Here you have a performer posing as Dr. Albert Vogler, practicioner of magnetic medicine. His wife is his assistant, but she disguises herself as his male protège. He is also accompanied by his witch of a grandmother, a gypsy, really, who apparently holds the secrets to unlocking the potent forces of the supernatural. And his uncle Tubal rounds out the party.
Of course, the whole illusion-vs-reality thing is obvious from the start, because of the proliferation of disguises. There's the fake male assistant, the learned doctor facade, and, by the end of the film, you even doubt that the identity of a cheap conjurer of tricks is Vogler's real personality. He is equally passionate as the master illusionist looming in the shadows like a vengeful spirit come back from the dead, and as a pathetic beggar desperate for coins for his next meal. He switches easily between these identities. Indeed, Vogler goes so far as to act dumb, and only halfway through the film does he start uttering words, the first of which is the solemn pronouncement "I hate them".
And then, there's the inexplicability of the world and science set against it on a crusade of enlightenment. Vogler is pitted against Dr. Vergérus, the medical officer of this town that they come to, and Vergérus roundly humiliates him in their first encounter in the audience of the police commissioner and a councilman. The skepticism of science holds fast against Vogler's hypnotic stare. But then Vogler regains the initiative when he fakes his own death, fools the doctor into autopsying another body, and then apparently resurrects himself to scare the doctor out of his wits. Ultimately, though, Vergérus maintains his composure; Vogler's resurrection act does not scare him into resorting to supernatural explanations to this apparently impossible scenario. Indeed, even as dismembered body parts turn up spontaneously on his desk, he has enough presence of mind to conclude that he must be hallucinating.
And ultimately even Vogler undermines his own illusion. He ends up begging the household for payment for a performance well put up. He calls it an "experience" that he enacted for the benefit of Vergérus, and effectively surrenders to the latter's skepticism. At the end, one only gets the concrete impression that both are pretenders, with their bells and whistles trying to assert that they really know how the world works. Vergérus and his diagnostic inspections, his autopsy and his intellectual musings in the face of terror, and Vogler's magnets, hidden ropes and levers, false bottoms and mirrors - both are similar in the way that both are means to indirectly interpret and manipulate the true nature of reality.
Far more fascinating, I think, on the spiritual plane is the grandmother, brewer of rat poison, medicines and most importantly, love potions. One gets the sense that she knows things, fundamental truths about the world that reside in the shadowy folds of her wrinkled face. She is utterly blunt, but at the same time also firmly rooted in her folk beliefs, so rooted that you get the impression that it must be real knowledge that gives her such confidence. She is the most convincing magical figure, with her solemnly carried out rituals of spiritual cleansing, and her potions, and even her revealed trove of gold at the end of the film.
The most interesting character, though, is Spegel the drunkard who stumbles into Vogler's path at the beginning of the film. They first mistake him for a ghost; the grandmother hears his moans in the forest and concludes that he is a zombie. Vogler finds him prostrate and drunken on the forest floor, and brings him along in their carriage, where he gives Vogler a glimpse of death, articulating the stoppage of life as it flowed from his extremities to his brain. He dies with the words "Death is..." hanging provocatively, promisingly, in the air.
But the grandmother apparently summons him back from the dead, and he turns up at the house they were staying at. He seeks out Vogler, and I think he gives Vogler the idea of resurrection scam by appearing before him alive after being bundled up as a corpse. Spegel dies a second time after a swig of vodka, and conveniently becomes the corpse that Vergérus dissects thinking that he was autopsying Vogler. And here is a disturbing question: if Spegel did not really die in the coach, then did he die for good in Vogler's arms? When Vogler lowered him into the coffin with the false bottom, was he plotting opportunistic murder? But then again, Spegel had mentioned before that he would like to be dissected with a sharp knife, so his spirit could be set free. So is this assisted suicide? In the short time that Spegel has on the screen, he says some of the most poignant lines, and it reminds me of Mercutio in R&J, where the wisest character gets ill-treated by others, and is turned into essentially a prop in their respective vendettas. It's the waste that gets to me; there is a feeling that I have to understand all that he is saying and trying to say, before he is gone entirely from the screen.
And listen to these:
- "You see what you see, and you know what you know" - Vogler's Grandmother
- "A shadow of a shadow" - Johan Spegel remarking on Vogler's projected image of a Death's Head
- "One goes step by step into the darkness. The actual movement is the only truth" - Spegel again, on the verge of drinking himself to death
- "God remains silent and people speak" - Dr. Vergérus to Volger's wife
There's probably more where that came from, and there is really a lot of substance to be analysed in this work. The use of shadows and smoke, the really forward young girls and women that lead the hapless men on to erotic rendezvous, and the significance of the number three - three knocks, three thumps, for what? I have to say I haven't been so excited about a work of art, so engaged in a dialogue with the content, since I left school. It's really refreshing.
Looking forward to running over all this, comparing notes with the little film club that we're trying to cobble together. But in the meantime, here's a glimpse that shows why this film is sometimes called The Face:
Max von Sydow as Vogler
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