Ingmar Bergman Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ronald S. Librach

Critical Essay by Ronald S. Librach

The largest metaphor in The Serpent's Egg is the metaphor of the narrative film itself as a dream—the complete inversion of two levels of "reality." The film opens, for example, with a shot of people's expressionless faces, as they move in slow motion, like the figures in the boat in the dream at the end of The Shame; the shot is intercut with the opening credits. The film ends with explicit suddenness, accompanied by the metallic sound of a shutter gate dropping; the screen cuts sharply to black, and there are no closing credits. Throughout the film, there is also a vapor drifting up from the ground, whether it be the cold mist that rises perpetually from the cobblestones or the cigarette smoke which lingers in every cabaret and every bedroom. The narrator identifies this vapor as fear: "Fear," he says, "rises like vapor from the asphalt; it can be...
(read more)