Vargtimmen - After a Scene by Ingmar Bergman

Vargtimmen—After a Scene by Ingmar Bergman is the exact reconstruction of a scene in Bergman’s 1968 film of the same name. Frame for frame, Georg Tiller and his cameraman Claudio Pfeifer reproduced the same shots—with the crucial difference that no actors are visible. All we see are the ocean and cliffs in black and white, steep rock formations, and with them the quiet surface of the water, ruffled slightly by the breeze. The soundtrack, which had no dialogue in the original either, was taken from the first film and adds narrative structure to the lonely landscape.
While in Vargtimmen Bergman concentrated on the faces of people, the focus of Tiller’s film experiment is space, and nature. The camera glides over the barren countryside, and stone slabs with numerous cracks and gaps lie in the sun, providing a stark contrast with the velvety smooth, nearly black water.
In Bergman’s film a nightmarish drama plays out before this background: In a frenzy, a man kills a boy, then lets the lifeless body slip into the water. Without human figures, the space itself becomes an actor. The camera examines the section of coastline from a number of different angles, includes the horizon to add a painterly touch, then the cliffs loom threateningly into the sky again. The music gives these images of empty countryside a dramatic arc, the tragedy in the original story can be sensed. At the same time the filmic representation of the landscape enters the foreground, like an empty stage becoming a projection screen.
Tiller has created a study, and its conceptual rigor opens up a broad field of associations involving perception, representational forms and the construction of filmic space.
(Andrea Pollach)

Shot for Shot reconstruction of a scene from the film Vargtimmen (1968) by Ingmar Bergman using the same technical devices - Lenses, Framing, Length of Shots as well as movements of the Camera. The absence of the bodies of the actors opens the room for a complete concentration on the filmic space. This reconstruction is understood as a reenactment by the reconstructeur, a becoming of Ingmar Bergman, thus reenacting a specific style of directing.
(Production Notice)