Virginia Woolf Through Ingmar Bergman

In View of the Stream of Consciousness

Sammendrag

This video essay stages a cross-media dialogue between Woolf’s novels and Bergman’s films. This comparison takes inspiration from “crossmappings,” Elisabeth Bronfen’s cross-media practice. Whereas this method typically guides research presented in written articles, this video essay deploys it in audiovisual form. Bronfen takes shared cultural pathos as the starting point to compare works of different media. In terms of Woolf and Bergman, their resonance with each other lies in their common adoption of the stream of consciousness style in their respective verbal and visual forms. This video essay examines this interplay through the narrative of trivialities, time, memory, trauma, and patterns of the stream of consciousness expressions. As a practice-based form of research, the process of composing this video essay demonstrates the affordances of videographic pieces in helping the video maker discover new meanings and knowledge beyond expectations. In the case of this work, the findings include the freedom digitalization offers to traditional, non-digital media, the possibility to visualize Woolf’s ekphrastic writing, and the personal touch incorporated in the accented voiceover.