Ingmar Bergman: C/D?

S: wild strawberries, persona, cries & whispers, shame, fanny & alexander, scenes from a marriage, the magician, through a glass darkly

D: the seventh seal, winter light

i guess we mostly concur - i love "the magician" though, think it is one of his more underrated films and am pleased to hear that a criterion dvd may be forthcoming. i have many more of his films to see.

bit dud, really: the seventh seal

neither c nor d: the magician, winter light, dreams

i am going to the library to watch fanny and alexander today though by all accounts i imagine this will go firmly in the first category.

I had a hard time putting "The Magician" on my dud list, but again that may have more to do with technical issues--I saw a really bad transfer, in LP mode VHS with a bad telecine frame-slipping issue in the middle of the film. That was a bit of a distraction from the rest of the film. My main problem with it is it seemed to be pretty similar to Sawdust & Tinsel, but with none of the surreal elements.

Classic: Wild Strawberries, Fanny & Alexander, Persona

Unsure: Smiles of a Summer Night

Dud: Seventh Seal (though it's not a BAD film by any means) - just as mentioned before, it's too blunt. I guess you could say the same thing of "Wild Strawberries" in places, but I felt the issues dealt with are something I could relate to more, and as the Seventh Seal goes, I have some philosophical disagreements with it, as well.

I love love love Fanny and Alexander, having just seen the five hour version (got the 5-disc criterion due to gift card money) a couple of weeks ago. I especially like it because he uses all the issues he brings up in his 50's films but doesn't beat them to death over 90 minutes. Full of color, surreal scenes, great quirky characters (whoever played that evil bishop did a great job), and I think the only remotely "happy" film he did. Of course, I'm also a sucker for auto-biographical pictures, which is probably why I like Chaplin's "The Kid" more than I should.

Persona's one of the most challenging things I've watched, and it raises interesting questions. Certainly something that I'll rewatch a fair amount.

But yeah, I really need to see more. Next thing on the list is that faith trilogy and "Cries and Whispers."

The reason "Wild Strawberries" works with the heavy-handed symbolism (while "Seventh Seal" does not) is that it balances it with nostalgia and humanism. The symbolism is also much more visceral & less blatant (although it could be argued that the "clock with no hands" is on par with "playing chess with death" in the cheese factor--but at the same time, it's a dream sequence in "Wild Strawberries", so maybe it's a bit more justifiable.

I haven't seen the 5-hr. version of Fanny & Alexander, but I'm look forward to it. I'm working on the full TV-series version of "Scenes From a Marriage" right now. God, I wish American TV had this kind of programming.

There are DWARVES in "The Silence"??? Wow, I definitely have to watch that one again!

i've never known quite what to make of the bickering couple in "wild strawberries". their appearance is unexpected, unsettling, and over quickly.

What I like about "The Wild Strawberries" is that it's not dealing with death and God's role in it. It's dealing with existential issues, sure -- but I feel it addresses how we spend our time on Earth while we have it more so than anything else. I've always taken issue with Bergman about "The Seventh Seal" because God is his placeholder for what he can't explain and why death occurs, and I don't agree with that.

Even assuming that he was correct about that -- you can worry about death, God, and other things all you want to, but doing so to the point where you are miserable makes no sense and is counterproductive. If it helped Bergman get out some of his demons, then fine, but I felt he had a little too much existential angst.

I liked that dream with the handless clocks. However, I was a much bigger fan of the classroom dream where he is judged by the stern old lecturer. That "you're incompetent" line summed it up perfectly. I especially liked how they staged it in his old classroom.

On a more general level, I like how Bergman gets me to emotionally respond to things without the use of music.

haha i actually don't remember anything from the first half hour of the silence, oddly enough. the rest of the film is bergman at his claustrophobic best, and ingrid thulin's freakout near the end is wondrous to behold.

Angst? Not Bergman.... :)

On a more general level, I like how Bergman gets me to emotionally respond to things without the use of music.

Great call. That has always been my favorite characteristic of Bergman's films. I have written on many other threads about my hatred of non-diagetic music in films, and how it's demeaning to not only audience, but to the actors and DP as well (it essentially says that the director has zero faith in the ability of the actors and the cinematography to elicit a strong emotional response on their own).

To me, Fanny & Alexander is more like Bergman's Greatest Hits, tho I haven't seen it at TV length. (His followup TV film, After the Rehearsal, is much fresher, and has Lena Olin.)

I saw a new print of The Magician last year and it's breathtaking.

The "God's silence" movies have more resonance if you were raised religious, I bet.

Cries & Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage strike me as heavy-handed; even moreso, Autumn Sonata! "It's my parents' fault and I will blame them exclusively!"

It just seems like a cop-out, dealing with Death in literary metaphor rather than directly, like in "Shame".

Simple, brutally powerful, minimal work to maximum effect. Nothing else to say - that's the epitome of a chamber work.

Crisis, 1946
To Joy, 1950
Summer Interlude, 1951
Summer with Monika, 1953
Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953
Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955
The Seventh Seal, 1957
Wild Strawberries, 1957
Brink of Life, 1958
The Magician, 1958
The Virgin Spring, 1960
The Devil's Eye, 1960
Through a Glass Darkly, 1961
Winter Light, 1963
The Silence, 1963
Persona, 1966
Hour of the Wolf, 1968
The Passion of Anna, 1969
Cries and Whispers, 1972
Scenes from a Marriage, 1973
The Magic Flute, 1975
Face to Face, 1976
Autumn Sonata, 1978
From the Life of the Marionettes, 1980
Fanny and Alexander, 1982
The Making of Fanny and Alexander, 1986

My personal C/Ds...

Classic: Cries and Whispers, Persona, The Seventh Seal, Winter Light
Dud: Sawdust and Tinsel, The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, Wild Strawberries

I agree with you here, but I don't find these characteristics in "Winter Light" at all. It didn't approach anything resembling an emotional response in me from any of the characters (the priest just seemed annoying) and Max Von Sydow's character just grated on me.

I don't understand how you found "Through A Glass Darkly" to be superficial--it was probably the most accurate & devestating portrayal of mental illness I've seen on film (with only "A Woman Under the Influence" giving it competition). The cinematography was amazing in this film as well (with "Winter Light" being the worst of the trillogy, lit like a made-for-tv movie shot on video).

"Sawdust & Tinsel" a dud? And despite the (at-times) heavy-handed symbolism, I'll parrot Dr Morbius in my amazement at "Wild Strawberries" being called a dud.

Hmmm, always keep variable quality of print sources in mind. I tend to doubt Sven Nykvist shot one of the trilogy much worse than the others.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=1452

For the record, I haven't seen much of his work yet (though I'm becoming more intrigued by the day)...

Classic: Fanny and Alexander (the Christmas portion, at any rate)
Dud: Smiles of a Summer Night (saw it at, like, 7 in the morning so I think reappraisal is required)
Neither: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries

haha, does everyone just turn it off after the big christmas scene? i'd never seen either the theatrical or the television version before the criterion dvd came out, but i was kind of shocked by how grim (and lengthy) the middle acts of the film are. not because it's bergman, but because everything i'd read about it suggested that it demonstrated an uncharacteristically playful and uplifting side of bergman (which it does - at least the first 1/5th of it). everybody i read responded to the christmas dinner and conveniently forgot about the evil man burning to death, etc.

Nah, though I can see why you would -- you're definitely right about the middle acts. But, the scenes at Uncle Isak's house are just as good as the christmas ones. Especially when Fanny's in that room with the puppet stage and magician....So I think you should watch those scenes too, at the least - even if you don't like the middle acts.

i was sure this was going to be revived re: saraband. i have yet to see it, but i hope too soon. i'm kind of weary of the long, slow bergman backlash. i found j. rosenbaum's review in particular quite irritating.

J.Ro votes (sorta not really) Dud! (He has a point that I don't think IB's THEATRE rep was mentioned once on the ILE obit thread. I did see his staging of Peer Gynt in Brooklyn and wasn't all that impressed.)

Scenes From an Overrated Career

By JONATHAN ROSENBAUM
Chicago

THE first Ingmar Bergman movie I ever saw was “The Magician,” at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in the spring of 1960, when I was 17. The only way I could watch the film this week after the Swedish director’s death was on a remaindered DVD I bought in Paris. Like many of his films, “The Magician” hasn’t been widely available here for ages.

Nearly all the obituaries I’ve read take for granted Mr. Bergman’s stature as one of the uncontestable major figures in cinema — for his serious themes (the loss of religious faith and the waning of relationships), for his expert direction of actors (many of whom, like Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, he introduced and made famous) and for the hard severity of his images. If you Google “Ingmar Bergman” and “great,” you get almost six million hits.

Sometimes, though, the best indication of an artist’s continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about. The hard fact is, Mr. Bergman isn’t being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard. His works are seen less often in retrospectives and on DVD than those of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson — two master filmmakers widely scorned as boring and pretentious during Mr. Bergman’s heyday.

What Mr. Bergman had that those two masters lacked was the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits, as Dreyer did when constructing his peculiar form of movie space and Bresson did when constructing his peculiar form of movie acting.

The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman’s films go down more easily than theirs — his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor — also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart. What we see is what we get, and what we hear, however well written or dramatic, are things we’re likely to have heard elsewhere.

So where did the outsized reputation of Mr. Bergman come from? At least part of his initial appeal in the ’50s seems tied to the sexiness of his actresses and the more relaxed attitudes about nudity in Sweden; discovering the handsome look of a Bergman film also clearly meant encountering the beauty of Maj-Britt Nilsson and Harriet Andersson. And for younger cinephiles like myself, watching Mr. Bergman’s films at the same time I was first encountering directors like Mr. Godard and Alain Resnais, it was tempting to regard him as a kindred spirit, the vanguard of a Swedish New Wave.

It was a seductive error, but an error nevertheless. The stylistic departures I saw in Mr. Bergman’s ’50s and ’60s features — the silent-movie pastiche in “Sawdust and Tinsel,” the punitive use of magic against a doctor-villain in “The Magician,” the aggressive avant-garde prologue of “Persona” — were actually more functions of his skill and experience as a theater director than a desire or capacity to change the language of cinema in order to say something new. If the French New Wave addressed a new contemporary world, Mr. Bergman’s talent was mainly devoted to preserving and perpetuating an old one.

Curiously, theater is what claimed most of Mr. Bergman’s genius, but cinema is what claimed most of his reputation. He was drawn again and again to the 19th-century theater of Chekhov, Strindberg and Ibsen — these were his real roots — and based on the testimony of friends who saw some of his stage productions when they traveled to Brooklyn, there’s good reason to believe a comprehensive account of his prodigious theater work, his métier, is long overdue.

We remember the late Michelangelo Antonioni for his mysteriously vacant pockets of time, Andrei Tarkovsky for his elaborately choreographed long takes and Orson Welles for his canted angles and staccato editing. And we remember all three for their deep, multifaceted investments in the modern world — the same world Mr. Bergman seemed perpetually in retreat from.

Mr. Bergman simply used film (and later, video) to translate shadow-plays staged in his mind — relatively private psychodramas about his own relationships with his cast members, and metaphysical speculations that at best condensed the thoughts of a few philosophers rather than expanded them. Riddled with wounds inflicted by Mr. Bergman’s strict Lutheran upbringing and diverse spiritual doubts, these films are at times too self-absorbed to say much about the larger world, limiting the relevance that his champions often claim for them.

Above all, his movies aren’t so much filmic expressions as expressions on film. One of the most striking aspects of the use of digital video in “Saraband,” his last feature, is his seeming contempt for the medium apart from its usefulness as a simple recording device.

Yet what Mr. Bergman was interested in recording was pretty much the same tormented and tortured neurotic resentments, the same spite and even the same cruelty that can be traced back to his work of a half-century ago. Like John Ford, one of Mr. Bergman’s favorite directors — whose taste for silhouettes moving across horizons he shared — he would endlessly reshuffle his reliable troupe of players, his favorite sores and obsessions, like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope.

It’s strange to realize that his bitter and pinched emotions, once they were combined with excellent cinematography and superb acting, could become chic — and revered as emblems of higher purposes in cinema. But these emotions remain ugly ones, no matter how stylishly they might be served up.

Even stranger to me was the way he always resonated with New York audiences. The antiseptic, upscale look of Mr. Bergman’s interiors and his mainly blond, blue-eyed cast members became a brand to be adopted and emulated. (His artfully presented traumas became so respectable they could help to sell espresso in the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Cinema.) Mr. Bergman, famously, not only helped fuel the art-house aspirations of Woody Allen but Mr. Allen’s class aspirations as well — the dual yearnings ultimately becoming so intertwined that they seemed identical.

Despite all the compulsive superlatives offered up this week, Mr. Bergman’s star has faded, maybe because we’ve all grown up a little, as filmgoers and as socially aware adults. It doesn’t diminish his masterful use of extended close-ups or his distinctively theatrical, seemingly homemade cinema to suggest that movies can offer something more complex and challenging. And while Mr. Bergman’s films may have lost much of their pertinence, they will always remain landmarks in the history of taste.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, a film critic for The Chicago Reader, is the author, most recently, of “Discovering Orson Welles.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

raymond williams (british/welsh inventor of cultural studies) had ingers down as basically an updated ibsen way back in the day.

THE first Ingmar Bergman movie I ever saw was “The Magician,” at the Fifth Avenue Cinema in the spring of 1960, when I was 17. The only way I could watch the film this week after the Swedish director’s death was on a remaindered DVD I bought in Paris. Like many of his films, “The Magician” hasn’t been widely available here for ages.

is so much 'jonathan rosenbaum articles very much in character'. it half pisses me off, but i half adore it.

i think he's right on the whole, but the fact that he isn't taught on film courses doesn't tell you very much. in a way some of his complaints about bergman (pinchedness, use of actresses, fear of something or other) could be aimed at hitchcock.

A collection of reactions to Rosenbaum:

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2007/08/links-for-day-august-6th-2007.html

is so much 'jonathan rosenbaum articles very much in character'. it half pisses me off, but i half adore it.

This would be OTM if J. Ro had written anything in the past year or so that wasn't paint-by-numbers. He's still more readable than most working film critics, but I'd be much more interested if he was even occasionally surprising anymore.

Results 1 - 10 of about 125,000 for "JONATHAN ROSENBAUM" and great

wow, Hour of the Wolf is about the worst thing he did in the '60s, amirite?

I'm no fan of The Silence, which desperately needs Woody Allen.

at least there are no bargain-basement vampires in that one, and Erland Josephson walking on the ceiling.

What Mr. Bergman had that those two masters lacked was the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits

dumbest thing an otherwise intelligent critic has ever written?

I like The Silence.

Didn't Bergman recognize Hour of the Wolf as a failure? (and, um, The Touch, too?)

Bergman Retro in SF
http://www.castrotheatre.com/p-list.html

I just finished the TV version of 'Scenes of a Marriage' and was wondering what to watch next. I've already seen a few of his older 50's movies but I'm look more interested in small personal dramas in natural/contemporary settings. Any suggestions?

Monika

Through a Glass Darkly (a little expressionistic)

The most telling part from that blog Morbius linked to above:

sean burns said...
#1. Rosenbaum does this every time somebody dies. I'm sure we all remember that Altman's body was still warm when he was already carrying on all over the place about how NASHVILLE wasn't as good as BOBBY. (I still laugh every time I type that.)

The first piece I ever read by Rosenbaum was trashing the then-recently departed Gene Siskel for, amongst other sins, enjoying basketball. <<

Haha. That's absurd. I don't think Jonathan Rosenbaum's life or work will be remembered for nearly as long as the f'makers he's dissing - and I actually like his stuff (like his alt. Top 100 American film list)

Liv Ullmann is 70.

http://daily.greencine.com/archives/007184.html

gratulerer med dagen!

I just rewatched the absolutely hysterical Bergman parody from the first season of Saturday Night Live and laughed harder than ever

D: The Seventh Seal,

hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....

Let's return to Elvis' question:

So what's the deal with The Serpent's Egg. Is it really that terrible? It seems to have dropped off the radar entirely.

Should I even bother?

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

o_O

>Classic: Fanny and Alexander (the Christmas portion, at any rate)

haha, does everyone just turn it off after the big christmas scene?

Ha -- the dullest part of the movie. I don't really start paying attention until the ogre stepfather piles on the horrors.

Anyway, revived cuz I checked S&T (Criterion) outta the library.

Ha, can't make it through that sequence because it drags on forever. Next time I will try Alfred's strategy

the TV version of Scenes From a Marriage is an improvement but it's still not a good film (there's a good Clive James review floating around somewhere). I couldn't accept those two together in the first place, and Ullmann's a drip.

The Best Intentions out on blu in June. Worth watching?

"An OK movie for public television" is what I thought at the time.

I actually ended up quite liking The Best Intentions, though the presentation is a bit polite for my tastes.

Mark Harris on Persona in his latest '67 lookback

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/cinema-67-revisited-persona/

Rewatched Wild Strawberries this afternoon for clemenza's Road poll. Not only is it still great, but its numerous moments of humour and uplift remind me once again that anyone who calls Bergman's films depressing probably only knows them to the extent that they've read their plot synopses.

The ones I'd rewatch.. Still think Shame is special.

Looking forward to this!

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

launching the centenary

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5242-the-daily-bergman100

centenary retrospective starts in my city next week, and it's going to run for TWO YEARS. wtf? not sure how they're doing it / if there will be multiple showings. only 30 films vs. the FF's 47. CRISIS is first up, didn't you see that one at the FF morbs? I remember a post you might've made something to the effect of "well... everyone has to start somewhere I guess."

the two years thing is blowing my mind. i'm sort of cross thinking i'll have to wait until 2019 to see Cries and Whispers in a theater.

no, I watched Crisis at home the other day; it's not good either, but there's a novelty in seeing him do a '40s melodrama with heavy stings of soundtrack music I guess.

Saw Port of Call tonight. Such a leap from Crisis, only 2 years later but with 3 films in between. Lots of stunning closeups, cool dolly shots moving between rooms, and one of those perfect, transcendent moments in every Bergman movie: early on, when the girl brings the guy home for the first time, she rebuffs him at first and leaves the room. it's the cut from a medium shot of them in one room to the closeup of her as she leaves, the camera now in the other room. Words obviously do no it no justice but I was really moved by that one moment.

was very moved by WILD STRAWBERRIES a couple of nights ago. Isak’s self-recognition in his mother and son after the conversation with his daughter in law just crushed me

Melvyn Bragg podcast on The Seventh Seal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001qmkx

that episode of In Our Time prompted a rewatch. not a single scene in that film that wouldn't make a decent poster.