Ingrid Bergman Film Poll

centennial of her birth on 8/29

need a re-poll including both versions of Intermezzo (or two polls: pre-Roberto, and the rest)

Sept NY retro:

http://www.bam.org/film/2015/ingrid-bergman

oh Isabella is doing a "theatrical tribute" to mom. With Jeremy Irons.

http://www.bam.org/theater/2015/the-ingrid-bergman-tribute

interviewing her daughters, amid centennial tributes

“She was so original and independent, but in a gentle, natural way,” says Ingrid. “She would always say, ‘People have to make sense.’ She would immediately detect if a person she was talking to was in any way artificial, and she didn’t like that. She was honest and authentic. And so people watch her on the screen and they are touched by her, because she doesn’t seem aware of her beauty.”

“My mother was not theatrical in her home life,” Lindstrom says. “She was strong-willed, which is maybe partly theatrical. I found her fun, she was fun to be around, and playful, and demanding. Maybe that was the Scandinavian in her. There were rules that she followed, and you needed to follow them if you were with her. For instance, I would always let her walk ahead of me through a door. You know, you wouldn’t cry or yell, ‘I want some ice cream!’ with her, you just wouldn’t do that. That was not her role in life, maternity. That was not her forte.”

But Isabella has a different perspective, perhaps because she saw her mother through the eyes of her father Roberto. “Father always said she was so loud that she didn’t need a telephone!” says Isabella. “And yes, she was like that at home. It wasn’t so much that she spoke loudly, but her voice had a certain pitch, so that she could be heard in the back of the theater, and yes, she was like that at home, too.”

http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/you-must-remember-this

That new documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words is quite good, though it doesn't really tell the story from her perspective. At all. It's a weird title, but all biodocs have to seem so personal these days. It's much better and more interesting for contrasting her stories with those of her children.

I read an Isabella interview in the late eighties in which she called Ingrid an uninvolved and bored mom.

At times she basically abandoned them, while she went somewhere else to live and work. She was very very busy with her career, and worked all over the world. But I mean, she wasn't worse than any number of male artists or CEO's or whatever. Roberto Rossellini abandoned them as well. The main story in the treatment of her personal life is the insanely misogynistic attacks on her in the fifties, for me.

It took the reissues of those Rossellini movies for me to appreciate the risk, which is easy, but that even when they're uneven and don't register their points they're still pretty good.

This documentary really made me appreciate just how revolutionary that partnership was. The way she is almost more a presence than an actress, a vessel to take in all these powerful sights, volcanoes or processions. It's completely central to film history. Like Antonioni and Monica Vitti, Tsai Ming-liang and Lee Kang-sheng or Petzold and Nina Hoss. Except much more so. She is one of the most important presences in film (and has been treated like such in French film history, ie. there's a bunch of clips of her in Godard's collages, etc).

Also, like, she made Casablanca as well as films with Hitchcock, Rossellini, Renoir and Bergman. How many actors has that resumé? I've really underestimated her, I think.

Sorry, might be slightly hyperbolic, sketching out my review at the moment.

100

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVZRfqHnQY

roundup

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-ingrid-bergman-100

so good as ivy in the 1941 dr jekyll & mr hyde
such a complex performance, the heart of the film, by far best thing in it

Which retro to go to?

MoMA's ends Thursday.

The documentary Frederik posted about opens here in a few weeks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEh5Nh4a9WE

A couple of interviews in the documentary I liked: Sigourney Weaver talking about working with Bergman on the stage, when she was just starting out, and how Bergman helped her (just in the way she carried herself) come to terms with her height; and Liv Ullmann's Autumn Sonata story, which didn't turn out how I thought it would. The highlight, though, was Bergman's screen test for Selznick. (It's on YouTube, but the poster added music and gums it up in other ways.) For the whole 45 seconds or so, the theatre I was in (about 80% full) was absolutely silent, and I had this weird feeling that I was sitting in a movie house 70 years ago. A couple of times Bergman flashes a toothy grin, but mostly she's in repose and looking away. In the last few seconds, she looks directly into the camera, so therefore directly at you. It's really something to see. (Extra timely for me, as I'll be seeing a program of Warhol's Screen Tests in a couple of weeks.)

Cactus Flower is one of those DOA swinging comedies of the late '60s, usually French-based, with middle-aged stars (plus Oscar-winning saucer-eyed ingenue Hawn) and talent sweating to seem "with it." Ingrid Bergman is certainly game, and has a breakthrough moment erotically smothering herself in a black mink. (A stage hit for Billy Wilder's frequent coscribe Izzy Diamond... BW sorely missed, esp the touch of vulgar class supplied later in Avanti!.

She can handle badinage, of course, but she can't do comedy, light or otherwise.

I thought she had a couple good snippy scenes w/ Jack Weston in the Bourgeois '60s Disco (altho he gets off most of the shots, like "you look like a giant Band-Aid in the office"}. But yeah it's pretty grievous. She's funny in Orient Express if you choose to view it that way.

She's game in the otherwise (very) minor Elena and Her Men, but the mugging in MOTOE is hard to take.

In the filming of Autumn Sonata, Ingmar Bergman said Ingrid kept trying to insert jokes in her dialogue, to which Ingmar said NO JOKES. A wise man.

but she can't do comedy, light or otherwise.

a lot of ppl find Ingmar at his straightest funny already

anyway the thing about Cactus Flower et al is they were about the squares, who bought the tickets.

I love Goldie Hawn, but she seemed to make nothing but bad films up till Sugarland Express. (Never seen Cactus Flower for some reason, but There's a Girl in My Soup and Butterflies are Free are pretty dismal, from what I remember.)

Checked the Goldie Hawn thread I started, and I say there I have seen Cactus Flower. Don't remember so much as an image.

I don’t think I ever saw that or Butterflies Are Free, just vaguely remember the posters/ads.