Nykvist's The Sacrifice

            Ingmar Bergman and Sven Nyqvist’s movies are very beautiful and deep. I love the composition of light and shadow in each scene. There is also a lot of use of negative space. Each frame is an individual piece of art. Because each frame is so powerful and the monologues are often deep in meaning, I find it difficult to watch in one sitting. The slow plot does not keep me in my seat, but I do not want to miss anything because it is so beautiful, so I watch in several sittings.

A lot of Swedish films I have a problem hearing properly and it doesn’t help that the lip sink is often off! Another sound glitch was when they were in the woods and the distance of the sound was off. You couldn’t tell who was speaking because the people in the distance sounded just as close as those in the foreground.

            I thought that it was interesting that with a conversation with the maid, the hostess was behind the camera so the maid looked the camera straight in the eye and responded about her final chores in a list.

I thought it was funny that the translator decided to capitalize Little Man as if that was his name, but when the mother jumped to English she called him Little Man too, so perhaps that was his name. He must have been named before the Swedish name laws were changed.