Bergman describes the theme of his early 1960s film trilogy as “a ‘reduction’ – in the metaphysical sense of the word.” In the classical conception, a metaphysics was a fundamental examination of all being at its most elemental level, yielding lists of the most basic kinds of thing and of the principles that governed them through change and motion, an ontology that displayed the true structure of the world. These elements were arrived at by stripping away everything that was inessential and thereby reducing the great variety and lushness of creation to its skeleton. It was not that this detail and particularity was worthless or insignificant, but rather that its nature and meaning depended on these deeper elements, which both gave it form and direction and set its limitations. Only if these could be articulated and understood could their filled-out appearances also be comprehended.

Bergman's subject is not being as such but the moral world – ourselves as human beings in the twentieth century: what is deepest and most true and essential about us, and what meaning we can find for our lives in the face of this truth. His goal is an essential portrait, an image of human being with its heart exposed and beating, a picture of what we each look like without our protective illusions, evasions, and lies. Such reduction to essentials provides a mirror in which we can see ourselves as we truly are, face to face.

This essential portrait, however, must show not just what we may be now at this particular moment or in this particular situation but also what we have failed to be and might yet still become.