De fördömda kvinnornas dans (The Dance of the Damned Women)

I will quote the Ingmarbergman.se page:

The film is described as a play for dancers rather than as a ballet. Four women are shown moving round a narrow and closed room. They represent ‘generational’ women, i.e., women who live by performing roles imposed upon them by women of earlier generations. Two of the dancers are damned souls coming alive, the third is death and the fourth a child, born unspoilt but forced into the pattern of role playing. The dancer who personifies death wears a black hood, not unlike the one Death wears in The Seventh Seal.

Erm, okay, if you say so.  I’ve said before that this kind of interpretive dance does very little for me.  I wouldn’t have been able to say what this is about without the blurb above.  It’s a bunch of women in leotards looking very, very serious about stuff and making dramatic gestures.  As a Bergmanophile, there’s only two real points of interest.  First is the beautiful black & white photography by Sven Nykvist, very gloomy and lots of those intense close-ups.  The other is the presence of Helene Friberg as the child.  She is familiar as the daughter in Face to Face and the little girl in the audience of The Magic Flute.

Swedish art critic Ingela Lind shows up at the beginning and says something, but it’s in Swedish and it wasn’t subtitled, so I’m afraid I have no idea.  She shows up again and says more, and then the whole thing repeats, so that viewers could revisit it with her comments in mind.  So although the running time is 25 minutes, it’s really only about 10 minutes.

Dance enthusiasts might get something out of this, particularly fans of choreographer Donya Feuer.  And Nykvist’s cinematography is worth appreciating.  But really this is for Bergman completists only.  Rating: Poor (46)

IMDb