Ingmar Bergman R.I.P.

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.

Is this Podhoretz guy famous or something? Sorry, I'm a brit.

it's sad but bergman was an old man with a brilliant life

Yes. And on that note, I think a viewing of Wild Strawberries is in order for me this evening.

s this Podhoretz guy famous or something? Sorry, I'm a brit.

Fuckwit son of fuckwit Norman Podhoretz, one of the original neocons.

yeah. he's a syndicated right-wing columnist who sort of tarts himself up as a contrarian intellectual. i.e., the kind of guy who thinks that just saying "ingmar bergman" will make him seem learned to his audience -- which it will, probably -- so that he can then assure them that they're not missing out on anything by not having seen or heard of ingmar bergman movies. sort of a self-loathing upper-west-sider.

"Happiness, contentment, even momentary good feeling are all but absent from a Bergman movie..." Oh fuckyou fucking fuckhead.

Remember, you can't think and enjoy yourself at the same time ever.

There were a couple comments similar to Podhoretz'z in the comments over on Salon, along the lines of "I'm a regular guy, I don't need no Bergman and sushi."

The Guardian's Obit spread was funny today - Ingmar Bergman and...Mike Reid

Yay to Rick Moody for making Bergman sound as unbearably dull as Rick Moody:
http://film.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,2138303,00.html

Rick Moody is the worst writer of... oh, skip it.

I wanted to watch one of his films tonight but my box set has gone missing. Bah.

i don't get this whole "he's so frigid and impenetrable" criticism at ALL

I might watch Persona instead, I think. I have a few, and I end up watching them all once every year or two. Persona may be my favorite, but... I don't want to say that until I see them all again. :)

i mean podhoretz is basically an idiot granted but did dude even ever see fanny and alexander?

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!"

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