This week was long, and limited in learning. I have been maybe the most sick I have ever been and consequentially managed to attend only one Film Light class. Still, I have some thoughts on how the Tuesday class went.
We watched some The Passion of Anna excerpts this week. Sven Nykvist was the cinematographer, and he achieved a naturalistic look across the film. This includes filling or bouncing the available light heavily, especially in the car scene. There was also continuity of lighting maintained in the scene, on each of the actors. I think the scene is nice in that it does look natural, but also has the bright colours in there, like the red of the car. In the second clip however, the sun acts as more of a motivational light source – coming in heavily from two different sides of the house. It still does work for the aesthetic of the film though.
In further research, I have read that there were some troubles during filming. Ingmar Bergman says that typically he would solve any technical problems he anticipated in the writing stage, but in this case he thought he’d better take the challenge of working things out during filming. Both Bergman and Sven Nykvist had a vision for the project, “…To make a black-and-white film in color, with certain hues emphasized in a strictly defined color scale.” They found this difficult however, and argued many times over it.
I still believe that they achieved what they set out to do, especially when looking at the fight scene – it had those strong contrasting colours, and control 0f it, especially with the bright blue eyes and bright red scarf. I think it was a really interesting take on reproducing real life with a certain style (in this case the colour) that did not impede on the naturalistic look.
(Quote excerpt from Ingmar Bergman’s second autobiography, page on The Passion of Anna found here: <https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/passion-anna>)