Music in play on screen : performing reality in Ingmar Bergman's late work

Abstract

Music can be a generative element in dramatic performances. It choreographs the action on stage, endows the performance with a distinctive dream-like quality, and mediates the audience’s experience. Instead of relying on recordings of actual performances, this dissertation examines cinematic representations thereof, delving into the role that music plays for the audience represented in the films. My prime case study is the late work of Ingmar Bergman. In the first three chapters of the dissertation I provide in-depth analyses of as many Bergman’s films to illustrate how music is a mediating element for the characters-spectators who play such a prominent role in his late work. Music triggers, mediates, and constitutes performances of meaning for them as much as us, the spectators. The films analysed in chapter four focus instead on representative examples of music addressed specifically to the film audience. I view them as cinematic reverberations of the main ideas of the thesis, in that they all focus on the spectatorial experience in the theatre but the listeners they address are the virtual, or at best spatially scattered and temporally dislocated members of the global film audience. In the concluding remarks, I bring the main ideas of the dissertation together under the notion of performance and its complex blend between artifice (expression), illusion (imagination), and reality (experience). The films emerge as mediators of a process of worldmaking in which music becomes a constitutive element. Music transforms artistic representations into encapsulations of experience, it imbues dramatic performances with a sense of “life as lived,” and, by engaging our imagination and emotions, it fosters a uniquely human capacity for intersubjectivity.