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would use the same musical techniques in the flagellant scene of his next film, The Seventh Seal (1957), also underlining oscillations between faith and doubt—but in that case through the lens of religion. 45 Though Bergson’s theories help understand how music functions in Smiles of a Summer Night , the fact remains that the film treads a fine line between tragedy and comedy. As aptly put by Frank Gado, ‘Bergman’s best comedy reads the human condition as dismally as his most pessimistic films.’ 46
word. Ben Astley, in his 1998 article ‘“Somewhere Between Faith and Doubt”: R. S. Thomas and the Poetry of Theology Deconstructed’, sees this ‘breaking open’ of language as a manifestation in Thomas’s work of ‘Derridean deconstruction’ in which ‘the free-play of the sign destroys any attempt to reduce or restrict the associations of the sign’ (77). While this seems true, it should be noted that in the discourse of the via negativa the word becomes an approximation, often more accurate in its cataloguing of what a thing, in this case deity, is not, rather than of what