Bergman: Nära Livet (Brink of Life) (1958)

Brink of Life tends to be overshadowed by The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, which immediately preceded it. However, in retrospect, it feels just as critical in the development of Bergman’s style as those films. Set exclusively in a maternity ward, and revolving around three very different patients, it’s an exercise in the kind of tortured, intense close-ups that would become synonymous with Bergman over the next decade. Nearly every surface is white – for all his love of chamber dramas, it’s Bergman’s first film to take place entirely inside – and the women are often shot horizontally, lying in bed, with the result that their faces seem to hover above blankness, suspended across the void. That makes for some incredible close-ups, to the point where a second face starts to morph out, a glimpse of the foetal, embryonic face that Bergman would attempt to capture in his next film, The Virgin Spring. Not only do these faces carry the burden of the whole body, they carry the burden of another face and body – they’re faces in labour, as the final birthing scene makes horrifically clear. And that makes it Bergman’s first film to really hone in on the peculiarities of the female face, and female facial labour. Perhaps that’s why there are so many pairings of female faces – just as the female face can give birth to another face, so Bergman delights in compositions where one female face seems to somehow contain or encompass another face. That makes it a clear antecedent of Persona, especially given the clinical setting - and if there’s any weakness, it’s that even the few appearances of male actors detract from the hypnotic communion between the women and their nurse, which garnered the four of them a single Best Actress award at Cannes.