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

A flower iirc

xp yea it is overused. and really what I mean by that is they give me an enormous amount of contagious creativity. I leave his movies with electricity surging thru me.

but j.lu, Bergman isn't fully Bergman in those early films.

Perhaps, but if there's one thing I've learned from ILM, it's that preferring an artist's early and harder-to-find work is a GREAT contrarian play. (Serious? I don't even know any more.)

I'll reiterate what I said about Thirst upthread, it's definitely worth checking out because it's not quite the straight melodrama of Crisis or Port of Call but there's still more "plot," jumbled as it is. Can't overstate how strange the sound is in that movie.

The NGA has scheduled Thirst and Prison for 7/22. I'm planning on going (and smuggling in a stash of chocolate-covered espresso beans, in case sleepiness strikes).

I've seen nearly all of the 1950-1982 Bergmans now, most on big screen, and have decided that Hour of the Wolf has the most interesting soundtrack. Modernist music from Lars Johan Werle, who also did the music in Persona.

not one of his strongest movies, though

I think it has some of his best but also some of his most ill-advised (even goofy) scenes in it

https://www.criterion.com/boxsets/1427-ingmar-bergman-s-cinema

30 BluRays!

wow, hope that's eligible in the usual November half price sale

I don't need to own all those. (which is how i feel about films in general)

Hoooooooooooooooooly shit

Yeah I hope I can get that 50% off. I already own ~11 of these but fuck it, there are very few filmmakers (artists, even) that I would shell out for like this. Really excited. I’ve held off on getting any of the films not on Blu-Ray & I don’t own the Eclipse series so this is a real treat, can’t wait.

Too rich for my blood, even at 50% off, so I’m really hoping that some of the more obscure titles will be made available for individual rental on iTunes and whatnot (not even gonna bother trying to pester my library to get this).

Filmstruck has all the features in that set except A Ship to India, Brink of Life, Färo Document, The Touch, The Serpent's Egg, After the Rehearsal and Saraband. But for everything on blu, plus the supplements and shorts and book, I'll def shell out $150 if I can get it at that price. I don't own any Bergman on disc, so I won't be duplicating anything.

Can't believe everyone is making such a big deal about a hundred-year-old ventriloquist.

I capitulated, unwisely.

Are box sets like this typically excluded from their sale? I remember getting the Cassavetes & Tati boxes during the sale last year, but those are 5 or 6 films each, not 39 (!)

Was the Olympics box excluded?

I watched The Best Intentions on Amazon last week, my first screening since 1994 (on PBS!) so this one might as well count as a first.

The July sale is still ongoing, and the Olympic box is down from $399 to $199, so this should definitely be available. Really glad I didn't finally pick up Persona last week, even though it was near the top of my list...

Assayas on Bergman

https://www.filmcomment.com/article/where-are-we-with-bergman/

Ingmar Bergman tried to live in LA for a summer but as soon as Barbra Streisand called to invite him to a pool party he was on the next plane back to Sweden lmao pic.twitter.com/5tlmrBK2y4

— Lauren Wilford (@lauren_wilford) July 17, 2018

idk I'd wanna hang out with Barbra drinking limoncello by the pool

lol yeah i remember reading that story somewhere else, IB had one of his nervous breakdowns after that phone call and left immediately

I watched Bergman Island just a couple of days ago and he tells that story in passing.

no doubt Ingrid would've preferred to stay.

why?

pretty sure Barbra was a better poolside companion than Liv + Ingmar.

(and yes, yes, I know how much she wanted to work with him)

we're clear that "Ingrid" is Bergman's fifth and last wife, right?

(not the other Ingrid Bergman)

I thought it was Ingrid the actress before production of Autumn Sonata.

when did he take that brief stab at living in LA? mid or late 70s?

76?

I like this line (from Mel Brooks apparently): "When Bergman left Sweden he complained about the persecution, the metaphysical anguish, the impossibility of realizing himself as an artist, the impotence created by the welfare state, the creeping Big Brotherism of the state ... When he left California three weeks later, he complained about the heat."

That was '75, as per the photo of him posing with the Jaws mechanical shark (postrelease). So likely too early for Autumn Sonata (and I don't think IB the actress wd've been into a summer of rehearsals).

In fact I'm pretty sure I read in Images that when production started on Sonata Ingmar's attitude was "What the hell is she doing?"

IB did not like direct sunlight! He was perfectly clear about this in interviews. There's no way he could've existed in LA, Babs or no Babs,

Saw the anticommunist thriller This Can't Happen Here at MoMA, which he suppressed during his life as an outlier he regretted making. Quite mediocre indeed, but nicely shot by Gunnar Fischer and has some sporadically funny stunt work. Notable for Donald Duck's only cameo in a Bergman film (surely?).

When I saw it last week I thought it had a certain amount of overlap with the other relationship dramas Bergman was making at this time. The only difference is that the relationships suddenly have international geopolitical significance. If anyone else had made it, it would have been dismissed as third-rate Hitchcock.

Jan Holmberg of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation introduced the National Gallery of Art screening last week; did he or anyone else introduce your screening?

no, it's actually running for a week at the museum

...but i see Holmberg was there for the first show

There's a series starting here soon. Very excited--just got a ticket for Liv Ullman introducing Shame.

seeing Smiles of a Summer Night in a theater full of people aged 65+, mostly couples, made me appreciate it a lot more.

saw The Seventh Seal in a theater for the first time on Monday and got the Criterion box in the mail yesterday. a theater here is showing most of his movies in chronological order over the course of two years and I haven't missed a single one, so I'm caught up on most of the early work up thru the mid-50s (with some blindspots).

anyway, I haven't seen any of these. what should I watch first?

A Ship to Inda
Waiting Women
A Lesson in Love
Dreams
Brink of Life
The Devil's Eye
Through a Glass Darkly
Winter Light
The Silence
All These Women
Hour of the Wolf
Shame
The Rite
The Passion of Anna
Faro Document
The Touch
Scenes from a Marriage
The Magic Flute
The Serpent's Egg
Faro Document 1979
From the Life of the Marionettes
After the Rehearsal
Saraband

well, the earliest masterwork on this list is Through a Glass Darkly

I was thinking that or Brink of Life. Going thru that list above, I realized I've only seen two of his 1960s films (Persona and The Virgin Spring).

it wd make sense to watch

Through a Glass Darkly
Winter Light
The Silence

whenever you get to them

(consecutively, i mean)

Hour of the Wolf and Shame are his horror and sf films respectively, a good one-two punch of late black and white Bergman

i don't really think of Shame as sf, anymore than i do The Sacrifice.