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A Man of Vision
by Devin RamboLight Keeps Me Company is a tribute to a father by his son. It's really that simple, although the fact that the father is the famed Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist causes you to bring certain expectations to the viewing. The son, Carl-Gustaf Nykvist, directs the film in an interesting way. He shows his father doing mundane things like riding his bike and making the bed, or sitting at the window looking out on the landscape. Unlike many documentaries I have seen about the lives of famous people, this film conveys the sense of an ordinary man who was really good at his job. It's just that his job happened to be serving as cameraman to one of the world's most influential film directors, Ingmar Bergman.
Nykvist himself is only partially present. He was forced into retirement in 1998 by aphasia, a rare form of dementia that affects a person's linguistic cognitive abilities. We see him drag out a trunk full of tapes of his films, and of those occasions in which he received honors for his work. We see him accepting the Oscar he won for his photography on Cries and Whispers (1972). Much of the footage we see of him in the present day is accompanied by selected readings from Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, which apparently was Nykvist's favorite novel as a young man growing up with missionary parents in Africa. (He ended up shooting the '72 film version of that novel.)
We also see cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond, Vittorio Storaro, László Kovács, and Giuseppe Rotunno appear to discuss Nykvist's influence on the craft of cinematography. Nykvist directed five films of his own, and did fine work for many directors besides Bergman as well - including Roman Polanski, Louis Malle, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Woody Allen.
Light Keeps Me Company is most rewarding for the insights brought to the film by directors and actors with whom Nykvist worked. Interviews with Ingmar Bergman are very rare these days, but he appears at length here to talk about his working relationship with Nykvist. I was surprised to hear Bergman reveal that while the two of them had a nearly symbiotic relationship on the set, they had little personal acquaintanceship outside the work.
Nykvist and Bergman
Nykvist and Allen
This is a loving portrait of a father by his son, so it probably shouldn't be treated as a definitive account of Nykvist's work and place in film history. But it is refreshing to see a documentary that doesn't just aim to hit career highlights at the expense of getting to know the subject. By the end of the film, I felt like I'd just spent a couple of hours with Sven Nykvist. It was definitely time well-spent.
Cries and WhispersIf I have one problem with the film, it is that many of the clips that are shown of Nykvist's work are taken from poor sources. One short sequence in particular, from Cries and Whispers, is shockingly washed-out and faded, which couldn't be more unlike how the film actually looks.
©2002 Devin Rambo
CineScene
