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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Nathan Cobb is an adjunct assistant professor of music theory at Shenandoah University. His research focuses primarily on contemporary music, with projects ranging from midcentury electronic studio practices to French spectralism or postmillennial popular music. In addition to this music-based research, he also engages with contemporary philosophy, art, and cinema as part of his broader interest in the intellectual development of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His website is nathan-cobb.com.

Abstract

In the early stages of development for A Passion (En Passion, 1969), Ingmar Bergman describes Fårö Island, where the film would be shot, as “the setting for the Kingdom of Death” (Bergman 1990/1994, 304). Building on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the puissance du faux (power of the false), presented in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, this article’s author develops a reading of A Passion in which death no longer operates in a traditional sense—as the definitive terminus of its antithesis, life—but is considered as a function of memory. In this revised conception, death is transformed so that it no longer represents the point at which life ceases to be but is rather a continual process of becoming-death. The author suggests that most characters of Bergman’s film represent this becoming-death through a continual fabrication of false memory that asserts a singular narrative and thereby collapses the multiplicity of the puissance du faux, in which there is a “simultaneity of incompossible presents, or the coexistence of not-necessarily true pasts” (Deleuze, 1985/1989, 131). A Passion offers more than an image of death, however: it also provides a line of flight from the Kingdom of Death through the disavowal of false memory, which the author explores in the final section of this article.

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