Dreams

Ingmar Bergman - 1955
This is really a wonderful film; because Bergman cares for his images, cares for his people. The technique is long takes, pretty close, elegantly moving between the characters in complex stagings, with a willingness to cut across. There are uses of the front of the scene (close depth), and plays with mirrors and so on for some innovative framings (great close-ups on the haunted ride). The lighting is, as always, subtle but not in your face.
Bergman lets his characters just live, not, largely, imposing any preconcieved ideas on them. They have dreams, they don't go right, but not due to some great teleological scheme, but live just seems to go that way. Not much histrionics, just a texture of small glances, wishes, attempts to come together, a few succeses at coming together, though the absolute isn't there, postively or negatively.
I keep thinking of Antonioni; it isn't really very much like Antonioni formally (except for the pace, and the long shot of the collapse in the empty fairground), but there's a similar way of how the image transcends the attempts to overlay a 'theme' to it. The images, the people of the images, come out rounded, real, cinema as truth.