Watching old classics brought me back to Sven Nykvist and his magic of light and darkness. It also brought me back to an old post, written when I came across his obituary while waiting in a doctor’s office for my turn.
The post certainly was not about personal bereavement, but about something relatively abstract, more personal than a bio, and literally about seeing inner and outer worlds from the vantage point of the lens underneath the iris.
Sven knew where and when to look through his darkly lens. Of course, you would know that more than anyone else when you have Bergman and Tarkovsky in company. How do visuals make you forget the composition, the chromatic metrics of lighting, and the whirring ascents and descents of tripods, and lead you instead into an atmosphere so ethereal and tactile that you are wary the dream you conjure up with eyes wide open is about to vanish? How much do we miss of this world, its blinding beauty and the colors of people’s minds? Sven’s art made me visceral about the crushing beauty of everything he captured on camera, including tragedy.
I watched Cries and Whispers (1973) in an auditorium for a makeshift theatre on top of the Ernakulam Public Library. The rental chairs and the projector were disconcertingly rickety. But that didn’t stop me from being absorbed in the majestic denouement of crimson red on the screen. I was lost. I began to think in color. If the soul had a color, it had to be a dragon’s red.
The tortured, poignant, and sometimes wailing relationships were portrayed in color. Though Bergman cleverly sketched the backdrop in fleeting beauty—the fall, the traditional European setting and period—Sven’s art stood out. In the last scene, after her funeral, Karin reads from her diary about a charmed moment when the three sisters, clothed in silken white, stroll through a sunlit park. They sit beside each other on a swing. Karin remembers it as a perfect moment of anguish and happiness, and how she cherished its perfection.
Sven made the scene absolutely out of this world.
I took the last bus home that night as a believer.
Bergman’s trilogy of faith was another astonishing feat of Sven’s art. Those who watched Winter Light cannot forget the frigid winter outside and the interior winter of Pastor Tomas, nor the long close-up of Ingrid Thulin as she waded into their soulless existence with her monologue. Who will forget the pointless meanderings of Johan along the hotel corridors and the echoes of God’s silence in The Silence? In A Passion, Sven deconstructed color and eventually the coherence of visuals and senses to portray the emotional isolation of Andreas and his violent resistance to Anna’s efforts to break through the ice. His experiments with color and visual fragmentation were unlike anything I had seen.
The human face was as wide a canvas as the landscape of Gotland overlooking the Baltic Sea. Persona (1966) was a case in point and a consummation of Bergman’s idea of the movie camera as “an incredible instrument for recording human soul as captured in the human face.” Despite the open-ended plot of the movie, Sven’s camera displays extraordinary control while moving between alienation and intimacy, abstraction and the sensitive portrayal of the Nurse and the Patient within a seemingly linear and natural narrative. The movie remains one of the great marvels of modern cinema.
Fanny and Alexander (1982) was a retreat for Bergman and Sven to the common sources of their shared fascination. The magical world unleashed from the perspective of a child showed an unbridled curiosity to go beyond the limits of adult memory and perception. The child’s amazement at the wonders of everyday discovery, the home theatre that became a playground of dreams, the lantern-lit nights, the kaleidoscope, the festive family dinners, the sudden death of the children’s father marking the end of an era, the ghostly fantasy world, the defiant confrontation with the stepfather, the terror of growing up, and the realization of anguish through wisdom—all were observed through the eyes of a child.
Childhood could never be dull. Sven captured the ephemeral world of a child’s life with all its incomprehensibilities, delights, pain, and wisdom.
The Sacrifice (1986) was Tarkovsky’s final film. In many ways, Sven lived the grandeur and abomination of a cameraman’s life during its making. The long shots that were Tarkovsky’s wont achieved an extraordinary grace through Sven’s camera, even when Alexander burned down his house as a sacrifice to redeem the world from nuclear holocaust.
And then the camera jammed.
The single camera Sven had at his disposal failed while the house was being charred. When the rebuilt house was burnt again, midway through the blaze, the camera ran through an entire reel, breaking the crew into tears. Sven gave Tarkovsky his meditating lens to draw the twilight zone where humankind’s loss of spirituality was acknowledged, leading to repentance and the ultimate offer of sacrifice.
The wide landscape, Bach’s music, the Japanese flute, Leonardo da Vinci’s chiaroscuro in The Adoration of the Magi—all were pointers to the creative sources of this astonishing and grandiloquently flawed masterpiece made for posterity.
Perhaps Sven, like Tarkovsky, should be remembered not only for the spectacular triumphs but also for the spectacular failures.
Chronicles 