Met Art Wild

Gunnar Fischer

He excelled in monochrome and was never quite so impressive when cinema turned almost exclusively to colour. His best work was Expressionist in manner, seen to its greatest effect in Wild Strawberries, which featured soft focus to embody a fondly remembered, if romanticised, recollection of the past, darker lighting for the more prosaic present and even darker to evoke the unreality of dreams.

Almost as striking was the camerawork for Bergman’s historical feature The Seventh Seal, which depicted a medieval encounter between a knight back from the Crusades and the figure of Death. Told in stark black and white, its most famous scene featured them playing chess together on a bleak Nordic beach. Borrowing a trick from the stage, Fischer lit the shot so that both men were seen in sharp relief against the dark, brooding waves. Pedants insisted that this image was impossible as it implied the existence of two suns in different quarters of the sky; Fischer dismissed the criticism on the ground that if the very notion of a knight playing chess with Death were accepted, two suns in the sky should be no more incredible.

She helped him gain employment in the film industry in 1935 as an assistant cameraman. He was taught by Julius Jaenzen, who had worked with Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller, two pillars of the Swedish film industry in the silent era.

Fischer graduated to full-fledged cameraman in 1942 on It Is My Music, the first in a succession of run-of-the-mill pictures. He met Bergman in 1946, when they collaborated on a test sequence for the film Crisis. They became a production team the following year on Port of Call, a film influenced by the then current fashion for realism emerging out of post-war Italy, but it was not their forte. Subsequently they struck a stronger chord with Summer Interlude (1950) and Summer with Monika (1952), but these were essentially novelettish romances, however handsomely photographed.

The breakthrough was Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Bergman’s first period drama and a masterpiece, with an elegance in script and camerawork that led some to bracket it with the perfection of Mozart’s opera Le Nozze di Figaro. Here Fischer’s admiration for the work of the American Gregg Toland, the magisterial cameraman of Citizen Kane and The Best Years of Our Lives, first came to the fore. Toland was celebrated for stylised deep focus photography, in which both foreground and background can be read with equal clarity. Thanks to this, actions of comparable significance could be staged simultaneously in two different fields. This lent the shot greater complexity.

Some Plans | Wild Goose Festival

We had some great discussions over the weekend with people interested in Wild Goose – thanks to those of you who were in DC and able to be part of the conversation.  We began to flesh out ideas about the way art can be both shown and created at the festival, how to engage with justice questions particularly relating to people who have been marginalised in the US, how to make the festival accessible to people on lower incomes, and some fascinating/crazy/wonderful notions about how to arrange the physical design of the festival site.

We’ll be offering more opportunities for participating in Wild Goose in the coming weeks – if you’re in San Francisco, Kansas City, NYC, Salt Lake City, or Los Angeles and want to be part of a Wild Goose conversation we’ll be near you soon, so let us know (more cities will be added – so don’t feel excluded if you’re not near one of these places!).  For now we’ve already confirmed some genuinely compelling ideas for the festival, including an offer to participate from a very significant musician – and no, it’s not who you’re thinking – but someone whose input will make the music at Wild Goose enviably good.  We’ll announce more when the website is launched next month.

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