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

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.

I'm trying to sell it to the kids, Morbs

I love Shame, if it's possible to write such a thing. The scenes in the boat...

I had no idea Bergman ever did anything close to sf - Shame is part of a trilogy as well, right?

gonna start with the first trilogy, thanks morbs

Saw Persona for the fifth or sixth time last night, part of the Lightbox's big series--not utterly depressing. Between Shame and The Passion of Anna, both of which screened last week, I prefer The Passion of Anna. I've got Fanny and Alexander on the weekend, first time in many years.

I have Passion of Anna from an old Bergman DVD box. Been a few years since I've seen it, but I remember liking it more than a lot of his more high profile work.

Love F&A, perfect viewing for this time of year.

Fanny and Alexander is the one Bergman project I really didn't like. I've only seen the theatrical cut, but for one, the title is misleading- the movie's all about Alexander. also, this is a personal thing rather than a fault in the work, but I have a really hard time watching movies about paternalistic captors (Gaslight, Martha, The Night of the Hunter). I find them intensely uncomfortable to watch but more importantly very tedious, maybe because there's no suspense. imo a movie like Rosemary's Baby works brilliantly because we're kept in the dark until the very end.

You find The Night of the Hunter ... tedious?!

tedious to watch. I like all of the films I mentioned (except F&A), but I find them immensely frustrating to sit through because I have such a burning hatred for the villains. not sure why, nothing like this ever happened to me, maybe I don't find the archetype very interesting. Robert Mitchum is just so vile in that movie.

he had VILE and EVIL tattooed on his toes

Sexily vile.

Watching the "Trilogy" first is the correct answer, but I would add...

Dreams is worthwhile, it has a slightly different look for Bergman - more lush I'd say - and excellent performances.

Brink of Life has almost a Hollywood-type structure, though it goes places Hollywood probably wouldn't have in 1958. Recommended.

From the late period, I found From the Life of Marionettes quite interesting, at least stylistically

Dud: The Touch, The Serpent's Egg - his only two English-language films, which may not be coincidental

All These Women is such an oddity in his oeuvre, I don't know whether to call it a dud or a curiosity

watched The Silence tonight, as soon as I saw that guy on the ladder with the fixed expression of goofy horror/surprise, I was sure this was Bergman's Fellini parody: the dwarves, the male lover holding his shoe by the laces, the setting, the debauchery. I was sure I'd find a whole subsection on the wiki page about this, but nope - lumped in as one of these modernist films, of a piece with Marienbad and Belle du Jour (!). no way. it's such a break for Bergman and an obvious comment on the Italian directors... anyway, The Silence was great and better than all of Fellini's films combined.

now reading that his following film, All These Women, is a straight up 8 1/2 parody

buy the box people

It's out of print already! But they say it'll be available again next month.

Hoping this leads to more big single-director sets.

me too, & though we probably won't see something as amazing and insane as the Bergman box for a while, directors with 10 or fewer films could be manageable. they already have the Tati box, they could do a Tarkovsky box but Kino has Nostalghia and they just put out The Sacrifice (would be perfectly happy with a nice Mirror disc no matter who puts it out). Bresson is doable.

I read rumors (on ILX?) that there's supposed to be a big Kiarostami box from CC this year. Maybe that'll turn out just to be the Koker Trilogy.

It all comes down to who holds the rights. Bergman and Kurosawa boxes happened because most of their films are owned by single entities who'll mega-license.

It's been floated on other forums that the next collections could be (in addition to Kiarostami) Ozu, Fassbinder, or even a retooled upgrade of Kurosawa, now that some more of his films are in play.

there's at least a dozen Fassbinder movies that have never had a region 1 release afaik