The Face is one of Bergman's most enigmatic films, perhaps his underground masterpiece, one of the keys to his cinema.

Traveling actors, maids flirting about, a love potion, a happy end and diabolical apparitions, Bergman gives himself to the vertigo of quoting himself. Mourning his past, he makes an inventory of his themes in order to proclaim their end, bringing back all his characters, all his actors who return for a bow. Everything is there, everyone is there, but beneath, abstraction is at work, mystery rumbles, doubt is gnawing at the whole. For in the centre of his moving universe, this baroque forest of signs and symbols, we find a figure, the magician Vogler, Bergman's first major self-portrait.

It should matter that at this moment in his work he represents himself as—or rather, wearing the mask of—a mute illusionist who's lost his faith in his power and only knows how to perpetuate appearances. All that is left to Vogler, the impotent magician who's unable to invoke his magic, are the accessories for the part, his beard and wig, pathetic subterfuges.

It's the author, devoured by doubt and taking refuge in silence. He's isolated, having shut himself off, facing his conscience and demons. Facing the secret of his art, which he's the only one to know it doesn't exist, that there is no secret, that the king is naked.

Haunted by his imposture that could be revealed at any instant, his only way out, his final entrenchment is his work, its artifice, its ritual, make believe as long as possible. For when he's able to make others believe, there is a possibility that out of nothingness, won from emptiness, magic happens.

It's undoubtedly one of the most beautiful images of the artist, carried by the irrational, by the mysteries of his private life, unaware of the nature of his power, building on a void, endlessly challenged to explain and justify himself before reason which take on the form of doctor Vergerus' materialism.

Vergerus, obsessed with the desire to unmask Vogler, to publicly humiliate him, harbors a dark and secret purpose under the guise of scientific truth. This cold, rational mind initially hates Vogler for what he holds and that he, Vergerus, will never possess. He is jealous of Vogler's access to the irrational that escapes him, just as he covets, as sordidly, Vogler's wife Manda.

Vergerus does not doubt, he believes in Vogler's art, he's convinced. But he also knows Vogler's torments, his uncertainty and how vulnerable it makes him, how much control he abandons to him.

Under this hideous figure, one of the worst incarnations of Bergman's phobia of criticism and exegesis—frenetically present however in The Face—we find the first sinister incarnation of this kind of evil that moves throughout his cinema, and we will encounter bearing the same name, appearing each time more terrifying, as in The Serpent's Egg, already growing in The Face, and of course in the very close Fanny and Alexander.

As with the Vergerus', the Voglers haunt Bergman's cinema and the confrontation between them makes for one of its major axes. In Persona, Elisabeth Vogler will be the doubting artist plunged once again in silence. In The Hour of the Wolf, Veronica Vogler will be the instrument in the humiliation of the painter Johan Borg ("I thank you, shame has finally been attained"). And, in closing, but it was coming, Erland Josephson will be the director in After the Rehearsal.

But it's the pastor Ericsson from Winter Light who answers The Face's magician first, four years later. He has also lost his faith, he no longer has anything to say, and is only carrying on for the sake of appearance. But meanwhile, the illusion has disappeared, there is no magic, and the miracle doesn't happen. The gestures in the ceremony are an end in themselves. Religion has become a mechanical ritual, yet necessary in easing the suffering of some disinherited who are not unlike ourselves; a few tormented souls who've found refuge in it. But there's nothing behind, and nothing beyond. And this time, Bergman has made a clean break with the idealism of his youth. In The Face he hasn't taken that step. Vogler dominates, he wins over Vergerus, faith has a meaning, magic exists. Bergman says so, but he no longer believes.

And with this cathartic film, profoundly mysterious, violent and cruel, he signals the work to come, confronted to risk, abstraction, abandon.