Bergman: Skepp till Indialand (A Ship Bound for India) (1947)

With A Ship Bound For India, Bergman extends the theatrical naturalism of his first two features into a more fully-formed grotesquerie of human cruelty, by way of the impoverished Blom family, who make their living salvaging boats, and are torn and tortured by various decisions, demons and deformities. As in so many of Bergman’s later films, it presents the coastline as Sweden’s bleakest and most radiant vista, a glittering waste whose devolution of sparkling possibility into entropic nothingness cries out for cinematic capture. Yet it’s precisely that cinematic availability that seems to make Bergman ambivalent about it, perhaps because the seductions of cinematic beauty offer a false consolation untenable in the theatre. As a result, the film’s tension between theatrical and cinematic language plays out as a series of tensile mise-en-scenes, in which Bergman offers the spectacle of the water’s surface only to wrench it away again. That ambivalence extends to the salvagers themselves – on the one hand, they mercilessly excavate and demystify the seabed, but at the same time Bergman can’t quite refrain from elevating their labour to mythological proportions, as they occasionally glimpse a profundity that the film doesn’t seem inclined to condone; the dreamlike refraction of water on roofs and walls. It feels right, then, that we’re also presented with Bergman’s first vision of imminent blindness, as Kapten Blom receives a diagnosis quite early that sets the narrative in play. That subsumes the most exquisite shots into imminent nothingness, but it also elevates the most banal moments, since salvaging his last vessel, which happens to be the most decrepit, ghastly vessel he’s ever salvaged, becomes a summative act and spectacle for Blom - it has to crystallise everything he’s ever seen and everything he’s ever yearned to see. That perfectly summarises Bergman’s scepticism about the consolations of cinematic beauty, and perhaps accounts for his exquisite script, one of his most poetic as a screenwriter, which continually competes with his scenes and shots for aesthetic primacy.