I watched this Bergman first time in my college campus during a movie club screening. Hardly left any impression on me at that time, but I accounted the failure to my philistine taste and undeveloped maturity. Years later, I watched Persona and it made complete sense to me on a deep level. But again, I may have overcompensated for my earlier guilt. But I really liked the existential musings and the abstract images open to interpretation in Persona. Rather than creating characters and illuminating juicy ideas through their lives, one abstracts juicy ideas first and then plays them on an intellectual chessboard through cipher characters. So hip are the symbols and the abstractions, that the game looked great in cocktail discussions and pickup lines. But a beating heart was always missing.
And then, I discovered Olmi. Oh my, I realized that one can study hard to analyze and understand the human anatomy, learn to perform surgery, and publish medical tomes for the benefit of mankind. But can one create life out of such abstraction and analysis? No! To create life, Olmi showed that if one is peasant enough to "cultivate" Nature into his humble studio, faithful enough to "sacrifice" his comfortable concepts for an uncertain hope of a miracle, child enough to "see" the blooming colors and patterns of contradictory hues, and artist enough to "reconcile" the emerging contradictions into a unifying whole, then not only juicy ideas would organically grow out of the complex whole, but it will be alive in the image of Nature, i.e., on multiple dimensions, just like how a tree is alive to a bee, a bird, a worm, and a human.
One is a professional surgeon who operates on a created body; the other is an amateur god who creates miniature bodies.
And then, I discovered Olmi. Oh my, I realized that one can study hard to analyze and understand the human anatomy, learn to perform surgery, and publish medical tomes for the benefit of mankind. But can one create life out of such abstraction and analysis? No! To create life, Olmi showed that if one is peasant enough to "cultivate" Nature into his humble studio, faithful enough to "sacrifice" his comfortable concepts for an uncertain hope of a miracle, child enough to "see" the blooming colors and patterns of contradictory hues, and artist enough to "reconcile" the emerging contradictions into a unifying whole, then not only juicy ideas would organically grow out of the complex whole, but it will be alive in the image of Nature, i.e., on multiple dimensions, just like how a tree is alive to a bee, a bird, a worm, and a human.
One is a professional surgeon who operates on a created body; the other is an amateur god who creates miniature bodies.