Ingmar Bergman R.I.P.

:(

rip

"Ingmar Bergman's films utterly depressing" -- Ingmar Bergman

RIP

I still haven't seen Persona, even though everthing I have ever heard/seen of it leads me to believe it would be my favourite film ever.

Persona is his best film im my opinion too.

A carful of us drove in from Claremont to L.A. to see the premiere of Fanny & Alexander. Bergman was something of an understood currency in my peer group at high school. I don't think any of us really understood him that well - we liked the grave, serious feel of his movies and that they all had at least one stark super-emotional flare-up of the sort that made you feel like you were watching something that came from some secret place inside somebody. A couple of years later I got around to watching Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light and they just killed me. His tone was so distinct, so clear. I thought he was older than 89; it's hard for me to feel real bad about somebody who lived to a ripe old age and left such a great body of work behind. He does belong to another age - it's hard to imagine somebody concerned with the things that concerned Bergman getting far in film now, but then again, he covered his ground so thoroughly that there's hardly any need for "another Bergman."

cries and whispers was sort of a revelation to me when i watched it freshman year of college and persona still terrifies me a little bit. RIP ingmar.

D:

Has anybody seen the full TV version of Fanny & Alexander? I've seen the movie in the theater everytime it's played in NY, and I really love it. I love the contrast between the Preacher's house and the Jewish house. I've had the DVD box-set on my wishlist forever but nobody will buy it for me. It's really long and I can only imagine it's more of a good thing.

I went to Oberlin which didn't have a film dept, just a guy named Daniel Goulding who taught awesome film classes. I never got to take his History of American or History of European cinema classes because they always conflicted with stuff I needed for my major, but he taught half-semester classes in specific directors, the Films of Polanski and the Films of Makavejev (he was an expert in eastern european cinema), and the Films of Bergman. He'd just gotten a laser pointer as a gift so after watching a movie once, he'd pause it on certain scenes and use the lazer to point at things. Our big test for Bergman was to write an essay about the first minute of Persona. There's a lot of stuff going on there.

RIP. this makes me immeasurably sad.

this is such a not OK way to start your day

I thought he was older than 89; it's hard for me to feel real bad about somebody who lived to a ripe old age and left such a great body of work behind. He does belong to another age - it's hard to imagine somebody concerned with the things that concerned Bergman getting far in film now, but then again, he covered his ground so thoroughly that there's hardly any need for "another Bergman."

Seconded! It was great to see Saraband a couple of years ago - still, at the age of 80-whatever, he could find mileage in his age-old concerns. I can't think of another film-maker who has the same incisiveness as Bergman, the same need to work through the Big Questions without succumbing to sentimentality or avoidance. RIP big guy!

O fuck, I really need to see Fanny & Alexander. My dad once told me it was his favorite film, and now I'm old enough that that actually makes me want to see it rather than the opposite.

Anyway, RIP, Bergie.

RIP

rest in peace

every criticism of bergman (arty morbid humorlessness) is true but he's so good it doesn't matter.

RIP

The Magician, The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring are always cycling into my thoughts and haunting me. RIP master builder.

"morbid humorlessness"

not always

^^^^Agreed, e.g. Death sawing down the tree dude is trying to hide in.

I don't get the "humorlessness" complaint either. While not a laff riot, Smiles of A Summer Night is a great Lubitsch-style comedy.

"My dad once told me it was his favorite film"

my dad took me to see it when it was out!

anyway, yeah, he was the man. even "lesser" bergman makes most people's movies look like yesterday's swedish meatballs.

"this makes me immeasurably sad."

so fitting.

i love how coherent the world of his movies is. the great ones and the not as great, they all seem part of the same territory, which i guess reflects the singularity and force of his ideas. i'm not sure i'd want to live on planet bergman, but it's fascinating to visit.

i'm not sure i'd want to live on planet bergman

no, not as a choice, but there's often that shocking moment in his films when you realize that you already do

i remember last time i watched the seventh seal thinking that parts of it were actually pretty funny. death has a few good deadpan lines.

(tho has anyone seen all those women (his first color film)? farce wasn't really his strong spot.)

Everybody bump Scott 4 today in honor of Ingmar.

I'm weird like this, but I thought Wild Strawberries was a lot more funny than Smiles of a Summer Night (which, pace me and screwball, didn't make me laugh at all).

Yeah, the cliches about Bergman's bleakness really rankle because humor is essential to a lot of Bergman's major films, without which they really wouldn't work.

I love when he uses his morbidity or broodingness as a set up for a punch line--in Wild Strawberries (the kids having a fist fight over whether God is dead) and especially Seventh Seal (Mary responding to Joseph's recounting of the Dance of Death with an amused "Oh you and your visions"). Also, throughout Smiles of a Summer Night.

And OTM about his creation of a consistent world. When I first got into Bergman I gobbled down maybe a dozen of his movies in a month, and it got so whenever I'd see one of his regular actors it'd be like seeing an old friend.

RIP, maybe my all-time fave.

Also, I watched the TV Fanny & Alexander last year. I think most of the additional stuff has to do with the aunts and uncles, but it had been a while since I'd seen the film, so I'm not sure. But yeah, if you love the movie, you won't find the TV version flabby.

I love when he uses his morbidity or broodingness as a set up for a punch line--in Wild Strawberries (the kids having a fist fight over whether God is dead)

OTM and exactly what I was referring to.

RIP

If you're in Texas, there are at least three theatres across the state (the MFA in Fort Worth, the Paramount in Austin, and the MFA in Houston) that are hosting the Janus flims tour, which of course includes some Bergman. On August 17th-19th in Houston, they will be showing Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal (Sunday'll be a double feature).

Suddenly I wish I was in Houston. I don't think I've ever felt this way before.

Amazed he was still alive. RIP though, great body of work.

One thing I like about his films is that he keeps them short (discounting Fanny & Alexander and Scenes From A Marriage, which were basically TV productions). Pretty much everything else is around 90 minutes. Shows his skill in pacing that he always sustained the intensity for just the right amount of time - if a lot of his films had been 2 hours+ they'd probably have lost some of their impact. Guess this is related to his b/g in theatre, where you more often have to operate to a strict timescale.

RIP, he was a great film maker.

It's your own arse you sit on.

no, not as a choice, but there's often that shocking moment in his films when you realize that you already do

well up to a point, yes. i mean, i recognize that his world is derived from and reflects the one i inhabit. but i don't share his background or the degree of his obsessions (any more than i do, say, david lynch's) -- but his films place me entirely within his vision of the world so that i can understand it despite not really sharing it. which i guess is just a way of saying they are great art. nobody would have predicted that the confluence of modernism, freudianism and lutheranism would give us one of the great talents of the 20th century, but there you go.

Suddenly I wish I was in Houston. I don't think I've ever felt this way before.

Well, it played at the Music Box back in January.

Which I did not see. :(

The Music Box has lousy projection and sound, anyway.

< /justification >

"morbid humorlessness"

not always

no, but I was thinking primarily of his run during the 60s and 70s - through a glass darkly, winter light, the silence, persona, hour of the wolf, shame, cries and whispers, scenes from a marriage... yucks galore! they cemented the general perception of him as an uber-dour auteur.

Come on, Cries and Whispers is funny. The shrieks of a dying woman? Oh man, my sides.

RIP and thank you for Fanny & Alexander . 1000x. And Wild Strawberries . And The Virgin Spring . And ...

:-(

(Film Four, by coincidence, screening "Persona" at 2.30am)

i don't have the energy to write anything big about this; it's sad but bergman was an old man with a brilliant life, as mentioned upthread. fanny and alexander is one of the great classics of all time, in any version, and hopefully someday it'll find the audience it deserves. it should is a genuine masterpiece.

anyhow, i've used up all of my sorrow and shock re. edward yang's death last month. but man-oh-man, there'll never be another bergman, never another slow, moody, broody, but ultimately sweet-hearted strindberg-with-violins type, never such a dark deep and beautiful version of the world. i've always said - and been unable to explainy why - that his films are like fine-polished mahogany, like rembrandts. history will be good to him.

He made three or four of my favourite films, but favourite in the sense that my memory of them is so warm that I doubt I'll ever have the time or inclination to sit through them again. Oh, you never know; perhaps when the kids are 12 or 13 we'll draw the curtains, sit down with a big bottle of Vimto and a box of Ritz crackers and all watch Winter Light together.

British national newspaper The Independent (which, to be fair, is known for its statement covers) devoted the whole of its front page today to a Bergman obit by Paul Schrader, under the banner headline THE MASTER. I bought it.

And, yes, I did listen to Scott 4 on the way to work as a sort of tribute, but it wasn't The Seventh Seal that got me, it was On Your Own Again which got me all choked at New Cross Gate.

There's one good point buried in this sniveling J-Pod column, but it's the usual Europe-as-land-of-decadents hysteria.

Sorry, I missed the good point. What a terrible article! Jeez. Straw men ahoy!

Worse still, the earnestness of his vision was beginning to wear pretty heavily. It is impossible these days to watch his most famous film, "The Seventh Seal," without laughing - because its famous scene of Death playing chess has been so frequently and devastatingly parodied over the years that it has become one of the great images of cinematic pretentiousness.

ffs

Though it is true that Seventh Seal is an occasionally funny film, that article is worthless.

I see what he's saying - I was getting at a similar thing upthread - bergman's approach became so distinctly severe during the 60s that it's easy to poke fun at, it verges on self-parody. but overall podhoretz is a schlong.

jesus, that podhoretz thing. "After decades of declaring modern life worthless..." what a jackass.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom

Smiles of a Summer Night and The Magic Flute aren't depressing.

The Ullmann-directed films from his recent scripts have been better than much of his '70s stuff.

From the bonus stuff from the Persona DVD:

"I was ill, and they had to make some sort of operation... and I got in my arm an in injection. It had never happened before. I had been asleep... not asleep, unconscious, for six hours. I had no feeling of time, of hour. Of existing. I had been in a situation of not existing. And that makes me very happy. Alive, I am conscious about myself and everything, then suddenly, or slowly, my conscious fades out, switches off, and it is not existent. And that is a marvelous feeling. That from existing, I'm... I'm not existing. At that moment, nothing can happen to me. I think it would be terrible if somebody came after this marvelous not existing and wake me up."

In other words, RIP.

Persona is one of my favorite films. It is part of what the medium was built to achieve.

I just watched it. And yes.

Wait, there's more to this Bergman interview:

"This feeling of not existing made me very happy because it was a feel of relief. Because this feeling of a God, this idea about a God, was very unhealthy. Because it was a feeling of something that is perfect. That is extremely perfect, that is the most perfect that exists. And in comparison to that, I always must feel like a snake. Like a dirty snake. And for a human being to feel like a dirty snake... is not good."

Surely anyone who has abandoned their faith relates. If there's a God, he smiles on you, Mr. Bergman.

Actually, I think it would be hilarious if Bergman woke up in some stereotypical Christian heaven. "Relax. It'll be just like moving back in with your parents!"

very overlooked: The Naked Night, Shame, After the Rehearsal

Eric, Smiles isn't screwball-related, you just don't like comedies where adults are more sophisticated than Edith Massey.

IB & Antonioni dying on the same day is like the cinematic simultaneous passing of Jefferson & Adams (July 4, 1826).

Filmregissören Woody Allen kallade Bergman "en vän":

"He told me that he was afraid that he would die on a very, very sunny day, and I can only hope that it was overcast and he got the weather he wanted."

http://www.sfi.se/sfi/smpage.fwx?page=7996&NYHETER=20109

I wanna die on a sunny day

Lars von Trier: "I am proud to say he treated me exactly like his other children - with no interest whatsoever."

That is the first funny thing that fuckhead has perpetrated in years.

mandatory twilight viewing: Saraband and Bergman Island

Meh. Scenes From a Marriage and Sarabland make you understand why that marriage dissolved: they found each other as boring as the rest of us did.

no appreciation for sexagenarian nude scenes, Alfred?

Do they have to talk through it?

I did rescreen Autumn Sonata on Wednesday. There's a story that Ingrid begged Ingmar to insert more jokes and he kept shouting, "NO JOKES!"

however, that does not mean he was humorless

Autumn Sonata's Liv: I'm repressed, look at these glasses!

At the very least, Autumn Sonata is beautiful to look at. As are Ingrid and Liv. Yes, even in glasses.

I love Scenes from a Marriage, fwiw.

I meant to ask Alfred why he pays any heed to a philistine-fellating freak like Podhoretz? Anyway, a "reasonable conservative" replies, defining the "Derrièrism" critical school:

http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/08/antonioni-and-bergman-bite-dust.html

Jack Warner once said that he judged movies by whether his ass shifted in the seat while he was watching them and Podhoretz has been judging movies by his ass for years. Antonioni's L'Avventura is "disastrous fare," he says. West Side Story is "an unintentional laff riot." (Only elitists spell words correctly.) Raging Bull is "the most unpleasant American movie" and "torture to sit through." Vertigo is "silly." The Searchers is "a turgid, wooden, boring and weird movie." 2001: A Space Odyssey is "a crashing bore." On the other hand Podhoretz is a big fan of Road House, Phantom Menace and Cinderella Man.

Road House is something we could talk about. The rest of it, not so much.

I meant to ask Alfred why he pays any heed to a philistine-fellating freak like Podhoretz?

Remember: I read The Corner.

I'm guessing that's some rightnut thing. I believe in avoiding the opinions of those with whom I violently disagree, so I don't go off to gun school.

So why are we on ILE?

inevitable Dargis line in review of Rush Hour 3: "Max von Sydow shows up for a few scenes to prove that Ingmar Bergman really is dead."

I used to think Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman were the same person. Did this happen to anyone else?

never.

I would love to hear the Woody-Ingmar phone tapes. The "small plane/ yogurt" line is a classic.

The Man Who Asked Hard Questions
By WOODY ALLEN

I got the news in Oviedo, a lovely little town in the north of Spain where I am shooting a movie, that Bergman had died. A phone message from a mutual friend was relayed to me on the set. Bergman once told me he didn’t want to die on a sunny day, and not having been there, I can only hope he got the flat weather all directors thrive on.

I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of “The Seventh Seal.” And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.

I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life. This would have given him roughly 60 more birthdays to go on making movies; a remarkable creative output. And there’s no doubt in my mind that’s how he would have used the extra time, doing the one thing he loved above all else, turning out films.

Bergman enjoyed the process. He cared little about the responses to his films. It pleased him when he was appreciated, but as he told me once, “If they don’t like a movie I made, it bothers me — for about 30 seconds.” He wasn’t interested in box office results, even though producers and distributors called him with the opening weekend figures, which went in one ear and out the other. He said, “By mid-week their wildly optimistic prognosticating would come down to nothing.” He enjoyed critical acclaim but didn’t for a second need it, and while he wanted the audience to enjoy his work, he didn’t always make his films easy on them.

Still, those that took some figuring out were well worth the effort. For example, when you grasp that both women in “The Silence” are really only two warring aspects of one woman, the otherwise enigmatic film opens up spellbindingly. Or if you are up on your Danish philosophy before you see “The Seventh Seal” or “The Magician,” it certainly helps, but so amazing were his gifts as a storyteller that he could hold an audience riveted and enthralled with difficult material. I’ve heard people walk out after certain films of his saying, “I didn’t get exactly what I just saw but I was gripped on the edge of my seat every frame.”

Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality, and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.

And yet the man was a warm, amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”

What does one say on the phone to a genius? I didn’t think it was a good idea, but in his hands I guess it would have turned out to be something special. After all, the vocabulary he invented to probe the psychological depths of actors also would have sounded preposterous to those who learn filmmaking in the orthodox manner. In film school (I was thrown out of New York University quite rapidly when I was a film major there in the 1950s) the emphasis was always on movement. These are moving pictures, students were taught, and the camera should move. And the teachers were right. But Bergman would put the camera on Liv Ullmann’s face or Bibi Andersson’s face and leave it there and it wouldn’t budge and time passed and more time and an odd and wonderful thing unique to his brilliance would happen. One would get sucked into the character and one was not bored but thrilled.

Bergman, for all his quirks and philosophic and religious obsessions, was a born spinner of tales who couldn’t help being entertaining even when all on his mind was dramatizing the ideas of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I used to have long phone conversations with him. He would arrange them from the island he lived on. I never accepted his invitations to visit because the plane travel bothered me, and I didn’t relish flying on a small aircraft to some speck near Russia for what I envisioned as a lunch of yogurt. We always discussed movies, and of course I let him do most of the talking because I felt privileged hearing his thoughts and ideas. He screened movies for himself every day and never tired of watching them. All kinds, silents and talkies. To go to sleep he’d watch a tape of the kind of movie that didn’t make him think and would relax his anxiety, sometimes a James Bond film.

Like all great film stylists, such as Fellini, Antonioni and Buñuel, for example, Bergman has had his critics. But allowing for occasional lapses all these artists’ movies have resonated deeply with millions all over the world. Indeed, the people who know film best, the ones who make them — directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors — hold Berman’s work in perhaps the greatest awe.

Because I sang his praises so enthusiastically over the decades, when he died many newspapers and magazines called me for comments or interviews. As if I had anything of real value to add to the grim news besides once again simply extolling his greatness. How had he influenced me, they asked? He couldn’t have influenced me, I said, he was a genius and I am not a genius and genius cannot be learned or its magic passed on.

When Bergman emerged in the New York art houses as a great filmmaker, I was a young comedy writer and nightclub comic. Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman? But I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.

I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about 60 films in his lifetime, I have made 38. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

I used to think Ingrid Bergman and Ingmar Bergman were the same person. Did this happen to anyone else?
I have the same birthday as one, but a relative thought it was the other.

Owen Gleiberman (surprise) takes Rosenbaum to task, identifies the Four Stages of Watching Bergman, incl the Mary Wilkie Phase:

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20051393,00.html

What's truly notable about Rosenbaum's dismissal, however, is the battle line he's really drawing: between Bergman the middlebrow, an art filmmaker who actually deigned to tell his stories fluidly (how vulgar!), and Rosenbaum's heroes, such as the arid, oblique Bresson, with his dessicated zombie acting and general lack of forward motion.

Specious as it is, this argument represents what has become a vanguard attitude in the way that foreign films are now routinely celebrated — not for their expression, but for their benumbed lack of expression. You see it in the canonization of directors like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Abbas Kiarostami, the spiritual heirs to Bresson: filmmakers who fetishize their refusal to dramatize, who create art that is meandering and oblique, at times to the point of madness.

Gleiberman is still a tool.

No, I mean really, I'll show Gleiberman some forward motion when I fuck him in the ear.

He's right about Kiarostami.

You're wrong about him.

The key difference between Rosenbaum's and Gleiberman's pieces is that Rosenbaum was just playing dumb.

The Saraband DVD's on-the-set featurette is quite nice; 84-year-old Ingmar jumping all over the place, choreographing fight scenes and showing actors how to gesture.

is the five-hour TV cut of F&A worth watching? The original left Fanny a cipher.

kinda ironic that the creator of the seventh seal, themselves died

Thank you, Alanis Morisette.

Is the five-hour version worth watching? The theatrical has always felt to me like Bergman overlooked Fanny.

― The Edge of Gloryhole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, May 31, 2011 7:18 PM (2 days ago)

yes, yes - watch! any reason is a good enough reason to watch this movie.

fanny is still overlooked in the t.v. version, and damned if i could articulate exactly /how/ the expanded version is different in terms of content, as both versions blur together, but IIRC the tv iteration feels a lot more voluptuous and immersive, and the magical-realism elements are a lot more pronounced and integrated than in the theatrical edition. I remember some gloriously expanded scenes with between Emilie and Grandma Ekdahl (Gunn Wållgren) that are among the best in the film. Long, langorous, and thoughtful conversation...

― remy bean, Tuesday, May 31, 2011 7:34 PM (2 days ago)

oh sorry, rem! I missed your reply.

I've only seen the TV cut and to my memory Fanny isn't given a whole lot to do in it either. It's still completely worth your time, of course. Can't imagine bothering with the theatrical cut after seeing it.

What I remember appreciating about my (first) viewing of the longer version is the way Bergman elaborates within the individual scenes... often a shot will be held for a second or two longer, a single line of dialogue will appear within a conversation that twists the subsequent chatter, and the heads and tails of the scenes are more naturalistic than in the theatrical release. i'm not sure how apt a comparison it is in many ways, but the pacing of the TV release version reminds me a little of tartovsky

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/gunnar-fischer-1910-2011

RIP Gunnar. Know that for some there was only room for one Swedish DP but others will miss you.

an interesting take on the silence in comparison to the great muppet caper

o_O

completely forgot that bergman and antonioni died on the same day

!!!

A comprehensive INGMAR BERGMAN retrospective will be touring theaters in 2018 to celebrate his centenary! Featuring all-new restorations and rarely-screened gems. pic.twitter.com/Fcr62qqIeI

— Janus Films (@janusfilms) November 11, 2017