Persona
A more stereotypical Bergman, goading his wife not to speak for the whole film. This is all subtext, no text. So this is where Fincher nicked Fight Club from, including the single frame with an erect cock, what a blowhard.
The Seventh Seal is much more approachable.
Some Millennium Actress goes catatonic and is being taken care by a nurse. The psych ward head sends them both to an island, so the actress can mope away from other people.
The nurse gets drunk and talks about her tryst with some random boys when she is sunbathing with a friend. The friend invites the boys and they have an impromptu orgy then and there. Later in the day, she fucks her husband, then gets an abortion.
Since the actress doesn’t speak, the nurse tells her story to the subject, which also involves abortion.
But wait, this is not the weird part. That is the initial inserts, with a boy sleeping, a sheep being slaughtered, an erect cock, just a bunch of stuff, sort of like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, no rhyme or reason.
There’s also references to the Holocaust and that Buddhist monk that immolated by fire (not the one from the RATM cover, another one? Apparently there were a lot of dudes that did that.).
Are the nurse and the actress the same people, just different personas? Maybe they are mutual foils, their lives with different choices. The nurse is all about subjecting herself to society, death of ego, fuck my feelings. The actress is the opposite, abandon society, retreat to her ego, fuck everything.
If not, is this Calvin and Hobbes. Is the nurse a real person?
What is meaning?
has been called the Mount Everest of cinematic analysis
You can say that again!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.