Boy on the rocks


By far, the most creepy scene in this great film. In a film that blends the 'real' and 'unreal' this scene felt even further removed from reality. The music and style in photography were different to the rest of the film. It was like a dream within a dream. I took it that the boy was the innocent part of himself. The sexualized pose with arched back before he confronted the boy also left me wondering. What do you think?

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Saw this movie a while ago, but it was one of my favorites, and yes... the scene at the rock left me shocked, it's when all the movie comes down together, Bergman talks about death but not in a Hollywood way like everybody else right now, without care, he speaks about it with great respect and I think it's one of the strongest points in the movie

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[deleted]

I also noticed the sexuality of the boy in his lying-down position. I have just watched this film and I'm left wondering, in this particular scene, why Johan first approached to hit the boy.

Is his motivation purposefully left unclear ?

Would appreciate any thoughts !

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Looking at this film from a totally different point of view - could it not be that it was Alma "cracking up"? After all it was she who the old woman appeared to and told her where to find the diary. Perhaps she was so consumed with jealousy that she even saw the child she was carrying as a threat, and it was a projection of her own animosity to the child which made her wish it dead.. Of course it would be unatural for a mother to harm her child so she projected the guilt onto her husband.

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"The difficulty with the picture is that I couldn't make up my mind who it was about. Had I made it from her [Alma's] point of view it would have been very interesting. But, no, I made it the wrong way. After it was finished, I tried to turn it over to her; we even reshot some scenes, but it was too late. To see a man who is already mad become crazier is boring. What would have been interesting would have been to see an absolutely sane woman go crazy because she loves the madman she married. She enters his world of unreality, and that infects her. Suddenly, she finds out that she is lost. I understood this only when the picture was finished."


— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (1971)

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I think that sums up the film: nothing was certain, not even the director's intentions!

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I just watched this in a film class and most people read the scene differently. However, my professor brought up an idea I hadn't thought of - that it is a depiction of child rape, which is why it disturbed her personally so much. I think you definitely could read it that way, the sexual pose of the boy, the cries he makes when he's on Von Sydow's back, the fact that he's on his back to begin with. Just a thought. Of course, the great thing about this film is that nothing is a certainty.

If the good Lord had intended us to walk, he wouldn't have invented roller skates

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Well, the man has two black legs and the boy has the black trunks on (one). The nightmare is the fishing rod... although I found it pretty funny.

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You want disturbing? In Images,he said if he could have done it again,he would have had both of them be naked to clarify the scene!!Yikes....

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I thought it was somehow connected back to the story of him getting locked in the closet.

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*beep* sick, *beep* interesting though! :D

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I thought that the scene where von Sydow kills the boy and sinks the corpse was meant to be a metaphor for his attempts to crush and repress memories of his own past (with the boy as a stand-in for the character's own troubled childhood, perhaps).

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de Vere,that was my feeling as well.

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Also mine...

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[deleted]

mine too.

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When a movie is a Rorschach test for viewers, something is seriously wrong. What some of you find brilliant, I just find pretentious, confusing, exasperating. I've seen my share of excellent Ingmar Bergman movies, but this isn't one of them.

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The first time I watched the scene, I thought Max von Sydow was playing Johan's father, and that the boy was Johan. But I wasn't sure. Now that I realize this isn't the case, it begs the question: Who in the heck was the boy?

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jrh,

The fact that people have different interpretations about what has been shown is meant to be understood as is not the sam me as saying that any and every interpretation is equal to how people view an inkblot. Some are better, more persuasive interpretations than others.

I tend to agree with this one:

"I thought that the scene where von Sydow kills the boy and sinks the corpse was meant to be a metaphor for his attempts to crush and repress memories of his own past (with the boy as a stand-in for the character's own troubled childhood, perhaps)."

The whole way the film is played, the pacing, the sound, the editing, suggest it is not a portrayal of something that actually occurred. It is either a dream or more likely fantasy where the foregoing metaphor is visualized.

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As previously noted, regardless if this scene was just a sick daydream or a real memory, the subtext was pretty clear. He's crazed and repressing a lot of black feelings. It isn't spelled out so you have to parse out what is reality and what isn't. The plot is fairly light, not really that confusing, I think people are just looking to make this more philosophical than it was intended.

Compared to Persona this is hardly pretentious. I've read essays on Persona and I still can't figure it out or get why people like it.

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[deleted]

I love how they went hand-held on that scene. It's the most memorable scene in the film.

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