Woolf and Bergman

By Daniel Kim

Pull-quotes:

“This sequence — dinner drifting into theatrical performance, theatrical performance drifting back into domesticity — is one of unique importance in the context of this essay. Here the film directly mingles the “unreality” of the stage with the “real” setting of the house and highlights the central role performance plays throughout the film’s narrative and more broadly the inherent relationship between performance and film.”

“The basic structure is as follows: the creation of a “frame” with a perfectly centered facial closeup (usually engaged in a monologue) followed by the breaking of this perfectly centered “frame” as uncertainty moves into the image. By structuring Persona around these facial closeups and framing faces with such incessant equilibrium Bergman calls attention to the artificial nature of the cinematic frame and constantly questions the ability of the monologue to convey”

Author Intro: My paper largely spun out of my personal interest in the works of Ingmar Bergman and

Virginia Woolf. In the summer preceding the writing of my paper I watched the films of Bergman and read the novels of Woolf and came away with the feeling that there were resonant qualities between the two that were worth exploring. The resonances were hard-to-pin down and inarticulable at the time but they remained in my head throughout Professor Juliette Wells’s course on Woolf that fall and eventually took shape in the form of this paper. The paper is largely an attempt to explicate these similarities between Woolf and Bergman’s works and show how both artists move in increasingly radical and self-reflexive directions throughout their careers. Chief among these similarities is a thematic focus on individual communication in the modern world as well as a shared usage of monologue and soliloquy as a primary structural element.

In a broad and personal sense, my paper is a sort of testament to things I believe about art and our engagement with it: the inextricable nature of form and content, the thin barriers between our interiors and exteriors, the endless interplay between various forms and mediums, that sort of thing. There’s no real “theory” underlying the paper beyond just: all art is connected, all art modifies both itself and other works of art, and the degree to which this modification takes place is directly correlated to the forms and degrees of attention we can apply to it. In other words, art is magical, it contains an infinite number of potential connections, and we actively manifest these connections by engaging with it.

In a truly personal sense, my paper is a sort of strange and oblique ode to the teachers I’ve had at Goucher who have given me the freedom to pursue these sorts of idiosyncratic ideas. Whether obvious or submerged, there are throughlines here from all my academic work at

Goucher and I’d like to thank the teachers who have made that sort of experience both possible and meaningful.

Faculty nominator intro: From Juliette Wells:

Dan Kim’s modus operandi is to seize a highly original idea, often one that involves synthesizing truly distinct areas of knowledge, and to pursue it at whatever length is necessary to do justice to it. This ambitious, eye-opening essay far exceeded both requirements and expectations for the 2-credit course LIT 440: Big Books: Virginia Woolf, of which Dan was an enthusiastic, insightful participant in fall 2021. As Dan has pursued his dual major in Literary Studies and Visual & Material Culture, it has been an absolute pleasure to watch him build expertise and develop his uniquely interdisciplinary approach. Our new department of Visual, Literary, and Material Culture was inspired in part by Dan’s commitment to the shared approaches of our two departments. Congratulations, Dan, and best wishes for your future studies and endeavors!

Read: Woolf and Bergman

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