BERGMAN'S PERSONA THROUGH A NATIVE MINDSCAPE
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tions as a filmmaker was to transfer Strindberg's A Dreamplay to the screen.15 STRINDBERGIAN DRAMATURGY AND CINEMATIC STRUCTURE
Strindberg developed his dreamplay dramaturgy in the first decade of this century, just as the film medium was coming into being. A year before his death in 1912, Anna Hoffman Uddgren, whose husband was a confidant of Strindberg, had received permission by the playwright to "kinematograph as much of my production as you please/'16 Two films were made, The Father and Miss Julie (the latter lost). The surviving results show the staginess of the undertaking and the literal, although mutilated transfer to the screen of two naturalistic plays. Clearly the Swedish cinema had not yet caught up with Strindberg's new dreamplay concept. However, ten years later with a film like Viktor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage, based on a novella by Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlof and a favorite work in Bergman's film library, the medium caught up with Strindberg's dreamlike and associative approach in A Dreamplay (1901). In a departure from Lagerlof;s epic storytelling, Sjostrom opted for an elliptical form of narration that emphasizes the dreamlike fluidity of time and space. Whereas Lagerlof had been careful to provide a causal development, Sjostrom elected an episodic approach. His carefully lit and composed scenes include a series of quadrupleexposed "transparent" vignettes of the driver of the death wagon. These scenes possess a fluidity reminiscent of A Dreamplay's associational changing of scenes.17 Sjostrom's ambition was to focus on a psychological and metaphysical vision by combining realistic details and sublime elements. He never employs the grotesque and distorting forms of expressionism that Reinhardt brought to Sweden and that also constituted the collective style of the German expressionist cinema. Instead he relied on what has been called "the Swedish style," which had begun to evolve around 1913-1914, where lighting, composition, and outdoor shooting were used to