Word, Image, and Music in Ingmar Bergman’s Intermedial Laboratory

The article addresses the problem of relationships between a word, an image, and music in Ingmar Bergman’s films as approached from a new perspective of multimodality theories within a wider context of intermedia studies. The proposed framework for analyses is Lars Elleström’s concept of modalities of media, which are basic categories of their possible features: material modality (the way of mediating signs), sensorial modality (the way of perception and involvement of the senses), spatiotemporal modality (concerning the cognitive conditions for fixing perception data in space and time), and semiotic modality, which is connected to meaning. As her point of departure the article’s author takes Bergman’s words about film being parallel to music, which speak for film’s formal complexity as well as intensified connotative values. Further into the article, the analyses of selected musical scenes from Autumn Sonata and Cries and Whispers are carried out to illustrate the emergence of meaning through the combination of text, image and music or image and music. The article argues that music serves as a narrative means connecting different narrative levels and/or expressing emotional complexity beyond the limits of language. Thanks to different modalities of the media involved the semiotic impact of musical scenes is more elaborate than that of the verbal text itself, and the symbolic meaning of universal relevance is achieved. 

The article addresses the problem of relationships between a word, an image, and music in Ingmar Bergman’s films as approached from a new perspective of multimodality theories within a wider context of intermedia studies. The proposed framework for analyses is Lars Elleström’s concept of modalities of media, which are basic categories of their possible features: material modality (the way of mediating signs), sensorial modality (the way of perception and involvement of the senses), spatiotemporal modality (concerning the cognitive conditions for fixing perception data in space and time), and semiotic modality, which is connected to meaning. As her point of departure the article’s author takes Bergman’s words about film being parallel to music, which speak for film’s formal complexity as well as intensified connotative values. Further into the article, the analyses of selected musical scenes from Autumn Sonata and Cries and Whispers are carried out to illustrate the emergence of meaning through the combination of text, image and music or image and music. The article argues that music serves as a narrative means connecting different narrative levels and/or expressing emotional complexity beyond the limits of language. Thanks to different modalities of the media involved the semiotic impact of musical scenes is more elaborate than that of the verbal text itself, and the symbolic meaning of universal relevance is achieved.