reaching dramatically different content, like Leone's action.

Hopefully, provocation will get generations to elaborate and reference such direct two sources, Ozu and Bergman, meanwhile, what has made all diminish is not hard to guess, interactive not passive.
Even as content is everywhere, "interactivity" (I want an exo suit) now blends with robotics, doesn"t it? Well, this is old sci fi hat.

I think that is why the double has more emphasis...as in switching realities in Families, accommodating inter-subjectivity and converting it to society. Or like in Persona, is the psychiatrist studying the actress or the actress studying the psychiatrist?
And the PKD world, which get this into clones, psychic transfer, double realities, insane reflections on the part of main characters...the inner thinking of the android...that does occur in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

But this transition into the inner self brings reflection, a stillness.