"A play without words, so you might callThe Damned." "Donya Feuer and Ingmar Bergman wanted to make a film in black and white about four women in a closed room, and to let that which happens between them reflect itself in their faces, skin, hands and glances." "Because, we do not only impart ourselves on each other through words, body language is also extraordinarily evolved and rich, and influences us much stronger subconsciously." "For example, many gestures means the same thing in widely separated cultures, and during different historical epochs." "We reveal our feelings and reactions in a swift shifting, a fleeting shadow across the face, one glance, one gesture." "And The Damned is a choreographic composition since it only uses movement as means of expression." "So, it is not a ballet." "And the four roles:" "It's The Dead, who is dressed in black, and Three Sisters, two that are adults, and one child." "This screening is also jointed to a very simple experiment:" "We show the film now first, it takes about ten minutes, then I come back and tell you about the original thougths behind it." "After that you'll see it again, and then it might happen that you discover a lot of details you didn't see the first time or that you see the film in a new way." "The Damned was recorded some months after The Magic Flute and has a very clear connection to that opera." "In The Magic Flute there are scenes from the underworld where the souls of the damned are tormented in eternal agony." "The choreography for those scenes was made by Donya Feuer and during the actual shooting, she and Ingmar Bergman played with motives from the opera, and out of that was cristallized eventually drafts for a short choreographic film." "It would also be about the damned, but not about dead souls in hell, but about women who has suffered another damnation, in life." "The room, with it's narrow walls, within which these four women move, it's that closed women's world in which they are forced to live and the confinement in this world causes them also to suppress each other." "The elderly teach the young to adapt to a petrified pattern of life and the centuries-old conception of how women should be and behave is pushed on to the younger generation." "They fend it off, and the film is about the power struggle between the generations, but it's also about the submission." "The dancer dressed in black, one can see as a mother-figure greedy for power, who attacks the three sisters, one after another." "Freest of them all is the child, who moves about completely self-evident out in the light, in her own world, immersed in her own games." "But eventually she is also pulled into this older women's world." "The circle is completed, and the suffocation is total." "This is anyway how Donya Feuer and Ingmar Bergman pictured the plot of The Damned, in broad strokes." "But we don't need to care about that very much, beacuse what's important are the thoughts and feelings that this film awakens in our selves." "Because the sole thing that is really dull is indifference and high admiration."