ChiaroScuro DVD-Collection
Alphabetically sorted by Director's last name
Total number of titles: 1397
Last updated: 09 Feb 2007
(An die Freude [de] • Vers la joie [fr])
Sweden 1950
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
Sweden 1950
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: Nils Svenwall
m: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Bedrich Smetana (overture from "Prodaná neveta [The Bartered Bride]"), Ludwig van Beethoven (from "Symphonie No. 9 'Choral' op. 125")
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Stig Olin, Birger Malmsten, John Ekman, Margit Carlqvist, Victor Sjöström
pr: 20 Feb 1950
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: Nils Svenwall
m: Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Bedrich Smetana (overture from "Prodaná neveta [The Bartered Bride]"), Ludwig van Beethoven (from "Symphonie No. 9 'Choral' op. 125")
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Stig Olin, Birger Malmsten, John Ekman, Margit Carlqvist, Victor Sjöström
pr: 20 Feb 1950
rt: 94:43 (+4%PAL= 98) min
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Jungfrukällen" (1960)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Jungfrukällen" (1960)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
Although veteran film-maker Sjöström's performance in "Wild Strawberries" is well known, he first appeared before Bergman's camera as the wise old conductor of the Helsingborg symphony orchestra. Taking its title from Schiller's "Ode to Joy" (as used in the choral finale to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony), the film follows the fortunes of orchestral players Nilsson and Olin, as they take the rough with the smooth in setting up home together. The framing of the story lets us know very early that she will lose her life in a tragic fire, leaving the question how her widowed husband will draw on his experiences to find the will to continue. Frankly, it's a crude device, barely worthy of the film's wise portrait of domesticity in all its facets, but it does play effectively against Sjöström's resonant description of Beethoven expressing 'a joy beyond all understanding'. As the couple's young son listens intently to the symphony rehearsal which closes the proceedings, Bergman's investment in a lesson to be learned is self-evident.
— TJ, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
In "To Joy" Bergman dedicates his full attention to a theme that will recur in smaller filmic moments throughout his career: the idea of music's redemptive power. In a frenetic performance, actor Stig Olin plays an ambitious concert violinist of mercurial temperament who ends up sacrificing nearly everything for his career. The fact that his orchestra conductor is in turn played by Victor Sjöström, the grand old master director of the Swedish silent cinema (and Bergman's main cinematic mentor as well), only adds to the resonances of this film as a personal parable of Bergman's own filmmaking. Beethoven's music, the source for the title, is equated by film's end with the momentary but intense joy of the Swedish summer, leading Bergman biographer Peter Cowie to cull from this film an artistic manifesto of sorts: "There are brief instances in life that are of such exquisite beauty that they compensate for all the misery and unhappiness.
— Mark Sandberg, PFA
•••••
Inspired by a Helsingborg orchestra's rehearsals of Beethoven's Ninth, Bergman dazzled himself (to his subsequent amusement) with the "utterly brilliant" idea of "a film with music streaming through it and out of it," and although he was to call the result "a hopelessly uneven film" and "an impossible melodrama," even he had to concede that it has some "shining moments." It is in fact a work of fascinating complexity, in which the demands that are made and the decisions taken in the production of any art form (including film) are passionately identified. Always scrupulous with his soundtracks, Bergman sometimes reduces its music to the minimum, just a ripple of harp-strings, for example, signals his journey into flashback. And the accompaniment to Stig and Marta's night of accusation and fury is no more than the melancholy groan of a fog-horn: no grand musical text is needed to reinforce the grief of this agonized duet.
The film has four major musical events. To begin, Gunnar Fischer's camera prowls through the orchestra to discover not only the special choreography of instruments, players, and hands (a whole sub-text of To Joy is revealed through caresses and clutches, gestures and fists) but also the four faces who will be our guides through what is to come. This strange arena, for which no audience is ever revealed (except for Nelly and Lasse, as if the experience is their dream), seems to occupy a self-absorbed limbo, existing solely to gratify the demands of the conductor and, through him, those of the composer, a divinity whose word is law.
Striving to break out from the ritual, Stig performs Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with such clumsy and unlikely assonance that we can be in no doubt that he has no chance of a solo career. But the balance is restored by the delightful scene, a pleasing fusion of aural and visual movement, in which Smetana accompanies the news that Marta (like Ellen before her) had given birth to twins. Finally, in a torrent of Schiller and Beethoven, the Ode to Joy celebrates images of Marta amid the pages of music for the solemn consideration of her son who, like the other children in Bergman's films, lands a cautious eye to adult promises.
— Philip Strick
— TJ, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
In "To Joy" Bergman dedicates his full attention to a theme that will recur in smaller filmic moments throughout his career: the idea of music's redemptive power. In a frenetic performance, actor Stig Olin plays an ambitious concert violinist of mercurial temperament who ends up sacrificing nearly everything for his career. The fact that his orchestra conductor is in turn played by Victor Sjöström, the grand old master director of the Swedish silent cinema (and Bergman's main cinematic mentor as well), only adds to the resonances of this film as a personal parable of Bergman's own filmmaking. Beethoven's music, the source for the title, is equated by film's end with the momentary but intense joy of the Swedish summer, leading Bergman biographer Peter Cowie to cull from this film an artistic manifesto of sorts: "There are brief instances in life that are of such exquisite beauty that they compensate for all the misery and unhappiness.
— Mark Sandberg, PFA
•••••
Inspired by a Helsingborg orchestra's rehearsals of Beethoven's Ninth, Bergman dazzled himself (to his subsequent amusement) with the "utterly brilliant" idea of "a film with music streaming through it and out of it," and although he was to call the result "a hopelessly uneven film" and "an impossible melodrama," even he had to concede that it has some "shining moments." It is in fact a work of fascinating complexity, in which the demands that are made and the decisions taken in the production of any art form (including film) are passionately identified. Always scrupulous with his soundtracks, Bergman sometimes reduces its music to the minimum, just a ripple of harp-strings, for example, signals his journey into flashback. And the accompaniment to Stig and Marta's night of accusation and fury is no more than the melancholy groan of a fog-horn: no grand musical text is needed to reinforce the grief of this agonized duet.
The film has four major musical events. To begin, Gunnar Fischer's camera prowls through the orchestra to discover not only the special choreography of instruments, players, and hands (a whole sub-text of To Joy is revealed through caresses and clutches, gestures and fists) but also the four faces who will be our guides through what is to come. This strange arena, for which no audience is ever revealed (except for Nelly and Lasse, as if the experience is their dream), seems to occupy a self-absorbed limbo, existing solely to gratify the demands of the conductor and, through him, those of the composer, a divinity whose word is law.
Striving to break out from the ritual, Stig performs Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with such clumsy and unlikely assonance that we can be in no doubt that he has no chance of a solo career. But the balance is restored by the delightful scene, a pleasing fusion of aural and visual movement, in which Smetana accompanies the news that Marta (like Ellen before her) had given birth to twins. Finally, in a torrent of Schiller and Beethoven, the Ode to Joy celebrates images of Marta amid the pages of music for the solemn consideration of her son who, like the other children in Bergman's films, lands a cautious eye to adult promises.
— Philip Strick
(Einen Sommer lang [de] • Jeux d'été [fr])
Sweden 1951
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
Sweden 1951
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
sc: Ingmar Bergman, Herbert Grevenius (based on a story by Bergman)
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: Nils Svenwall
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellin, Annalisa Ericson, Georg Funkquist, Stig Olin, Mimi Pollak, Renée Björling, Gunnar Olsson
pr: 01 Okt 1951
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: Nils Svenwall
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Birger Malmsten, Alf Kjellin, Annalisa Ericson, Georg Funkquist, Stig Olin, Mimi Pollak, Renée Björling, Gunnar Olsson
pr: 01 Okt 1951
rt: 91:49 (+4%PAL= 96) min
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Sommaren med Monika" (1951)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Sommaren med Monika" (1951)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
Told in flashback as the memories of a ballerina approaching the end of her career, this sensitively observed story traces a teenage love affair which took place one idyllic summer on the archipelago near Stockholm. Bergman's preoccupation with the transition from youthful innocence to adult experience is already clearly marked here, as is the double movement of a journey backward into one's own past which nevertheless marks a spiritual progression. For it is through her re- living of her past that the heroine comes to embrace the tentative possibilities for her future. The translation of the title, incidentally, is incorrect and misleading. "Sommarlek" means "Summer Games", and Bergman's concern is with the transience of playful youth.
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
A dancer, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), who is at the height (and thus sees the end) of her powers as a prima ballerina, under the dreamlike pull of memory impulsively revisits the island of her youth and, in flashbacks, her first and only love. Bergman's breakthrough masterpiece is an almost magical fusion of sunstruck elegiac love poem and dark suggestion. The latter looks ahead to "The Seventh Seal" and its games with death; and to "Sawdust and Tinsel" in its depiction of a performer struggling to see her life clearly through a mirror of humiliation. But Marie, an early Bergman heroine suffused (like the film itself) with music and dance, finally will have none of that. Jean-Luc Godard wrote that, whereas he admired other films, he loved "Summer Interlude", and one can see this reflected in his films with Anna Karina-the playful cinema (cf. Bergman's cartoon interlude here, and swanlike hands dancing), the doomed lovers, the beautiful survivors. "Paradise lost and time regained" (Godard).
— PFA
•••••
Ingmar Bergman considers this 1951 production to be his first truly personal film, though it's hardly original—its lyricism owes a great deal to the French romantic dramas of the period. But the sense of fate that descends over the drama is very much Bergman's own—cruel, distant, ultimately imponderable.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
"For me Summer Interlude is one of my most important films. Even though to an outsider it may seem terribly passé, for me it isn't. This was my first film in which I felt I was functioning independently, with a style of my own, making a film all my own, with a particular appearance of its own, which no one could ape. It was like no other film. It was all my own work. Suddenly I knew I was putting the camera on the right spot, getting the right results; that everything added up. For sentimental reasons, too, it was also fun making it."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
•••••
"I had always felt technically crippled—insecure with the crew, the cameras, the sound equipment—everything. Sometimes a film succeeded, but I never got what I wanted to get. But in Summer Interlude, I suddenly felt that I knew my profession."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, 1971
•••••
"We filmed it in Stockholm's outer archipelago. The landscape had a special mixture of tempered countryside and wilderness, which played an important part in the different time schemes, in the luminescence of summer and in the autumnal twilight. A touch of genuine tenderness is achieved through Maj-Britt Nilsson's performance. The camera catches her with an affection that is easy to comprehend. She embraced the girl's story and lifted it higher with her brilliant mixture of playfulness and seriousness. The filming became one of my happy experiences."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, 1990
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
A dancer, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), who is at the height (and thus sees the end) of her powers as a prima ballerina, under the dreamlike pull of memory impulsively revisits the island of her youth and, in flashbacks, her first and only love. Bergman's breakthrough masterpiece is an almost magical fusion of sunstruck elegiac love poem and dark suggestion. The latter looks ahead to "The Seventh Seal" and its games with death; and to "Sawdust and Tinsel" in its depiction of a performer struggling to see her life clearly through a mirror of humiliation. But Marie, an early Bergman heroine suffused (like the film itself) with music and dance, finally will have none of that. Jean-Luc Godard wrote that, whereas he admired other films, he loved "Summer Interlude", and one can see this reflected in his films with Anna Karina-the playful cinema (cf. Bergman's cartoon interlude here, and swanlike hands dancing), the doomed lovers, the beautiful survivors. "Paradise lost and time regained" (Godard).
— PFA
•••••
Ingmar Bergman considers this 1951 production to be his first truly personal film, though it's hardly original—its lyricism owes a great deal to the French romantic dramas of the period. But the sense of fate that descends over the drama is very much Bergman's own—cruel, distant, ultimately imponderable.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
"For me Summer Interlude is one of my most important films. Even though to an outsider it may seem terribly passé, for me it isn't. This was my first film in which I felt I was functioning independently, with a style of my own, making a film all my own, with a particular appearance of its own, which no one could ape. It was like no other film. It was all my own work. Suddenly I knew I was putting the camera on the right spot, getting the right results; that everything added up. For sentimental reasons, too, it was also fun making it."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
•••••
"I had always felt technically crippled—insecure with the crew, the cameras, the sound equipment—everything. Sometimes a film succeeded, but I never got what I wanted to get. But in Summer Interlude, I suddenly felt that I knew my profession."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Charles Thomas Samuels, 1971
•••••
"We filmed it in Stockholm's outer archipelago. The landscape had a special mixture of tempered countryside and wilderness, which played an important part in the different time schemes, in the luminescence of summer and in the autumnal twilight. A touch of genuine tenderness is achieved through Maj-Britt Nilsson's performance. The camera catches her with an affection that is easy to comprehend. She embraced the girl's story and lifted it higher with her brilliant mixture of playfulness and seriousness. The filming became one of my happy experiences."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, 1990
(Zeit mit Monika [de] • Monika [fr])
Sweden 1953
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
Sweden 1953
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
sc: Ingmar Bergman, Pers Anders Fogelstrom (based on a novel "Monika" by Pers Anders Fogelstrom)
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Tage Holmberg, Gösta Lewin
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell, Naemi Briese, Åke Grönberg, Sigge Fürst, John Harryson
pr: 09 Feb 1953
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Tage Holmberg, Gösta Lewin
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Dagmar Ebbesen, Åke Fridell, Naemi Briese, Åke Grönberg, Sigge Fürst, John Harryson
pr: 09 Feb 1953
rt: 91:54 (+4%PAL= 96) min
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Sommarlek" (1951)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Sommarlek" (1951)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
A tender yet unsentimental account of a love affair that turns sour. Harriet Andersson gives a precociously assured performance as a wild, feckless girl from Stockholm's poorer quarter who falls in love with a 19-year-old youth. During an idyllic motor-boat holiday among the islands of the Stockholm archipelago, the girl becomes pregnant and the couple, forced to marry, set up home in a tiny, cramped flat. Very soon, love gives way to distrust and hostility, and they agree to part. Bergman's sympathetic eye and Gunnar Fischer's atmospheric photography invest the locations with a poetic significance, the light and open spaces of the holiday islands contrasted tellingly with the dark claustrophobia of the city, where the flame of the couple's love is slowly extinguished by the lack of air.
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Critics touted Monika as "Bergman's most erotic film" for its theme of a young man's sexual awakening and scenes of nudity on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. But this summer interlude is surrounded by some of the bleakest commentary of Bergman's early cinema, in a city captured in all its shadows and empty light by the expert cinematographer Gunnar Fischer. Monika (Harriet Andersson), a restless, sexually harassed vegetable seller, and her more bourgeois boyfriend Harry take off in his father's boat for the islands. There she teaches him how to dance and how to make love, how to steal vegetables, and they dream of a family. But Borzage lovers turn into characters out of Pierrot le fou. Monika, now pregnant, becomes a woman of the reeds. A shot of a spider web seems to announce Bergman deserting his young heroine, leaving her to founder in femme fatalism (eternal spider to man's fly) and a life of dubious freedom.
— PFA
•••••
The most famous reflexive moment is when Monika sits in a café near the end of the film, having seemingly – almost inadvertently – rejected the conventional moral codes of the time (familial responsibility, monogamy, motherhood and a broadly Christian social contract). Godard and Truffaut, who would both later copy this image and the iconic narrative arc of the film, were enraptured by Monika as she sits smoking a cigarette, then slowly turns towards the camera to stare straight out at us. This shot is indeed radical in a fairly classical film, yet it merely makes explicit what pervades all of Monika's Stockholm scenes. It contains both the film's surface (but reflexive and stylised) realism, then directly forces on the viewer the means of that textual construction via the stare straight to camera. Then Bergman theatrically blackens out a background world we thought was real, leaving only the abstracted surface of a woman's face looking right at us in the dark.
Perhaps most importantly, the direct gaze at the audience raises a difficult complicity. We might have looked down on Monika's naïve investment in the Hollywood melodrama and her attempts to act it out in the real world, but when she looks directly at us watching 'our' film, the viewer's belief in Monika's diegetic reality is humbled. And the radical energy and nihilism that fuels her character is here emphasised as having been there all along, our romantic and erotic investment in Monika's persona and fictional gestures notwithstanding.
Despite the formal-thematic interest of the Stockholm sequences, the experience of Summer with Monika is probably dominated by the lengthy island sequence in which Monika and Harry's affair goes from rebellious euphoria to the chilly awakening from what he finally says has been a dream. It is perhaps best to resist describing the largely wordless rendering of this fantasy-idyll, wherein all Bergman's Scandinavian ambivalence about nature and summer is intricately articulated by the multiple dissolve cuts and non-narrative compositions which make this film so visually sumptuous.
The island sequence is famous enough, but the journey to and from this sublime time and space also receives important attention in the film. We experience at some length the characters' gleeful travelling from the city, and then following the end of summer, their doom-laden return. These sequences along the waterways of Stockholm (accompanied by each trip's contrasting soundtrack) that bookend the island sequence, emotionally and aesthetically suture the viewer into the film's world, further sealing our complicity (enforced by the later direct stares to camera) in the performances, desires and tragedies played out on-screen throughout.
— Hamish Ford, Senses of Cinema February 2003
•••••
"I've always felt great affection for this movie...for several reasons. Partly because I think it's a good movie. It was all a stroke of luck. I met [Per Anders] Fogelström, who wrote the novel Summer with Monika, on the Kungsgatan. He'd written other scripts for Svensk Filmindustri, and we knew each other pretty well from before. I asked him if he was working on anything, and he replied that he was in fact writing a story about two young people with lousy jobs, each on their own. 'Really?' I said. 'That sounds like a film. Can't you make a script out of it?' 'Certainly,' he said. And so he wrote this script fairly quickly. I took it to Svensk Filmindustri...naturally. And it created considerable turmoil, because they considered it indecent, immoral—I don't know what. Nobody would want to see this stuff. There was no end to people's objections. But I explained to them that it would be a very inexpensive movie. We'd leave for the archipelago and they wouldn't see us for six weeks. And on our return we'd bring them a finished film. So, the next issue was who was to play the young girl. At that time, Harriet Andersson—she wasn't making her debut, because she'd had a small part in a movie called Biffen och Bananen. I thought she was very, very good. She was on stage at the Casino—No, it was called the Scalateatern, down at Norra Bantorget. It was a theatre for variety shows at the time. There she was in a negligee...and fishnet stockings, singing suggestive songs with immense charisma. It was such a fun production, and Harriet and I fell in love. It was a kind of fascination with exteriors. And it influenced the filming as well. In a way it's—I still think it holds its own."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Critics touted Monika as "Bergman's most erotic film" for its theme of a young man's sexual awakening and scenes of nudity on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. But this summer interlude is surrounded by some of the bleakest commentary of Bergman's early cinema, in a city captured in all its shadows and empty light by the expert cinematographer Gunnar Fischer. Monika (Harriet Andersson), a restless, sexually harassed vegetable seller, and her more bourgeois boyfriend Harry take off in his father's boat for the islands. There she teaches him how to dance and how to make love, how to steal vegetables, and they dream of a family. But Borzage lovers turn into characters out of Pierrot le fou. Monika, now pregnant, becomes a woman of the reeds. A shot of a spider web seems to announce Bergman deserting his young heroine, leaving her to founder in femme fatalism (eternal spider to man's fly) and a life of dubious freedom.
— PFA
•••••
The most famous reflexive moment is when Monika sits in a café near the end of the film, having seemingly – almost inadvertently – rejected the conventional moral codes of the time (familial responsibility, monogamy, motherhood and a broadly Christian social contract). Godard and Truffaut, who would both later copy this image and the iconic narrative arc of the film, were enraptured by Monika as she sits smoking a cigarette, then slowly turns towards the camera to stare straight out at us. This shot is indeed radical in a fairly classical film, yet it merely makes explicit what pervades all of Monika's Stockholm scenes. It contains both the film's surface (but reflexive and stylised) realism, then directly forces on the viewer the means of that textual construction via the stare straight to camera. Then Bergman theatrically blackens out a background world we thought was real, leaving only the abstracted surface of a woman's face looking right at us in the dark.
Perhaps most importantly, the direct gaze at the audience raises a difficult complicity. We might have looked down on Monika's naïve investment in the Hollywood melodrama and her attempts to act it out in the real world, but when she looks directly at us watching 'our' film, the viewer's belief in Monika's diegetic reality is humbled. And the radical energy and nihilism that fuels her character is here emphasised as having been there all along, our romantic and erotic investment in Monika's persona and fictional gestures notwithstanding.
Despite the formal-thematic interest of the Stockholm sequences, the experience of Summer with Monika is probably dominated by the lengthy island sequence in which Monika and Harry's affair goes from rebellious euphoria to the chilly awakening from what he finally says has been a dream. It is perhaps best to resist describing the largely wordless rendering of this fantasy-idyll, wherein all Bergman's Scandinavian ambivalence about nature and summer is intricately articulated by the multiple dissolve cuts and non-narrative compositions which make this film so visually sumptuous.
The island sequence is famous enough, but the journey to and from this sublime time and space also receives important attention in the film. We experience at some length the characters' gleeful travelling from the city, and then following the end of summer, their doom-laden return. These sequences along the waterways of Stockholm (accompanied by each trip's contrasting soundtrack) that bookend the island sequence, emotionally and aesthetically suture the viewer into the film's world, further sealing our complicity (enforced by the later direct stares to camera) in the performances, desires and tragedies played out on-screen throughout.
— Hamish Ford, Senses of Cinema February 2003
•••••
"I've always felt great affection for this movie...for several reasons. Partly because I think it's a good movie. It was all a stroke of luck. I met [Per Anders] Fogelström, who wrote the novel Summer with Monika, on the Kungsgatan. He'd written other scripts for Svensk Filmindustri, and we knew each other pretty well from before. I asked him if he was working on anything, and he replied that he was in fact writing a story about two young people with lousy jobs, each on their own. 'Really?' I said. 'That sounds like a film. Can't you make a script out of it?' 'Certainly,' he said. And so he wrote this script fairly quickly. I took it to Svensk Filmindustri...naturally. And it created considerable turmoil, because they considered it indecent, immoral—I don't know what. Nobody would want to see this stuff. There was no end to people's objections. But I explained to them that it would be a very inexpensive movie. We'd leave for the archipelago and they wouldn't see us for six weeks. And on our return we'd bring them a finished film. So, the next issue was who was to play the young girl. At that time, Harriet Andersson—she wasn't making her debut, because she'd had a small part in a movie called Biffen och Bananen. I thought she was very, very good. She was on stage at the Casino—No, it was called the Scalateatern, down at Norra Bantorget. It was a theatre for variety shows at the time. There she was in a negligee...and fishnet stockings, singing suggestive songs with immense charisma. It was such a fun production, and Harriet and I fell in love. It was a kind of fascination with exteriors. And it influenced the filming as well. In a way it's—I still think it holds its own."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
(Das Lächeln einer Sommernacht [de] • Sourires d'une nuit d'été [fr])
Sweden 1955
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)
Sweden 1955
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, Margit Carlqvist, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jarl Kulle, Åke Fridell, Björn Bjelfvenstam, Naima Wifstrand, Jullan Kindahl, Gull Natorp, Birgitta Valberg, Bibi Andersson
pr: 26 Dez 1955
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Ulla Jacobsson, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, Margit Carlqvist, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jarl Kulle, Åke Fridell, Björn Bjelfvenstam, Naima Wifstrand, Jullan Kindahl, Gull Natorp, Birgitta Valberg, Bibi Andersson
pr: 26 Dez 1955
rt: 104:33 (+4%PAL= 108) min
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie • Double Feature with "Djävulens öga" (1960) // Leaflet with Production Notes
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie • Double Feature with "Djävulens öga" (1960) // Leaflet with Production Notes
Bergman's first major success, inspiration for both Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music" and Woody Allen's "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy", this enchanting comedy of manners assembles a team of couples, ex-couples and would-be couples, and puts them through their paces in a game of love at a country house party during one heady midsummer weekend in 1900. Ruthless towards its characters' amorous pretensions, but extending a kind of ironic tenderness when they get hoist with their own petards, it is a wonderfully funny, genuinely erotic, and quite superbly acted rondo of love. Dig too deeply and it disintegrates, but its facade - decked out in elegant turn-of-the-century settings and costumes - has a magical, shimmering beauty.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
We see a different side of Bergman in one of the cinema's great erotic comedies. The plot is an Ophulsian ronde of love affairs and intrigues revolving around a middle-aged lawyer (Gunnar Björnstrand); his young wife who remains a virgin; his former mistress, a sophisticated stage actress (Eva Dahlbeck); her lover, and his wife. They gather for a weekend at the country estate of the actress's elderly mother, who works a kind of magic on this ménage of infinite possibilities. A true parody of the ridiculous male, this is a comic working-out of an idea suggested so tragically in "Sawdust and Tinsel"-that men are a species of beast who turn to women to save them from being totally humiliated. Not always a smart move. Woody Allen brilliantly reworked "Smiles of a Summer Night" in "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy", and the film also inspired the Broadway play "A Little Night Music".
— PFA
•••••
Ingmar Bergman achieves one of the few classics of carnal comedy: a tragicomic chase and roundelay that raises boudoir farce to elegance and lyric poetry. This film is the culmination of Bergman's 'rose' style; as writer and director, he ties up his persistent, early battle-of-the-sexes themes in an intricate plot structure. And in this fin-de-siècle houseparty setting, with its soft light, its delicate, perfumed atmosphere, and its golden pavilion, the women are all beautiful and epigrams shine. The film becomes an elegy to transient love; a gust of wind, and the whole vision may drift away.
— Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
•••••
"[This] film was a turning point for me in every way. When it was finished, it was a success everywhere. Svensk Filmindustri earned a huge amount of money on it...and so they gave me free rein. It was very strange. I didn't even know they had entered it at Cannes. I had no idea. I remember sitting on the toilet, reading the morning paper, when suddenly I saw the headline: 'Swedish Success at Cannes.' 'That's great,' I thought to myself. 'A Swedish success at Cannes.' Then I saw it was Smiles of a Summer Night, which they had taken to the festival without even asking me. I was so damned poor...and I was going with Bibi Andersson at the time. She was fairly well-off, doing all these film roles, so I borrowed money from her for the plane ticket. I went down to Cannes without asking anybody. And there they were, manager Carl Anders Dymling, and the manager for overseas affairs too. Svensk Filmindustri was suddenly behaving like an old spinster...who had never been asked to dance and suddenly finds herself surrounded by lots of young gentlemen. It was total confusion, but since the success of Smiles of a Summer Night, I've never had anybody interfering in my business. I've always done whatever I wanted. In a way it was a bit sad, because there wasn't always a Lorens Marmstedt, someone with whom I could discuss my scripts. Which I would have been happy to do—have a professional to discuss them with....I like it. I always have. If you think of the miserable conditions under which it was produced, it's amazing that it's so cheerful and carefree, with its lightly serious tone. I still find it funny."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
We see a different side of Bergman in one of the cinema's great erotic comedies. The plot is an Ophulsian ronde of love affairs and intrigues revolving around a middle-aged lawyer (Gunnar Björnstrand); his young wife who remains a virgin; his former mistress, a sophisticated stage actress (Eva Dahlbeck); her lover, and his wife. They gather for a weekend at the country estate of the actress's elderly mother, who works a kind of magic on this ménage of infinite possibilities. A true parody of the ridiculous male, this is a comic working-out of an idea suggested so tragically in "Sawdust and Tinsel"-that men are a species of beast who turn to women to save them from being totally humiliated. Not always a smart move. Woody Allen brilliantly reworked "Smiles of a Summer Night" in "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy", and the film also inspired the Broadway play "A Little Night Music".
— PFA
•••••
Ingmar Bergman achieves one of the few classics of carnal comedy: a tragicomic chase and roundelay that raises boudoir farce to elegance and lyric poetry. This film is the culmination of Bergman's 'rose' style; as writer and director, he ties up his persistent, early battle-of-the-sexes themes in an intricate plot structure. And in this fin-de-siècle houseparty setting, with its soft light, its delicate, perfumed atmosphere, and its golden pavilion, the women are all beautiful and epigrams shine. The film becomes an elegy to transient love; a gust of wind, and the whole vision may drift away.
— Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
•••••
"[This] film was a turning point for me in every way. When it was finished, it was a success everywhere. Svensk Filmindustri earned a huge amount of money on it...and so they gave me free rein. It was very strange. I didn't even know they had entered it at Cannes. I had no idea. I remember sitting on the toilet, reading the morning paper, when suddenly I saw the headline: 'Swedish Success at Cannes.' 'That's great,' I thought to myself. 'A Swedish success at Cannes.' Then I saw it was Smiles of a Summer Night, which they had taken to the festival without even asking me. I was so damned poor...and I was going with Bibi Andersson at the time. She was fairly well-off, doing all these film roles, so I borrowed money from her for the plane ticket. I went down to Cannes without asking anybody. And there they were, manager Carl Anders Dymling, and the manager for overseas affairs too. Svensk Filmindustri was suddenly behaving like an old spinster...who had never been asked to dance and suddenly finds herself surrounded by lots of young gentlemen. It was total confusion, but since the success of Smiles of a Summer Night, I've never had anybody interfering in my business. I've always done whatever I wanted. In a way it was a bit sad, because there wasn't always a Lorens Marmstedt, someone with whom I could discuss my scripts. Which I would have been happy to do—have a professional to discuss them with....I like it. I always have. If you think of the miserable conditions under which it was produced, it's amazing that it's so cheerful and carefree, with its lightly serious tone. I still find it funny."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
(Das siebte Siegel [de] • The Seventh Seal [en] )
Sweden 1957
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
Sweden 1957
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Ingmar Bergman (from his play "Trämalning")
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Lennart Wallén
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Eric Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Inga Gill, Maud Hansson, Inga Landgré, Gunnel Lindblom, Bertil Anderberg, Anders Ek, Åke Fridell, Gunnar Olsson, Erik Strandmark
pr: 16 Feb 1957
aw: Cannes Film Festival 1957 Jury Special Prize Ingmar Bergman - Tied with Kanal (1957) // Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists 1961 Silver Ribbon Regista del Miglior Film Straniero Ingmar Bergman
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Lennart Wallén
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Eric Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Gunnar Björnstrand, Bengt Ekerot, Nils Poppe, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Inga Gill, Maud Hansson, Inga Landgré, Gunnel Lindblom, Bertil Anderberg, Anders Ek, Åke Fridell, Gunnar Olsson, Erik Strandmark
pr: 16 Feb 1957
aw: Cannes Film Festival 1957 Jury Special Prize Ingmar Bergman - Tied with Kanal (1957) // Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists 1961 Silver Ribbon Regista del Miglior Film Straniero Ingmar Bergman
rt: 97:01 min
dvd-rl: 02 Feb 1999
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • English dubbed Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #100
This digital transfer was created from a new 35mm fine-grain master positive made from the restored camera negative. The Swedish sound was created from a 35mm magnetic audio track
• Audio commentary by Ingmar Bergman-biographer Peter Cowie
• An annotated Bergman filmography, featuring clips from "Wild Strawberries" (4:34 min) and "The Magician" (7:31 min) with commentary by Peter Cowie
• Theatrical trailer (2:39 min)
• Restauration Demonstration (3:20 min)
• Leaflet with Liner Essay by Peter Cowie
dvd-rl: 02 Feb 1999
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • English dubbed Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #100
This digital transfer was created from a new 35mm fine-grain master positive made from the restored camera negative. The Swedish sound was created from a 35mm magnetic audio track
• Audio commentary by Ingmar Bergman-biographer Peter Cowie
• An annotated Bergman filmography, featuring clips from "Wild Strawberries" (4:34 min) and "The Magician" (7:31 min) with commentary by Peter Cowie
• Theatrical trailer (2:39 min)
• Restauration Demonstration (3:20 min)
• Leaflet with Liner Essay by Peter Cowie
Bergman's portentous medieval allegory takes its title from the Book of Revelations - 'And when he (the Lamb) opened the seventh seal, there was a silence in heaven about the space of half an hour'. In the opening scene, a knight returning from the Crusades is challenged to a game of chess by the cloaked figure of Death (Ekerot), and from this point onwards an air of doom hangs over the action, like the hawk which hovers in the air above them. The time of Death and Judgement prophesied in the Bible has arrived, and a plague is sweeping the land. Bergman fills the screen with striking images: the knight and Death playing chess for the former's life, a band of flagellants swinging smoking censers, a young witch manacled to a stake. Probably the most parodied film of all time, this nevertheless contains some of the most extraordinary images ever committed to celluloid. Whether they are able to carry the metaphysical and allegorical weight with which they have been loaded is open to question.
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
It may be folly to think that life and thus death hold any secrets. In "The Seventh Seal" Bergman spoke to this modern query in a medieval setting rendered at once awesome and intimate in chiaroscuro. A knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) return disillusioned from the Crusades to the hysteria of plague-infested fourteenth-century Sweden. On the shore Block encounters Death and, in one of the most effective reverse-angle exchanges ever filmed, challenges him to a game of chess, playing for time to perform one significant act in life. What is timeless about this existential passion play is the humanity of its characters, who seem to shun allegory like a kind of narrative death: Block, whom the Crusades took away from the real-the only proof of God-to the abstract, and torment; Jöns, cynical sensualist who articulates the void; Death himself, a picture of inconclusiveness; and the dreamer Jof and his wild-strawberry wife (Bibi Andersson), actors traveling into light.
— PFA
•••••
"I wrote this film to conjure up my own fear of dying. Death was therefore to have a starring role and was to take part from the very beginning. And then I was considering—I knew that the knight and Jöns were traveling through a plague-infected landscape. And so I contemplated in what situation this knight would meet death. It was very natural for me to think of Albertus Pictor's painting. He was the famous medieval church painter. There's a painting that depicts...Death playing chess with a knight. So it all came naturally....[I haven't seen this film in] a very long time. I don't watch my own movies very often. I get—I get nervous and start to cry. I need to pee and feel miserable. It's terrible. But the way I remember it—I don't know how many films I've made. Maybe around 50, if you count those made for TV. Somewhere between 50 and 60. If I say I've made ten good films, that I feel I can stand up for, I think The Seventh Seal is among them. Yes, I'm certain of it."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
It may be folly to think that life and thus death hold any secrets. In "The Seventh Seal" Bergman spoke to this modern query in a medieval setting rendered at once awesome and intimate in chiaroscuro. A knight, Antonius Block (Max von Sydow), and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand) return disillusioned from the Crusades to the hysteria of plague-infested fourteenth-century Sweden. On the shore Block encounters Death and, in one of the most effective reverse-angle exchanges ever filmed, challenges him to a game of chess, playing for time to perform one significant act in life. What is timeless about this existential passion play is the humanity of its characters, who seem to shun allegory like a kind of narrative death: Block, whom the Crusades took away from the real-the only proof of God-to the abstract, and torment; Jöns, cynical sensualist who articulates the void; Death himself, a picture of inconclusiveness; and the dreamer Jof and his wild-strawberry wife (Bibi Andersson), actors traveling into light.
— PFA
•••••
"I wrote this film to conjure up my own fear of dying. Death was therefore to have a starring role and was to take part from the very beginning. And then I was considering—I knew that the knight and Jöns were traveling through a plague-infected landscape. And so I contemplated in what situation this knight would meet death. It was very natural for me to think of Albertus Pictor's painting. He was the famous medieval church painter. There's a painting that depicts...Death playing chess with a knight. So it all came naturally....[I haven't seen this film in] a very long time. I don't watch my own movies very often. I get—I get nervous and start to cry. I need to pee and feel miserable. It's terrible. But the way I remember it—I don't know how many films I've made. Maybe around 50, if you count those made for TV. Somewhere between 50 and 60. If I say I've made ten good films, that I feel I can stand up for, I think The Seventh Seal is among them. Yes, I'm certain of it."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
(Wilde Erdbeeren [de] • Wild Strawberries [en])
Sweden 1957
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
Sweden 1957
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: Gittan Gustafsson
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Victor Sjöström, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jullan Kindahl, Folke Sundquist, Björn Bjelfvenstam, Naima Wifstrand, Gunnel Broström, Gertrud Fridh, Sif Ruud, Gunnar Sjöberg, Max von Sydow, Åke Fridell, Yngve Nordwall
pr: 26 Dez 1957
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: Gittan Gustafsson
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Victor Sjöström, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jullan Kindahl, Folke Sundquist, Björn Bjelfvenstam, Naima Wifstrand, Gunnel Broström, Gertrud Fridh, Sif Ruud, Gunnar Sjöberg, Max von Sydow, Åke Fridell, Yngve Nordwall
pr: 26 Dez 1957
rt: 91:47 min
dvd-rl: 12 Feb 2002
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #139
This new digital transfer was created from a new 35mm composite print, made from the original camera negative
• Audio Commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie
• "Ingmar Bergman: Om liv och arbete", a 1998 documentary by filmmaker and author Jörn Donner (90:35 min)
• Stills gallery, featuring rare behind-the-scenes photos
• Booklet with Liner Essay by Peter Cowie
dvd-rl: 12 Feb 2002
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #139
This new digital transfer was created from a new 35mm composite print, made from the original camera negative
• Audio Commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie
• "Ingmar Bergman: Om liv och arbete", a 1998 documentary by filmmaker and author Jörn Donner (90:35 min)
• Stills gallery, featuring rare behind-the-scenes photos
• Booklet with Liner Essay by Peter Cowie
One of Bergman's warmest, and therefore finest films, this concerns an elderly academic - grouchy, introverted, dried up emotionally - who makes a journey to collect a university award, and en route relives his past by means of dreams, imagination, and encounters with others. It's an occasionally over-symbolic work (most notably in the opening nightmare sequence), but it's filled with richly observed characters and a real feeling for the joys of nature and youth. And Sjöström - himself a celebrated director, best known for his silent work (which included the Hollywood masterpiece "The Wind") - gives an astonishingly moving performance as the aged professor. As Bergman himself wrote of his performance in the closing moments: 'His face shone with secretive light, as if reflected from another reality...It was like a miracle'.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Allegorical dreams are integral to the film's theme. Professor Borg's runaway carriage dream is similar to the dream sequence in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, signifying the burden of life, guilt, and inescapability of death. The dream is obscure and surreal, as if the mind is in denial of its fate. In contrast, the summer cottage dream is lucid, nostalgic, and melancholy. Professor Borg reluctantly awakens from it with a profound sense of loss and regret. His most unsettling dream occurs in a lecture hall because it is a place that has defined his existence. Having become alienated from his family, and denied his skills, his life, and legacy, are lost. The final dream occurs after he attempts to reunite Evald and Marianne. Recalling a family picnic by the lake, the effect is warm, peaceful, and redemptive. It is a subtly beautiful affirmation of reconciliation and closure.
— Acquarello
•••••
To honor his debt to the early Swedish cinema and the oneiric quality of its nature cinematography, Ingmar Bergman cast the silent film director and actor Victor Sjöström as the aging pedant Isak Borg in "Wild Strawberries". The film unites two strands in Bergman's work: here, the examination of male vanity finds its apex, and the protagonist is introduced to a severe comeuppance in the face of death. As usual, Bergman does it with mirrors, and with dreams, which are the mind's mirror. Interestingly, the film's Dali/Kafkaesque dream sequences have proved less memorable than the scenes in which natural settings are brilliantly transformed into dreamscapes by virtue of their flashback context. Borg dreams his own death, revisits his youth as a spectator, and learns amid the forgiving wild strawberries (symbolic in Sweden of a favorite spot or sanctuary) that he has always denied desire.
— Judy Bloch
•••••
The mind that Bergman reveals in this film is one corrupted by despair, tormented by human cruelty, seeking salvation in a kind of simple good-heartedness that would be despised in a lesser artist. Perhaps these very features make him a man of his time; perhaps the very confusion of symbols is a relief, being such a rich source of theorising for anyone who likes to construct theories. Whether any of the solutions offered represents Bergman's own intention or not, or whether that intention is communicable at all, is another matter. He is a supremely skilful setter of crossword puzzles. If only we could be sure they had an answer.
— Kenneth Cavander, Sight & Sound, Winter 1958-59
•••••
The conception of Wild Strawberries is roughly parallel to Joyce's Ulysses, with Bergman's protagonist on this Biblical odyssey, like Joyce's, the total man—husband, lover, father, son, poet, laborer, man of thought and man of action, inhabitant of past and present, with mankind's weaknesses and strengths—who, at the end of this ninety-minute film, is presented to the observer, complete. Bergman's achievement in Wild Strawberries is far too complex to be briefly summarized, but the conclusion, when the old man reaches through time to clasp the hand of the charming girl who represents man's aspirations, and weeps over the realization of his loss, is as moving a moment as the screen has ever recorded. The film is frequently harsh, cruel, and finally beautiful, its unforgettable final image, a couple sitting on the river bank, the man's fishing pole forming a perfect arc into the still water, represents Bergman's most personal statement, a comment which is passionately affirmative.
— Eugene Archer, Film Quarterly, Fall 1959
•••••
"Victor Sjöström was an excellent storyteller, funny and engaging—especially if some young, beautiful woman happened to be present. We were sitting at the very source of film history, both Swedish and American. What a pity that tape recorders were not available at this time. All these external facts are easy to recall. What I had not grasped until now was that Victor Sjöström took my text, made it his own, invested it with his own experiences: his pain, his misanthropy, his brutality, sorrow, fear, loneliness, coldness, warmth, harshness, and ennui. Borrowing my father's form, he occupied my soul and made it all his own—there wasn't even a crumb left over for me! He did this with the sovereign power and passion of a gargantuan personality. I had nothing to add, not even a sensible or irrational comment. Wild Strawberries was no longer my film; it was Victor Sjöström's! It is probably worth noting that I never for a moment thought of Sjöström when I was writing the screenplay. The suggestion came from the film's producer, Carls Anders Dymling. And as I recall, I thought long and hard before I agreed to let him have the part."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (1990)
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Allegorical dreams are integral to the film's theme. Professor Borg's runaway carriage dream is similar to the dream sequence in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, signifying the burden of life, guilt, and inescapability of death. The dream is obscure and surreal, as if the mind is in denial of its fate. In contrast, the summer cottage dream is lucid, nostalgic, and melancholy. Professor Borg reluctantly awakens from it with a profound sense of loss and regret. His most unsettling dream occurs in a lecture hall because it is a place that has defined his existence. Having become alienated from his family, and denied his skills, his life, and legacy, are lost. The final dream occurs after he attempts to reunite Evald and Marianne. Recalling a family picnic by the lake, the effect is warm, peaceful, and redemptive. It is a subtly beautiful affirmation of reconciliation and closure.
— Acquarello
•••••
To honor his debt to the early Swedish cinema and the oneiric quality of its nature cinematography, Ingmar Bergman cast the silent film director and actor Victor Sjöström as the aging pedant Isak Borg in "Wild Strawberries". The film unites two strands in Bergman's work: here, the examination of male vanity finds its apex, and the protagonist is introduced to a severe comeuppance in the face of death. As usual, Bergman does it with mirrors, and with dreams, which are the mind's mirror. Interestingly, the film's Dali/Kafkaesque dream sequences have proved less memorable than the scenes in which natural settings are brilliantly transformed into dreamscapes by virtue of their flashback context. Borg dreams his own death, revisits his youth as a spectator, and learns amid the forgiving wild strawberries (symbolic in Sweden of a favorite spot or sanctuary) that he has always denied desire.
— Judy Bloch
•••••
The mind that Bergman reveals in this film is one corrupted by despair, tormented by human cruelty, seeking salvation in a kind of simple good-heartedness that would be despised in a lesser artist. Perhaps these very features make him a man of his time; perhaps the very confusion of symbols is a relief, being such a rich source of theorising for anyone who likes to construct theories. Whether any of the solutions offered represents Bergman's own intention or not, or whether that intention is communicable at all, is another matter. He is a supremely skilful setter of crossword puzzles. If only we could be sure they had an answer.
— Kenneth Cavander, Sight & Sound, Winter 1958-59
•••••
The conception of Wild Strawberries is roughly parallel to Joyce's Ulysses, with Bergman's protagonist on this Biblical odyssey, like Joyce's, the total man—husband, lover, father, son, poet, laborer, man of thought and man of action, inhabitant of past and present, with mankind's weaknesses and strengths—who, at the end of this ninety-minute film, is presented to the observer, complete. Bergman's achievement in Wild Strawberries is far too complex to be briefly summarized, but the conclusion, when the old man reaches through time to clasp the hand of the charming girl who represents man's aspirations, and weeps over the realization of his loss, is as moving a moment as the screen has ever recorded. The film is frequently harsh, cruel, and finally beautiful, its unforgettable final image, a couple sitting on the river bank, the man's fishing pole forming a perfect arc into the still water, represents Bergman's most personal statement, a comment which is passionately affirmative.
— Eugene Archer, Film Quarterly, Fall 1959
•••••
"Victor Sjöström was an excellent storyteller, funny and engaging—especially if some young, beautiful woman happened to be present. We were sitting at the very source of film history, both Swedish and American. What a pity that tape recorders were not available at this time. All these external facts are easy to recall. What I had not grasped until now was that Victor Sjöström took my text, made it his own, invested it with his own experiences: his pain, his misanthropy, his brutality, sorrow, fear, loneliness, coldness, warmth, harshness, and ennui. Borrowing my father's form, he occupied my soul and made it all his own—there wasn't even a crumb left over for me! He did this with the sovereign power and passion of a gargantuan personality. I had nothing to add, not even a sensible or irrational comment. Wild Strawberries was no longer my film; it was Victor Sjöström's! It is probably worth noting that I never for a moment thought of Sjöström when I was writing the screenplay. The suggestion came from the film's producer, Carls Anders Dymling. And as I recall, I thought long and hard before I agreed to let him have the part."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (1990)
(Die Jungfrauenquelle [de] • La source [fr])
Sweden 1960
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
Sweden 1960
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 2 fr)
sc: Ulla Isaksson (based on the 14th-century ballad "Tores Dotter I Vange")
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Ingmar Bergman, Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson, Axel Düberg, Tor Isedal, Allan Edwall, Ove Porath, Axel Slangus, Gudrun Brost, Oscar Ljung, Tor Borong, Leif Forstenberg
pr: 08 Feb 1960
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren
p: Ingmar Bergman, Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson, Axel Düberg, Tor Isedal, Allan Edwall, Ove Porath, Axel Slangus, Gudrun Brost, Oscar Ljung, Tor Borong, Leif Forstenberg
pr: 08 Feb 1960
rt: 85:31 (+4%PAL= 89) min
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono • French Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Till glädje" (1950)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono • French Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Till glädje" (1950)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
Bergman won his first Oscar for this cruel but unsensational medieval allegory, a tale of superstition, religious faith, rape and revenge set in a 14th century Sweden where the populace is vacillating between Christianity and paganism. On her way to church, the 15-year-old virgin daughter (Pettersson) of peasant parents (von Sydow and Valberg) is raped by two goatherds. Later, in a bizarre twist of fate, the culprits ask for food and shelter at the house of the dead girl's parents. Discovering the truth when the goatherds offer to sell them their dead daughter's bloodstained clothes, the parents exact a brutal revenge. The formal simplicity and overt symbolism (light and dark, fire and water) undercut the potentially sensationalist elements of the material, Sven Nykvist's luminous black-and-white photography conspiring with the austerity of Bergman's imagery to create an extraordinary metaphysical charge.
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Adapted from a fourteenth century Swedish legend by screenwriter and novelist Ulla Isaksson, The Virgin Spring is a harrowing, yet ultimately affirming portrait of faith, humanity, and atonement. Using chiaroscuro imagery that interplays light and shadows, Ingmar Bergman reflects the process of spiritual illumination in the transitional era of the Middle Ages where mysticism, amorality, and paganism coexisted with the period of intellectual, artistic, and religious enlightenment: the opening image of Ingeri performing her chores that transitions into an illuminated crucifix as Töre and Märeta pray; the physical dissimilarity between the fair haired Karin and the dark haired "adopted" Ingeri; the stark visual contrast between the dark and claustrophobic interiors of the farmhouse and the sunlit path along the stream; the light precipitation of snow after the brothers' unconscionable act. As Ingeri (the allusional fallen sinner, Mary Magdalene) becomes a witness to the manifestation of secular discord and divine grace, she follows her own figurative path from religious darkness and moral bankruptcy to a state of spiritual baptism and enlightenment.
— Acquarello
•••••
Following the international success of "The Seventh Seal", Bergman turned to this medieval folk-tale about a farming family's revenge of a brutal rape and murder. The tale unfolds with a biblical simplicity and Bergman's visual storytelling (his first collaboration with sacred cinematographer Sven Nykvist) is so powerful and sustained that one could turn the sound off and still follow the story. Each image foretells, recalls or incorporates another image, from the opening shot of a pregnant daughter to magical minutiae like a toad in bread or a crucifix. The religious process of symbolization in Bergman's medieval morality plays never completely obscures his characteristic agnostic questioning, because the director balances the visions against his modern psychological perception. Like Kurosawa's Rashomon, which it strongly resembles, "The Virgin Spring" raises moral questions that elevate the film above the violent story.
— Tom Kemper, PFA
•••••
Bergman's films are characterised by their serious and contemplative tone, measured pace, and formal technique. These characteristics are often used by filmmakers to distance the viewer from the drama on screen and allow them to examine events objectively, but here they serve to render the horrific events in the film even more realistic and shocking. In this case, Bergman's realistic presentation of events and his portrayal of the family as “ordinary” people, suggests that he wants to pull us into the unfolding drama, not keep us safely away from it. Throughout the film, we share the viewpoint – and are made to identify with – various characters, including the boy who accompanies the two herdsmen. ...
Images of nature, such as earth, water and fire, recur throughout the film. This may reflect the beauty and purity of the rural environment, but it also suggests that nature can be primal, violent and dangerous. A shock cut to a crow crying out as Karin and Ingeri approach the forest on their journey alerts us, in no uncertain terms, that something terrible awaits the characters if they venture any further, and the frog that Karin hides in Karin's bread as a spiteful gesture looks like an act of witchcraft. The violent rape and murder of Karin, along with the subsequent brutal retribution that is meted out to her attackers by her father, are staged with virtually no any dialogue. We can only watch as these terrible events are played out before us in near silence and ask, as the father will later do, why God has permitted such a terrible thing to happen to his daughter.
Throughout the film, the mother and father have maintained a staunch belief in God, but the bleak events of the film force the father to question his faith, a dilemma that dominates many Bergman films. As well as the father voicing doubts about his beliefs, the mother and Ingeri also express the guilt and responsibility that they feel concerning Karin's death. When a sign of hope – and the possibility of redemption – is finally presented to the family, it may strike some as an uncharacteristically optimistic ending for a Bergman film and a surprisingly “fantastic” element to appear in a film that has hitherto maintained a largely realistic tone. The “virgin spring” that magically appears may be a sign that God has acknowledged the father's offer of penance for exacting his revenge on the herdsmen, but the father's murderous act of vengeance and Ingeri's failure to help Karin are sins that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
— Martyn Bamber, Senses of Cinema August 2004
•••••
"A film which was one of my shadiest, it seems to me just now, was The Virgin Spring. I admit it contains a couple of passages with immense acceleration and vitality, and it has some sort of cinematic appeal. The idea of making something out of the old folk-song 'Herr Töre of Venge's Daughters' was a sound one. But then the jiggery-pokery began—the spiritual jiggery-pokery. I wanted to make a blackly brutal mediaeval ballad in the simple form of a folk-song. But while talking it all over with the authoress, Ulla Isaksson, I began psychologizing. That was the first mistake, the introduction of a therapeutic idea: that the building of their church would heal these people. Obviously it was therapeutic; but artistically it was utterly uninteresting. And then, the introduction of a totally unanalyzed idea of God. The mixture of the real active depiction of violence, which has a certain artistic potency, with all this other shady stuff—today I find it all dreadfully triste....A fine example of how one's motifs can get all tangled up, and how limitations and weaknesses one isn't clear about—intellectual shortcomings, inability to see through one's own motives—can transform a work as it develops."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Adapted from a fourteenth century Swedish legend by screenwriter and novelist Ulla Isaksson, The Virgin Spring is a harrowing, yet ultimately affirming portrait of faith, humanity, and atonement. Using chiaroscuro imagery that interplays light and shadows, Ingmar Bergman reflects the process of spiritual illumination in the transitional era of the Middle Ages where mysticism, amorality, and paganism coexisted with the period of intellectual, artistic, and religious enlightenment: the opening image of Ingeri performing her chores that transitions into an illuminated crucifix as Töre and Märeta pray; the physical dissimilarity between the fair haired Karin and the dark haired "adopted" Ingeri; the stark visual contrast between the dark and claustrophobic interiors of the farmhouse and the sunlit path along the stream; the light precipitation of snow after the brothers' unconscionable act. As Ingeri (the allusional fallen sinner, Mary Magdalene) becomes a witness to the manifestation of secular discord and divine grace, she follows her own figurative path from religious darkness and moral bankruptcy to a state of spiritual baptism and enlightenment.
— Acquarello
•••••
Following the international success of "The Seventh Seal", Bergman turned to this medieval folk-tale about a farming family's revenge of a brutal rape and murder. The tale unfolds with a biblical simplicity and Bergman's visual storytelling (his first collaboration with sacred cinematographer Sven Nykvist) is so powerful and sustained that one could turn the sound off and still follow the story. Each image foretells, recalls or incorporates another image, from the opening shot of a pregnant daughter to magical minutiae like a toad in bread or a crucifix. The religious process of symbolization in Bergman's medieval morality plays never completely obscures his characteristic agnostic questioning, because the director balances the visions against his modern psychological perception. Like Kurosawa's Rashomon, which it strongly resembles, "The Virgin Spring" raises moral questions that elevate the film above the violent story.
— Tom Kemper, PFA
•••••
Bergman's films are characterised by their serious and contemplative tone, measured pace, and formal technique. These characteristics are often used by filmmakers to distance the viewer from the drama on screen and allow them to examine events objectively, but here they serve to render the horrific events in the film even more realistic and shocking. In this case, Bergman's realistic presentation of events and his portrayal of the family as “ordinary” people, suggests that he wants to pull us into the unfolding drama, not keep us safely away from it. Throughout the film, we share the viewpoint – and are made to identify with – various characters, including the boy who accompanies the two herdsmen. ...
Images of nature, such as earth, water and fire, recur throughout the film. This may reflect the beauty and purity of the rural environment, but it also suggests that nature can be primal, violent and dangerous. A shock cut to a crow crying out as Karin and Ingeri approach the forest on their journey alerts us, in no uncertain terms, that something terrible awaits the characters if they venture any further, and the frog that Karin hides in Karin's bread as a spiteful gesture looks like an act of witchcraft. The violent rape and murder of Karin, along with the subsequent brutal retribution that is meted out to her attackers by her father, are staged with virtually no any dialogue. We can only watch as these terrible events are played out before us in near silence and ask, as the father will later do, why God has permitted such a terrible thing to happen to his daughter.
Throughout the film, the mother and father have maintained a staunch belief in God, but the bleak events of the film force the father to question his faith, a dilemma that dominates many Bergman films. As well as the father voicing doubts about his beliefs, the mother and Ingeri also express the guilt and responsibility that they feel concerning Karin's death. When a sign of hope – and the possibility of redemption – is finally presented to the family, it may strike some as an uncharacteristically optimistic ending for a Bergman film and a surprisingly “fantastic” element to appear in a film that has hitherto maintained a largely realistic tone. The “virgin spring” that magically appears may be a sign that God has acknowledged the father's offer of penance for exacting his revenge on the herdsmen, but the father's murderous act of vengeance and Ingeri's failure to help Karin are sins that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
— Martyn Bamber, Senses of Cinema August 2004
•••••
"A film which was one of my shadiest, it seems to me just now, was The Virgin Spring. I admit it contains a couple of passages with immense acceleration and vitality, and it has some sort of cinematic appeal. The idea of making something out of the old folk-song 'Herr Töre of Venge's Daughters' was a sound one. But then the jiggery-pokery began—the spiritual jiggery-pokery. I wanted to make a blackly brutal mediaeval ballad in the simple form of a folk-song. But while talking it all over with the authoress, Ulla Isaksson, I began psychologizing. That was the first mistake, the introduction of a therapeutic idea: that the building of their church would heal these people. Obviously it was therapeutic; but artistically it was utterly uninteresting. And then, the introduction of a totally unanalyzed idea of God. The mixture of the real active depiction of violence, which has a certain artistic potency, with all this other shady stuff—today I find it all dreadfully triste....A fine example of how one's motifs can get all tangled up, and how limitations and weaknesses one isn't clear about—intellectual shortcomings, inability to see through one's own motives—can transform a work as it develops."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
(Die Jungfrauenbrücke [de] • L'œuil du diable [fr])
Sweden 1960
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)
Sweden 1960
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)
sc: Ingmar Bergman (based on the Danish radio play "Don Juan Vender tillbage" by Oluf Bang)
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren; Domenico Scarlatti
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Jarl Kulle, Bibi Andersson, Stig Järrel, Nils Poppe, Gertrud Fridh, Sture Lagerwall, Georg Funkquist, Gunnar Sjöberg, Torsten Winge, Axel Düberg, Kristina Adolphson, Allan Edwall, Ragnar Arvedson, Gunnar Björnstrand
pr: 17 Okt 1960
c: Gunnar Fischer (b/w)
e: Oscar Rosander
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren; Domenico Scarlatti
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Jarl Kulle, Bibi Andersson, Stig Järrel, Nils Poppe, Gertrud Fridh, Sture Lagerwall, Georg Funkquist, Gunnar Sjöberg, Torsten Winge, Axel Düberg, Kristina Adolphson, Allan Edwall, Ragnar Arvedson, Gunnar Björnstrand
pr: 17 Okt 1960
rt: 83:52 (+4%PAL= 87) min
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Sommarnattens leende" (1955)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
dvd-rl: 17 Apr 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Sommarnattens leende" (1955)
• Leaflet with Production Notes
Bergman's first earnest attempt to grapple with the question of theatricality in cinema. It retells the key incidents in the life of Don Juan, but its account of the seducer's shallow bravado and inner angst and his final despatch to hell is like Fellini's "Casanova" to the power of ten: a 'comedy' from which the laughs have all been drained. It's mounted as an overtly theatrical performance throughout: the episodes are introduced by Bergman veteran Björnstrand, who lectures the audience on what they're seeing and instructs them to view it as comedy. The episodes themselves are highly stylised, with (non-musical) hints of "Don Giovanni" foreshadowing Bergman's declared passion for Mozart opera. The dominant impression, though, as in so many early Bergman movies, is of a deep pessimism that is imposed rather than felt as necessary or productive.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
A seldom-shown, strikingly atypical film by Ingmar Bergman, this is a broad, rather heavy farce in which Don Juan is sent by the devil to seduce that paragon of Swedish respectability, a country parson's daughter. The first part of the film, set in a stylized hell, is a witty, arch symposium on seduction techniques, as Don Juan is briefed for his mission by a panel of legendary rakes, but Bergman reverts to his customary naturalism for the earth-level sequences, and the action turns turgid.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
"The Devil's Eye continues my line of comedies. The studio had bought the rights to a dusty Danish comedy called The Return of Don Juan. [Producer Carl Anders] Dymling and I entered into a shameful agreement. I wanted to direct The Virgin Spring, which he detested. He wanted me to direct The Devil's Eye, which I detested. We were both very satisfied with our agreement through which both could be made, and each one of us felt that we had fooled the other. In reality I had only fooled myself."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
A seldom-shown, strikingly atypical film by Ingmar Bergman, this is a broad, rather heavy farce in which Don Juan is sent by the devil to seduce that paragon of Swedish respectability, a country parson's daughter. The first part of the film, set in a stylized hell, is a witty, arch symposium on seduction techniques, as Don Juan is briefed for his mission by a panel of legendary rakes, but Bergman reverts to his customary naturalism for the earth-level sequences, and the action turns turgid.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
"The Devil's Eye continues my line of comedies. The studio had bought the rights to a dusty Danish comedy called The Return of Don Juan. [Producer Carl Anders] Dymling and I entered into a shameful agreement. I wanted to direct The Virgin Spring, which he detested. He wanted me to direct The Devil's Eye, which I detested. We were both very satisfied with our agreement through which both could be made, and each one of us felt that we had fooled the other. In reality I had only fooled myself."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
(Wie durch einen Spiegel [de] • Through a Glass Darkly [en] )
Sweden 1961
d: Ingmar Bergman
Tartan Video (Region 0 uk)
Sweden 1961
d: Ingmar Bergman
Tartan Video (Region 0 uk)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren; Johann Sebastian Bach
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max von Sydow, Lars Passgård
pr: 16 Okt 1961
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Erik Nordgren; Johann Sebastian Bach
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Max von Sydow, Lars Passgård
pr: 16 Okt 1961
rt: 85:47 (+4%PAL= 89) min
dvd-rl: 19 Nov 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English
supp: • Trailer/Advertisement for Tartan's 'The Ingmar Bergman Collection' (2:53 min)
• Stills Gallery - 5 poorly done stills
• 23 static pages of transcript and questions to Ingmar Bergman (from 'Images - My Life In Film')
• Philip Strick Film Notes - 7 Static pages
• Filmographies of Bergman, Bjornstrand and Thulin
dvd-rl: 19 Nov 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English
supp: • Trailer/Advertisement for Tartan's 'The Ingmar Bergman Collection' (2:53 min)
• Stills Gallery - 5 poorly done stills
• 23 static pages of transcript and questions to Ingmar Bergman (from 'Images - My Life In Film')
• Philip Strick Film Notes - 7 Static pages
• Filmographies of Bergman, Bjornstrand and Thulin
Preserving a strict unity of time and place, this stark tale of a young woman's decline into insanity is set in a summer home on a holiday island. It is the first part of the trilogy that comprises "Winter Light" and "The Silence", films which are generally seen as addressing Bergman's increasing disillusionment with the emotional coldness of his inherited Lutheran religion. In particular here, Bergman focuses on the absence of familial love which might perhaps have pulled Karin (Andersson) back from the brink; while Karin's mental disintegration manifests itself in the belief that God is a spider. As she slips inexorably into madness, she is observed with terrifying objectivity by her emotionally paralysed father (Björnstrand) and seemingly helpless husband (von Sydow).
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"Through a Glass Darkly" is the first film of Ingmar Bergman's religious chamber trilogy, influenced by the minimal instrumentation of chamber music. The film is visually spare, stark, and metaphoric. Note Karin's disintegration inside the hull of a shipwreck, symbolizing the tormented soul. It is a brooding, highly personal film that seeks validation for Bergman's religious upbringing and the essence of God. David tells Minus: "I don't know if love proves God's existence, or love is God Himself." In the end, Karin sees God behind the attic door - and it is a cold, stony faced spider - a painful reflection of her own family's deceptive love: a false god.
— Acquarello
•••••
The first of Bergman’s chamber dramas, Through a Glass Darkly concerns a family vacationing on the Baltic island of Fårö, where their alienation from one another is mirrored in the bleak landscape that surrounds them. The patriarch, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), is a widower and best-selling novelist, whose life is marked solely by professional ambition and emotional detachment. His daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson), is a schizophrenic plagued by rapturous voices that promise the imminent return of God. She is tended by her husband, Martin (Max Von Sydow), and by her younger brother, Minus (Lars Passgard), neither of whom is capable of offering her lasting comfort. Not surprisingly, Bergman constructs the film so as to allow his players to ruminate on his chief, career-long concerns: the struggle with inspiration in the life of an artist, the silence of God, and the potential redemption afforded by human love. ...
Strangely, it’s Karin’s plight, and that of so many like her in Bergman’s films, that draws me again and again to his work. There is, in that dramatization of the existential crisis, something of what Christian aesthetician Frank Burch Brown calls “negative transcendence”: “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.” I’ve become quite fond of that concept, applying it repeatedly to Bergman and sharing it often with friends who are struggling to make sense of their admiration for supposedly Godless films like Magnolia. In "Through a Glass Darkly", I think, Bergman stages that crisis more brutally than anywhere in his canon, and the film is better for it.
— longpauses.com
•••••
The search for God, which is complicated by and confused with lust and madness, is the central theme of this trilogy. Karin (Harriet Andersson), daughter, wife, and recently released mental patient, convalesces at her family's seaside summer cabin, where the men in her life have hardly a clue what emotional sustenance the confused and delusional woman might require. Her father (Gunnar Björnstrand) and husband (Max von Sydow), both cold, self-absorbed intellectuals, distance themselves from the recovery process while Karin increasingly fixates on her vulnerable and sexually susceptible younger brother. That Karin is to be consumed in the search for God is the film's ever-controversial premise, made all the more provocative by the implied eternal detachment of Bergman's (significantly male) God.
— Barbara Scharres, Film Center of the Chicago Art Institute
•••••
"Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God. A person surrounded by love is also surrounded by God. That is what I, with the assistance of Vilgot Sjöman, named 'conquered certainty.' The terrible thing about the film is that it offers a horrendously revealing portrait of the creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film, both as a man and as an artist. A book would have been much less revealing in this case, since words can be more nebulous than pictures.
"So here we started with a falsehood, largely unconscious, but a falsehood nevertheless. In a weird way, the film floats a couple of inches above the ground. But falsehood is one thing, the weaving of illusions another. The illusion maker is conscious of what he is doing, as is Albert Emanuel Vogler in The Magician. Therefore The Magician is an honest film, whereas Through a Glass Darkly is a conjurer's trick.
"The best thing about Through a Glass Darkly...emanated from Käbi's [Laretei, the pianist and Bergman's then-wife] and my relationship. Through Käbi I learned much about music. She helped me find the form of the 'chamber play.' The borderline between the chamber play and chamber music is nonexistent, as it is between cinematic expression and musical expression."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, 1990
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"Through a Glass Darkly" is the first film of Ingmar Bergman's religious chamber trilogy, influenced by the minimal instrumentation of chamber music. The film is visually spare, stark, and metaphoric. Note Karin's disintegration inside the hull of a shipwreck, symbolizing the tormented soul. It is a brooding, highly personal film that seeks validation for Bergman's religious upbringing and the essence of God. David tells Minus: "I don't know if love proves God's existence, or love is God Himself." In the end, Karin sees God behind the attic door - and it is a cold, stony faced spider - a painful reflection of her own family's deceptive love: a false god.
— Acquarello
•••••
The first of Bergman’s chamber dramas, Through a Glass Darkly concerns a family vacationing on the Baltic island of Fårö, where their alienation from one another is mirrored in the bleak landscape that surrounds them. The patriarch, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), is a widower and best-selling novelist, whose life is marked solely by professional ambition and emotional detachment. His daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson), is a schizophrenic plagued by rapturous voices that promise the imminent return of God. She is tended by her husband, Martin (Max Von Sydow), and by her younger brother, Minus (Lars Passgard), neither of whom is capable of offering her lasting comfort. Not surprisingly, Bergman constructs the film so as to allow his players to ruminate on his chief, career-long concerns: the struggle with inspiration in the life of an artist, the silence of God, and the potential redemption afforded by human love. ...
Strangely, it’s Karin’s plight, and that of so many like her in Bergman’s films, that draws me again and again to his work. There is, in that dramatization of the existential crisis, something of what Christian aesthetician Frank Burch Brown calls “negative transcendence”: “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.” I’ve become quite fond of that concept, applying it repeatedly to Bergman and sharing it often with friends who are struggling to make sense of their admiration for supposedly Godless films like Magnolia. In "Through a Glass Darkly", I think, Bergman stages that crisis more brutally than anywhere in his canon, and the film is better for it.
— longpauses.com
•••••
The search for God, which is complicated by and confused with lust and madness, is the central theme of this trilogy. Karin (Harriet Andersson), daughter, wife, and recently released mental patient, convalesces at her family's seaside summer cabin, where the men in her life have hardly a clue what emotional sustenance the confused and delusional woman might require. Her father (Gunnar Björnstrand) and husband (Max von Sydow), both cold, self-absorbed intellectuals, distance themselves from the recovery process while Karin increasingly fixates on her vulnerable and sexually susceptible younger brother. That Karin is to be consumed in the search for God is the film's ever-controversial premise, made all the more provocative by the implied eternal detachment of Bergman's (significantly male) God.
— Barbara Scharres, Film Center of the Chicago Art Institute
•••••
"Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God. A person surrounded by love is also surrounded by God. That is what I, with the assistance of Vilgot Sjöman, named 'conquered certainty.' The terrible thing about the film is that it offers a horrendously revealing portrait of the creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film, both as a man and as an artist. A book would have been much less revealing in this case, since words can be more nebulous than pictures.
"So here we started with a falsehood, largely unconscious, but a falsehood nevertheless. In a weird way, the film floats a couple of inches above the ground. But falsehood is one thing, the weaving of illusions another. The illusion maker is conscious of what he is doing, as is Albert Emanuel Vogler in The Magician. Therefore The Magician is an honest film, whereas Through a Glass Darkly is a conjurer's trick.
"The best thing about Through a Glass Darkly...emanated from Käbi's [Laretei, the pianist and Bergman's then-wife] and my relationship. Through Käbi I learned much about music. She helped me find the form of the 'chamber play.' The borderline between the chamber play and chamber music is nonexistent, as it is between cinematic expression and musical expression."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, 1990
(Licht im Winter [de] • Les communiants [fr])
Sweden 1963
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)
Sweden 1963
d: Ingmar Bergman
Opening / Fravidis (Region 0 fr)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: --
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Gunnel Lindblom, Max von Sydow, Allan Edwall, Kolbjörn Knudsen, Olof Thunberg, Elsa Ebbesen
pr: 11 Feb 1963
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: --
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Gunnel Lindblom, Max von Sydow, Allan Edwall, Kolbjörn Knudsen, Olof Thunberg, Elsa Ebbesen
pr: 11 Feb 1963
rt: 77:26 (+4%PAL= 81) min
dvd-rl: 10 Jul 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French (fixed)
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Eva" (Gustav Molander, 1948)
dvd-rl: 10 Jul 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 5.0 Arkamys Mono
st: French (fixed)
supp: Collection Les Films de ma vie
Double Feature with "Eva" (Gustav Molander, 1948)
The middle part of Bergman's trilogy about God's silence - it is flanked by "Through a Glass Darkly" and "The Silence" - and the most austere, Winter Light focuses on a small group of parishioners found at the beginning of the film attending Holy Communion. The village pastor (Björnstrand) is realising he has become an atheist since his wife's death. His faith is further tested by an offer of marriage from a schoolteacher (Thulin) tortured with eczema, and the solace demanded by a man (von Sydow) suicidally depressed by the threat of nuclear war. The pastor fails on both counts, and Bergman gives us an ambiguous ending back in the church service - what he himself called 'certainty unmasked'. Never a comfortable film, it's finely acted by a familiar Bergman ensemble, and the awesomely cold vistas form a perfect counterpoint to the spiritual freeze.
— DT, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Perhaps the most spiritually bleak and visually stark of Ingmar Bergman's religious chamber series, "Winter Light", the second film of the trilogy, is a transitional film, both thematically and conceptually. It marks Bergman's final exploration of religious faith, and serves as a prelude to the human relational drama of his subsequent work. Similar to Through a Glass Darkly, minimal cast, dialogue, and scenery pervade the film, distilling the atmosphere, and story, to its fundamental essence: God's silence. The use of monologues, prolonged silences, and extreme close-ups convey character introspection and emotional isolation. Furthermore, the barren landscape, seasonal climate, and Tomas' illness serve to further reflect the cold emptiness of his soul. In the end, Tomas returns to the sanctity of the ceremonial mass - the one constant in his life - ministering the hollow words for those who seek comfort behind their meaning, deriving from them a reflection of their own spirituality and emotional equilibrium: an echo god.
— Acquarello
•••••
Critic Dave Kehr has written of "Winter Light": "Routine stuff from Ingmar Bergman, the metaphysician of the middle class. . . . Much suffering, none of it very illuminating." At the heart of Kehr's criticism, it seems, is the assumption that for a work of art to be illuminating it must not only pose difficult questions, but provide universally satisfying answers as well. A crisis of faith, however, is a process, an on-going debate that can often seem frustratingly one-sided. Reducing such a debate to a simple question and an even simpler answer — as often happens both in the movies and the Church — only trivializes it. I'm relieved to find a film like Winter Light, which understands that at the very root of faith are those same unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. Despite its existential bleakness, watching "Winter Light" was, in fact, a faith-affirming experience for me.
— longpauses.com
•••••
"Winter Light" is the central film in Bergman's so-called "God trilogy" (with "Through a Glass Darkly" and "The Silence"). Gunnar Björnstrand plays the doubting Tomas, pastor of a dwindling rural parish. Tomas is an isolated individual, haunted by "God's silence" and indifferent to the physical, whether in the person of the schoolmistress Märta (Ingrid Thulin) or Christ himself. When a local fisherman (Max von Sydow) comes to him stupefied by fear of the atom bomb, Tomas cannot meet his gaze. The film's spare style, which prefigures the modernist Persona, is one of gazes and avoidances, and the visual articulation of contradiction: bathed in bright winter light, Tomas becomes free from God. The trilogy, as Bergman has stated, "is not concerned with God or His absence...but with the saving force of love." But to take the lead, and not wait for God to show love, is the most difficult task for a Bergman persona.
— PFA
•••••
The exterior shots of a bitterly cold, lifeless world reinforce the sense that these people live in an uninhabitable world, not hospitable even to a bird. Sven Nykvist experimented with much low-angle direct lighting to capture the peculiarly northern look of daylight that is actually a prolonged twilight between a late dawn and an early dusk – the sun unable to reach far enough above the horizon to illuminate latitudes that have effectively “gone under” for a prolonged sleep.
Technically, the film is flawless – no single shot could be removed without damaging the overall effect. It is as if Bergman assembled the raw materials to tell his story, as raw as he could make them, then placed them in front of Sven Nykvist's camera with as little emphasis as possible. That said, the film contains three powerful performances – Gunnar Björnstrand's lost and frail Tomas, Ingrid Thulin's frustratedly loving Marta and Max von Sydow's tormented Jonas. Bergman himself admitted in an interview:
"I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is 'Winter Light'. That is my only picture about which I feel that I have started here and ended there and that everything along the way has obeyed me. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture."
— Dan Harper, Senses of Cinema January 2005
•••••
"As the religious aspect of my existence was wiped out, life became much easier to live. Sartre has said how inhibited he used to be as an artist and author, how he suffered because what he was doing wasn't good enough. By a slow intellectual process he came to realize that his anxieties about not making anything of value were an atavistic relic from the religious notion that something exists which can be called the Supreme Good, or that anything is perfect. When he'd dug up this secret idea, this relic, had seen through it and amputated it, he lost his artistic inhibitions too. I've been through something very similar. When my top-heavy religious superstructure collapsed, I also lost my inhibitions as a writer. Above all, my fear of not keeping up with the times. In Winter Light I swept my house clean. Since then things have been quiet on that front."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
•••••
"Working in this profession of butchers and whores, you develop this great need to please people. You keep wishing your movies will be successful, that this strenuous effort you put into making a film...this Sisyphean task—you want people to approve of it, and you want houses to be sold out. Well, I was a bit tormented by all that. I felt I was being ingratiating. And so I thought to myself, 'I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to worry about being ingratiating. I will write strictly about the problems that occupy me. Not for a moment, not for a minute, do I want the story to be ingratiating. I'll tell the story exactly and precisely the way I envisioned it.' We maintained this very strict form. Which meant that all the light...would be this grayish, shadowless light. November light. Sven and I went up to Dalarna, to a church in Skattungbyn, where we sat from morning till night taking notes. Sven took pictures the whole time of how the light moved through the church. He then invented something that had never existed before, a kind of lamp that could provide a shadowless light. I'm very fond of this movie. I think in a way this is the movie that is closest to me. Because for once I made a film that I consider a brave film."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
— DT, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Perhaps the most spiritually bleak and visually stark of Ingmar Bergman's religious chamber series, "Winter Light", the second film of the trilogy, is a transitional film, both thematically and conceptually. It marks Bergman's final exploration of religious faith, and serves as a prelude to the human relational drama of his subsequent work. Similar to Through a Glass Darkly, minimal cast, dialogue, and scenery pervade the film, distilling the atmosphere, and story, to its fundamental essence: God's silence. The use of monologues, prolonged silences, and extreme close-ups convey character introspection and emotional isolation. Furthermore, the barren landscape, seasonal climate, and Tomas' illness serve to further reflect the cold emptiness of his soul. In the end, Tomas returns to the sanctity of the ceremonial mass - the one constant in his life - ministering the hollow words for those who seek comfort behind their meaning, deriving from them a reflection of their own spirituality and emotional equilibrium: an echo god.
— Acquarello
•••••
Critic Dave Kehr has written of "Winter Light": "Routine stuff from Ingmar Bergman, the metaphysician of the middle class. . . . Much suffering, none of it very illuminating." At the heart of Kehr's criticism, it seems, is the assumption that for a work of art to be illuminating it must not only pose difficult questions, but provide universally satisfying answers as well. A crisis of faith, however, is a process, an on-going debate that can often seem frustratingly one-sided. Reducing such a debate to a simple question and an even simpler answer — as often happens both in the movies and the Church — only trivializes it. I'm relieved to find a film like Winter Light, which understands that at the very root of faith are those same unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. Despite its existential bleakness, watching "Winter Light" was, in fact, a faith-affirming experience for me.
— longpauses.com
•••••
"Winter Light" is the central film in Bergman's so-called "God trilogy" (with "Through a Glass Darkly" and "The Silence"). Gunnar Björnstrand plays the doubting Tomas, pastor of a dwindling rural parish. Tomas is an isolated individual, haunted by "God's silence" and indifferent to the physical, whether in the person of the schoolmistress Märta (Ingrid Thulin) or Christ himself. When a local fisherman (Max von Sydow) comes to him stupefied by fear of the atom bomb, Tomas cannot meet his gaze. The film's spare style, which prefigures the modernist Persona, is one of gazes and avoidances, and the visual articulation of contradiction: bathed in bright winter light, Tomas becomes free from God. The trilogy, as Bergman has stated, "is not concerned with God or His absence...but with the saving force of love." But to take the lead, and not wait for God to show love, is the most difficult task for a Bergman persona.
— PFA
•••••
The exterior shots of a bitterly cold, lifeless world reinforce the sense that these people live in an uninhabitable world, not hospitable even to a bird. Sven Nykvist experimented with much low-angle direct lighting to capture the peculiarly northern look of daylight that is actually a prolonged twilight between a late dawn and an early dusk – the sun unable to reach far enough above the horizon to illuminate latitudes that have effectively “gone under” for a prolonged sleep.
Technically, the film is flawless – no single shot could be removed without damaging the overall effect. It is as if Bergman assembled the raw materials to tell his story, as raw as he could make them, then placed them in front of Sven Nykvist's camera with as little emphasis as possible. That said, the film contains three powerful performances – Gunnar Björnstrand's lost and frail Tomas, Ingrid Thulin's frustratedly loving Marta and Max von Sydow's tormented Jonas. Bergman himself admitted in an interview:
"I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is 'Winter Light'. That is my only picture about which I feel that I have started here and ended there and that everything along the way has obeyed me. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture."
— Dan Harper, Senses of Cinema January 2005
•••••
"As the religious aspect of my existence was wiped out, life became much easier to live. Sartre has said how inhibited he used to be as an artist and author, how he suffered because what he was doing wasn't good enough. By a slow intellectual process he came to realize that his anxieties about not making anything of value were an atavistic relic from the religious notion that something exists which can be called the Supreme Good, or that anything is perfect. When he'd dug up this secret idea, this relic, had seen through it and amputated it, he lost his artistic inhibitions too. I've been through something very similar. When my top-heavy religious superstructure collapsed, I also lost my inhibitions as a writer. Above all, my fear of not keeping up with the times. In Winter Light I swept my house clean. Since then things have been quiet on that front."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman, 1968
•••••
"Working in this profession of butchers and whores, you develop this great need to please people. You keep wishing your movies will be successful, that this strenuous effort you put into making a film...this Sisyphean task—you want people to approve of it, and you want houses to be sold out. Well, I was a bit tormented by all that. I felt I was being ingratiating. And so I thought to myself, 'I'm not going to worry about it. I'm not going to worry about being ingratiating. I will write strictly about the problems that occupy me. Not for a moment, not for a minute, do I want the story to be ingratiating. I'll tell the story exactly and precisely the way I envisioned it.' We maintained this very strict form. Which meant that all the light...would be this grayish, shadowless light. November light. Sven and I went up to Dalarna, to a church in Skattungbyn, where we sat from morning till night taking notes. Sven took pictures the whole time of how the light moved through the church. He then invented something that had never existed before, a kind of lamp that could provide a shadowless light. I'm very fond of this movie. I think in a way this is the movie that is closest to me. Because for once I made a film that I consider a brave film."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
(Das Schweigen [de] • The Silence [en] )
Sweden 1963
d: Ingmar Bergman
Tartan Video (Region 0 uk)
Sweden 1963
d: Ingmar Bergman
Tartan Video (Region 0 uk)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Ivan Renliden (uncredited); Johann Sebastian Bach
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Birger Malmsten, Håkan Jahnberg, Jörgen Lindström
pr: 23 Sep 1963
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
m: Ivan Renliden (uncredited); Johann Sebastian Bach
p: Allan Ekelund (Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Birger Malmsten, Håkan Jahnberg, Jörgen Lindström
pr: 23 Sep 1963
rt: 91:19 (+4%PAL= 96) min
dvd-rl: 19 Nov 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English
supp: • Trailer/Advertisement for Tartan's 'The Ingmar Bergman Collection' (2:53 min)
• Stills Gallery - 5 poorly done stills
• 23 static pages of transcript and questions to Ingmar Bergman (from 'Images - My Life In Film')
• Philip Strick Film Notes - 7 Static pages
• Star and Director Filmographies
dvd-rl: 19 Nov 2001
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English
supp: • Trailer/Advertisement for Tartan's 'The Ingmar Bergman Collection' (2:53 min)
• Stills Gallery - 5 poorly done stills
• 23 static pages of transcript and questions to Ingmar Bergman (from 'Images - My Life In Film')
• Philip Strick Film Notes - 7 Static pages
• Star and Director Filmographies
The final part of Bergman's trilogy (after "Through a Glass Darkly" and "Winter Light") is a bleak and disturbing study of loneliness, love and obsessive desire. Sisters Ester (Thulin) and Anna (Lindblom), together with the latter's young son, book into a vast but virtually empty hotel - the only other guests are a troupe of dwarf entertainers - in a country seemingly occupied or threatened by war. Once again exploring the conflicts between physicality and spirituality, Bergman candidly portrays Ester's latent lesbian desire for her sister, as well as Anna's own compulsive sexuality (she picks up a waiter and brings him back to the hotel). Despite the overt eroticism, the sisters' craving for emotional warmth is filmed in a cold, objective style; in this way, Bergman's severe symbolism emphasises both the seeming impossibility of, and the absolute necessity for, human tenderness in a Godless world.
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"The Silence", Ingmar Bergman's final installment in his chamber series, is arguably the most abstract and nihilistic film of the trilogy. As "Winter Light" explored spiritual bankruptcy, "The Silence" is an examination of emotional isolation in a world without God - where salvation lies in human connection. Figuratively, Esther has the linguistical faculties to communicate, but physical frailty and fear of rejection prevent her from being understood. Anna, on the other hand, seeks emotional intimacy through physical contact, and is also, invariably, misunderstood. Thematically, Bergman conveys alienation through geography, partitions, darkness, and non-confronting dialogue. The use of mirrors further provides discontinuity, creating a sense of distance. Note the use of Esther's mirror image in her "dialogue" with the hotel manager as she attempts to order another bottle of liquor, emphasizing the language barrier. Another scene shows Esther observing Anna's reflection from the adjoining room as she washes her face, suggesting the fractured intimacy between them. After a prolonged, convulsive attack, Esther implores God to allow her to die in her own homeland. In the end, she is left to die, alone and suffering, in a strange land: unanswered prayers by an absent God.
— Acquarello
•••••
The Silence is the great watershed movie of Bergman's career, perhaps of Sixties art cinema: the work of a filmmaker no longer able to contain the creatures and archetypes surging in the playroom of his imagination. These include a troop of dwarfs (out of Tod Browning by Velazquez), an eldritch rag-and-bone man and his horse, several tortured sex scenes, a boy urinating in the hotel corridor, and the choric grind and roar of war machinery—tanks, planes—outside the hotel's windows. Late Bergman meets early Buñuel blended with mid-period Fellini. But The Silence isn't L'Age d'or with angst or 8½ with religious guilt. Bergman's discovery of free association—because it comes from a mind so austere and hermetic—is more nightmarish and far more powerful in its cosmic disgust. The outrage that greeted The Silence—howls of bishops, scissorings of censors, even feces-smeared toilet paper sent to the director—denoted public horror at a morally serious moviemaker surrendering (it seemed) to a libertine, Dadaist nihilism. But The Silence is a massively serious movie. Its deconstruction of the unconscious in a world drifting toward secularity opened the way to modern directors like Kieslowski and Lars von Trier, for whom cinema is a glorious trapdoor art. Linear storytelling is at worst impossible, at best a matter of negotiating ground that can open up beneath you without notice."
— Harlan Kennedy, "Whatever happened to Ingmar Bergman?", Film Comment, July-August 1998
•••••
"[There is] somewhere between 34 and 38 exchanges of dialogue. If I'd been a bit more alert and logical, it wouldn't have had more than 28. There's a scene in it that I regret, one I don't like. I wanted to make a film without dialogue. I had made so many films with so much talking in them that I wanted to make a film, a true 'cinematograph,' where the image would play the leading role. I never understood that I'd created a film that would cause censorship in so many countries, such trouble. I remember sitting with the manager of Svensk Filmindustri, Mr. Kenne Fant. We were watching the rough cut...and I remember Kenne saying...with a little embarrassed smile, when he had finished watching it, 'Well, this film won't have audiences running to the theatre.' In those days I had progressed so far as to get a share of the films. A couple days later he calls me and says, 'There's a German distributor who's thinking of buying The Silence, all in cash, up front, for the entire German-speaking region.' He mentioned a rather modest amount of money, some 1.3 million kronor, I think. I told him, 'Take the money and run! It's wonderful if we can make any money on it!' I think he made around 130 million kronor on that film in the end. When it was released in different areas of the world...it was definitely regarded as pornography in certain regions. On some posters they even listed the exact times for the indecent scenes so people wouldn't have to sit around and wait."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
— NF, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"The Silence", Ingmar Bergman's final installment in his chamber series, is arguably the most abstract and nihilistic film of the trilogy. As "Winter Light" explored spiritual bankruptcy, "The Silence" is an examination of emotional isolation in a world without God - where salvation lies in human connection. Figuratively, Esther has the linguistical faculties to communicate, but physical frailty and fear of rejection prevent her from being understood. Anna, on the other hand, seeks emotional intimacy through physical contact, and is also, invariably, misunderstood. Thematically, Bergman conveys alienation through geography, partitions, darkness, and non-confronting dialogue. The use of mirrors further provides discontinuity, creating a sense of distance. Note the use of Esther's mirror image in her "dialogue" with the hotel manager as she attempts to order another bottle of liquor, emphasizing the language barrier. Another scene shows Esther observing Anna's reflection from the adjoining room as she washes her face, suggesting the fractured intimacy between them. After a prolonged, convulsive attack, Esther implores God to allow her to die in her own homeland. In the end, she is left to die, alone and suffering, in a strange land: unanswered prayers by an absent God.
— Acquarello
•••••
The Silence is the great watershed movie of Bergman's career, perhaps of Sixties art cinema: the work of a filmmaker no longer able to contain the creatures and archetypes surging in the playroom of his imagination. These include a troop of dwarfs (out of Tod Browning by Velazquez), an eldritch rag-and-bone man and his horse, several tortured sex scenes, a boy urinating in the hotel corridor, and the choric grind and roar of war machinery—tanks, planes—outside the hotel's windows. Late Bergman meets early Buñuel blended with mid-period Fellini. But The Silence isn't L'Age d'or with angst or 8½ with religious guilt. Bergman's discovery of free association—because it comes from a mind so austere and hermetic—is more nightmarish and far more powerful in its cosmic disgust. The outrage that greeted The Silence—howls of bishops, scissorings of censors, even feces-smeared toilet paper sent to the director—denoted public horror at a morally serious moviemaker surrendering (it seemed) to a libertine, Dadaist nihilism. But The Silence is a massively serious movie. Its deconstruction of the unconscious in a world drifting toward secularity opened the way to modern directors like Kieslowski and Lars von Trier, for whom cinema is a glorious trapdoor art. Linear storytelling is at worst impossible, at best a matter of negotiating ground that can open up beneath you without notice."
— Harlan Kennedy, "Whatever happened to Ingmar Bergman?", Film Comment, July-August 1998
•••••
"[There is] somewhere between 34 and 38 exchanges of dialogue. If I'd been a bit more alert and logical, it wouldn't have had more than 28. There's a scene in it that I regret, one I don't like. I wanted to make a film without dialogue. I had made so many films with so much talking in them that I wanted to make a film, a true 'cinematograph,' where the image would play the leading role. I never understood that I'd created a film that would cause censorship in so many countries, such trouble. I remember sitting with the manager of Svensk Filmindustri, Mr. Kenne Fant. We were watching the rough cut...and I remember Kenne saying...with a little embarrassed smile, when he had finished watching it, 'Well, this film won't have audiences running to the theatre.' In those days I had progressed so far as to get a share of the films. A couple days later he calls me and says, 'There's a German distributor who's thinking of buying The Silence, all in cash, up front, for the entire German-speaking region.' He mentioned a rather modest amount of money, some 1.3 million kronor, I think. I told him, 'Take the money and run! It's wonderful if we can make any money on it!' I think he made around 130 million kronor on that film in the end. When it was released in different areas of the world...it was definitely regarded as pornography in certain regions. On some posters they even listed the exact times for the indecent scenes so people wouldn't have to sit around and wait."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
(Persona [de/en])
Sweden 1966
d: Ingmar Bergman
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)
Sweden 1966
d: Ingmar Bergman
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: Bibi Lindström
m: Lars Johan Werle (original score), Johann Sebastian Bach
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Svensk Filmindustri)
w: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Björnstrand
pr: 18 Okt 1966
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: Bibi Lindström
m: Lars Johan Werle (original score), Johann Sebastian Bach
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Svensk Filmindustri)
w: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Björnstrand
pr: 18 Okt 1966
rt: 82:37 min [OL: 2320m = 84:48] min
dvd-rl: 13 Mär 2004
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono • English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English, French, Spanish; CC
supp: Special Edition
• Audio Commentary by Bergman biographer Marc Gervais
• Featurette "A Poem in Images" (26:30 min)
• Interviews with Liv Ullmann (04:29 min) and Bibi Andersson (05:27 min)
• Photo gallery with 18 b/w production stills
• Theatrical Trailer (02:10 min)
dvd-rl: 13 Mär 2004
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono • English Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English, French, Spanish; CC
supp: Special Edition
• Audio Commentary by Bergman biographer Marc Gervais
• Featurette "A Poem in Images" (26:30 min)
• Interviews with Liv Ullmann (04:29 min) and Bibi Andersson (05:27 min)
• Photo gallery with 18 b/w production stills
• Theatrical Trailer (02:10 min)
Bergman at his most brilliant as he explores the symbiotic relationship that evolves between an actress suffering a breakdown in which she refuses to speak, and the nurse in charge as she recuperates in a country cottage. To comment is to betray the film's extraordinary complexity, but basically it returns to two favourite Bergman themes: the difficulty of true communication between human beings, and the essentially egocentric nature of art. Here the actress (named Vogler after the charlatan/artist in "The Face") dries up in the middle of a performance, thereafter refusing to exercise her art. We aren't told why, but from the context it's a fair guess that she withdraws from a feeling of inadequacy in face of the horrors of the modern world; and in her withdrawal, she watches with detached tolerance as humanity (the nurse chattering on about her troubled sex life) reveals its petty woes. Then comes the weird moment of communion in which the two women merge as one: charlatan or not, the artist can still be understood, and can therefore still understand. Not an easy film, but an infinitely rewarding one.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Bergman uses minimal composition and extremely tight close-ups to illustrate the theme of psychological deconstruction. Note the prevalent use of single camera shots throughout the duration of a scene. The lack of camera movement forces us to study the characters' faces. Persona, after all, as the title suggests, is not about who the person actually is, but the different identities, or facades, that the person projects. Figuratively, Elisabeth Vogler, having played the role of celebrity, wife, and mother, has decided to abandon her persona and walk off the stage. A variation on the idea of duality provides an essential ingredient to the plot development. The themes of experience, children, and romantic relationships take on very different meanings for the two women. Alma seems to covet what Elisabeth has, but she has deliberately chosen other paths. Note the monologue that is shown twice: one showing a close-up of Alma, and the other of Elisabeth. It is a scene about regret, frustration, and denial. The effect illustrates how different, and yet similar, these two women are... and how cruel and destructive the human will can be.
— Acquarello
•••••
That a woman can drive another woman to suicide by simply denying her the human recognition we all crave is the most horrifying aspect of "Persona". The moment when Alma becomes so desperate to get Elisabeth to speak that she is ready to throw boiling hot water in the latter's face is one of the most terrifying in the history of "art-house" cinema. The modern psychological horror film foregrounds the neuroses and psychoses of its principle characters, and much of the terror that emerges therefrom—if it doesn't degenerate into mad slasher clichés—is derived from the etiology of their neuroses, and the plausibility of how they act as a result (Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" [1960] is a particularly apt example). Both women horrify us here: Elisabeth with her sadistically predatory nature, Alma with her masochistic need to sacrifice herself. Only one of them is likely to be shattered by the experience, however. Elisabeth is regenerated by feeding on the adulation of her nurse, but Alma is likely (if she survives at all) to require extensive therapy as the result of her encounter with this spiritual blood-sucker.
— Daniel C Shaw, KinoEye
•••••
The temptation is to take Bergman's masterpiece for granted. It is probably the most famous of all those modern, post-Pirandellian films concerned with themselves as works of art. It also contains one of the most truly erotic sequences on film, demonstrating what can be done on screen with told material. An actress named Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) elects to become silent and is put into the care of Alma (Bibi Andersson), a nurse companion. The actress's act, we soon learn, has two aspects: it is a wish for ethical purity, but it is also a species of sadism, a virtually impregnable position of strength from which to manipulate her nurse, who is charged with the burden of talking. By the end of the film, the two characters are engaged in a desperate Strindberg-like duel of identities, and Bergman has turned that struggle into a metaphor for the fate of language, art, and consciousness itself.
— Russell Merritt, PFA
•••••
In this film, as in his very early Prison, the writer-director Ingmar Bergman involves us in the making of a movie. He gives us a movie within a movie, but he seems hardly to have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner one. (You can feel it go—at the repeated passage, when the director seems to be trying an alternate way of shooting a sequence.) It's a pity, because the inner movie had begun to involve us in marvellous possibilities: an actress (Liv Ullmann) who has abandoned the power of speech is put in the care of a nurse (Bibi Andersson), and the nurse, like an analysand who becomes furious at the silence of the analyst, begins to vent her own emotional disturbances. The two women look very much alike, and Bergman plays with this resemblance photographically by suggestive combinations and superimpositions. Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman's not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. There is, however, great intensity in many of the images, and there's one great passage: the nurse talks about a day and night of sex on a beach, and as she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her voice and the emptiness of her present life in her face, viewers may begin to hold their breath in fear that the director won't be able to sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. But he does, and it builds and builds and is completed. It's one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history."
— Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Bergman uses minimal composition and extremely tight close-ups to illustrate the theme of psychological deconstruction. Note the prevalent use of single camera shots throughout the duration of a scene. The lack of camera movement forces us to study the characters' faces. Persona, after all, as the title suggests, is not about who the person actually is, but the different identities, or facades, that the person projects. Figuratively, Elisabeth Vogler, having played the role of celebrity, wife, and mother, has decided to abandon her persona and walk off the stage. A variation on the idea of duality provides an essential ingredient to the plot development. The themes of experience, children, and romantic relationships take on very different meanings for the two women. Alma seems to covet what Elisabeth has, but she has deliberately chosen other paths. Note the monologue that is shown twice: one showing a close-up of Alma, and the other of Elisabeth. It is a scene about regret, frustration, and denial. The effect illustrates how different, and yet similar, these two women are... and how cruel and destructive the human will can be.
— Acquarello
•••••
That a woman can drive another woman to suicide by simply denying her the human recognition we all crave is the most horrifying aspect of "Persona". The moment when Alma becomes so desperate to get Elisabeth to speak that she is ready to throw boiling hot water in the latter's face is one of the most terrifying in the history of "art-house" cinema. The modern psychological horror film foregrounds the neuroses and psychoses of its principle characters, and much of the terror that emerges therefrom—if it doesn't degenerate into mad slasher clichés—is derived from the etiology of their neuroses, and the plausibility of how they act as a result (Michael Powell's "Peeping Tom" [1960] is a particularly apt example). Both women horrify us here: Elisabeth with her sadistically predatory nature, Alma with her masochistic need to sacrifice herself. Only one of them is likely to be shattered by the experience, however. Elisabeth is regenerated by feeding on the adulation of her nurse, but Alma is likely (if she survives at all) to require extensive therapy as the result of her encounter with this spiritual blood-sucker.
— Daniel C Shaw, KinoEye
•••••
The temptation is to take Bergman's masterpiece for granted. It is probably the most famous of all those modern, post-Pirandellian films concerned with themselves as works of art. It also contains one of the most truly erotic sequences on film, demonstrating what can be done on screen with told material. An actress named Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) elects to become silent and is put into the care of Alma (Bibi Andersson), a nurse companion. The actress's act, we soon learn, has two aspects: it is a wish for ethical purity, but it is also a species of sadism, a virtually impregnable position of strength from which to manipulate her nurse, who is charged with the burden of talking. By the end of the film, the two characters are engaged in a desperate Strindberg-like duel of identities, and Bergman has turned that struggle into a metaphor for the fate of language, art, and consciousness itself.
— Russell Merritt, PFA
•••••
In this film, as in his very early Prison, the writer-director Ingmar Bergman involves us in the making of a movie. He gives us a movie within a movie, but he seems hardly to have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner one. (You can feel it go—at the repeated passage, when the director seems to be trying an alternate way of shooting a sequence.) It's a pity, because the inner movie had begun to involve us in marvellous possibilities: an actress (Liv Ullmann) who has abandoned the power of speech is put in the care of a nurse (Bibi Andersson), and the nurse, like an analysand who becomes furious at the silence of the analyst, begins to vent her own emotional disturbances. The two women look very much alike, and Bergman plays with this resemblance photographically by suggestive combinations and superimpositions. Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman's not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. There is, however, great intensity in many of the images, and there's one great passage: the nurse talks about a day and night of sex on a beach, and as she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her voice and the emptiness of her present life in her face, viewers may begin to hold their breath in fear that the director won't be able to sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. But he does, and it builds and builds and is completed. It's one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history."
— Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
(Die Stunde des Wolfs [de] • Hour of the Wolf [en])
Sweden 1968
d: Ingmar Bergman
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)
Sweden 1968
d: Ingmar Bergman
MGM/UA Home Entertainment (Region 1 us)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: Marik Vos-Lundh
m: Lars Johan Werle; Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Svensk Filmindustri)
w: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg, Erland Josephson, Naima Wifstrand, Ulf Johansson, Gudrun Brost, Bertil Anderberg, Ingrid Thulin
pr: 19 Feb 1968
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: Marik Vos-Lundh
m: Lars Johan Werle; Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Svensk Filmindustri)
w: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg, Erland Josephson, Naima Wifstrand, Ulf Johansson, Gudrun Brost, Bertil Anderberg, Ingrid Thulin
pr: 19 Feb 1968
rt: 87:25 (+4%PAL= 91) min
dvd-rl: 27 Apr 2004
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English, Spanish, French; CC
supp: Special Edition
• Audio Commentary by Bergman Biographer Marc Gervais
• Featurette "The Search for Sanity" (26:11 min)
• On-camera interviews with Liv Ullmann (2:55 min) and Erland Josephson (3:35 min)
• "Bergman at Work" photo gallery
• Still Gallery
• Theatrical Trailer (2:11 min)
dvd-rl: 27 Apr 2004
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: English, Spanish, French; CC
supp: Special Edition
• Audio Commentary by Bergman Biographer Marc Gervais
• Featurette "The Search for Sanity" (26:11 min)
• On-camera interviews with Liv Ullmann (2:55 min) and Erland Josephson (3:35 min)
• "Bergman at Work" photo gallery
• Still Gallery
• Theatrical Trailer (2:11 min)
A brilliant Gothic fantasy about an artist who has disappeared, leaving only a diary; and through that diary we move into flashback to observe a classic case history of the Bergman hero haunted by darkness, demons and the creatures of his imagination until he is destroyed by them. The tentacular growth of this obsession is handled with typical virtuosity in a dazzling flow of surrealism, expressionism and full-blooded Gothic horror. First the hour of the wolf, the sleepless nights of watching and waiting, when the artist (von Sydow) describes - but we do not see - the horde of man-eating birdmen and insects who have invaded his sketch-book. Then the daylight encounters when a car crawling over the horizon, a girl picking her way through the rocks on a sun-bleached beach, look momentarily like weird, threatening insects. Finally, the full nightmare of the soirée at a château gradually transformed into Dracula's castle as its aristocratic inhabitants become werewolves and vampires, and the artist flees into a forest of blackened, clutching trees, pursued by monstrous birds of prey. In its exploration of the nature of creativity, haunted by the problem of whether the artist possesses or is possessed by his demons, "Hour of the Wolf" serves as a remarkable companion-piece to "Persona".
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Madness and demonism, ever present in Bergman's films, are made the explicit themes of "Hour of the Wolf": here they are associated with artistic creativity. The narrative finds Alma (Liv Ullmann) telling of her life with her artist husband, who disappeared, leaving only his diary. "There can be no mistaking the message of the film at least in part as artistic autobiography. Max von Sydow the tormented artist equals Ingmar Bergman the tormented artist. What ambiguities arise in the film do so because of the confusion between allegory and autobiography.... To criticize Bergman, however, is not to condemn him.... Even when Bergman's gaze is fixed on his own navel, his feelings erupt violently and sensually as if from out of a visceral volcano.... If for nothing else, Bergman deserves immortality for expressing his understanding of women through his inspired direction of actresses." --Andrew Sarris
•••••
"Twenty-two years ago (Crisis) Bergman was telling the story of a man torn between two women; ten years ago (The Face) he was showing a performer being stripped of his mask, and five years ago (The Silence) he was revealing a single human coin by the examination of both its sides. All these were present in Persona, and they recur again in Hour of the Wolf, augmented on the immediate visual level by such familiar Bergman phrases as the bleached flashback (Sawdust and Tinsel), the errant eyeball (The Face), and the corpse that rises laughing from its slab (Wild Strawberries). Yet there are new departures, too—the dizzying revolve by Nykvist's camera around the dinner-table, the hideous ambivalence of the murder scene, the startling levitation of the Baron (a joke that is delicately capped by von Sydow's nervous glance at the ceiling as he hurries on his way), the jump-cuts with the firing of the gun, the rapturous Lester-style burst of sunlight on the lens as Veronica flings herself into her lover's arms. 'Awful things can happen,' she murmurs. 'Dreams can be revealed.' Nightmares as well, it seems. In the hour before dawn, Bergman's imagination remains the finest, and the most disturbing, of all the cinema's modern visionaries."
— Philip Strick, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1968
•••••
"Hour of the Wolf is seen by some as a regression after Persona. It isn't that simple. Persona was a breakthrough, a success that gave me the courage to keep on searching along unknown paths. For several reasons that film has become a more open affair than others, more tangible: a woman who is mute, another who speaks; therefore a conflict. Hour of the Wolf, on the other hand, is more vague. There is within that film a consciously formal and thematic disintegration. When I see Hour of the Wolf today, I understand that it is about a deep-seated division within me, both hidden and carefully monitored, visible in both my earlier and later work: Aman, in The Magician (The Face); Ester, in The Silence; Tomas, in Face to Face; Elisabet, in Persona; Ismael, in Fanny and Alexander. To me, Hour of the Wolf is important since it is an attempt to encircle a hard-to-locate set of problems and get inside them. I dared take a few steps, but I didn't go the whole way. Had I failed with Persona, I would never have dared to make Hour of the Wolf. Hour of the Wolf is not a regression but an uneasy step in the right direction."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, 1990
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Madness and demonism, ever present in Bergman's films, are made the explicit themes of "Hour of the Wolf": here they are associated with artistic creativity. The narrative finds Alma (Liv Ullmann) telling of her life with her artist husband, who disappeared, leaving only his diary. "There can be no mistaking the message of the film at least in part as artistic autobiography. Max von Sydow the tormented artist equals Ingmar Bergman the tormented artist. What ambiguities arise in the film do so because of the confusion between allegory and autobiography.... To criticize Bergman, however, is not to condemn him.... Even when Bergman's gaze is fixed on his own navel, his feelings erupt violently and sensually as if from out of a visceral volcano.... If for nothing else, Bergman deserves immortality for expressing his understanding of women through his inspired direction of actresses." --Andrew Sarris
•••••
"Twenty-two years ago (Crisis) Bergman was telling the story of a man torn between two women; ten years ago (The Face) he was showing a performer being stripped of his mask, and five years ago (The Silence) he was revealing a single human coin by the examination of both its sides. All these were present in Persona, and they recur again in Hour of the Wolf, augmented on the immediate visual level by such familiar Bergman phrases as the bleached flashback (Sawdust and Tinsel), the errant eyeball (The Face), and the corpse that rises laughing from its slab (Wild Strawberries). Yet there are new departures, too—the dizzying revolve by Nykvist's camera around the dinner-table, the hideous ambivalence of the murder scene, the startling levitation of the Baron (a joke that is delicately capped by von Sydow's nervous glance at the ceiling as he hurries on his way), the jump-cuts with the firing of the gun, the rapturous Lester-style burst of sunlight on the lens as Veronica flings herself into her lover's arms. 'Awful things can happen,' she murmurs. 'Dreams can be revealed.' Nightmares as well, it seems. In the hour before dawn, Bergman's imagination remains the finest, and the most disturbing, of all the cinema's modern visionaries."
— Philip Strick, Sight and Sound, Autumn 1968
•••••
"Hour of the Wolf is seen by some as a regression after Persona. It isn't that simple. Persona was a breakthrough, a success that gave me the courage to keep on searching along unknown paths. For several reasons that film has become a more open affair than others, more tangible: a woman who is mute, another who speaks; therefore a conflict. Hour of the Wolf, on the other hand, is more vague. There is within that film a consciously formal and thematic disintegration. When I see Hour of the Wolf today, I understand that it is about a deep-seated division within me, both hidden and carefully monitored, visible in both my earlier and later work: Aman, in The Magician (The Face); Ester, in The Silence; Tomas, in Face to Face; Elisabet, in Persona; Ismael, in Fanny and Alexander. To me, Hour of the Wolf is important since it is an attempt to encircle a hard-to-locate set of problems and get inside them. I dared take a few steps, but I didn't go the whole way. Had I failed with Persona, I would never have dared to make Hour of the Wolf. Hour of the Wolf is not a regression but an uneasy step in the right direction."
— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film, 1990
(Schande [de])
Sweden 1968
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment (Region 0 de)
Sweden 1968
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment (Region 0 de)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph AB / Svensk Filmindustri (SF) AB)
w: Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Sigge Fürst, Gunnar Björnstrand, Birgitta Valberg, Hans Alfredson, Ingvar Kjellson, Frank Sundström, Ulf Johansson, Vilgot Sjöman, Bengt Eklund, Gösta Prüzelius, Willy Peters, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Agda Helin
pr: 29 Sep 1968
aw: Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain 1970 Mejor Película Extranjera • Guldbagge Awards 1969 Bästa kvinnliga huvudroll Liv Ullmann • Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards 1970 Best Foreign Film • National Board of Review, USA 1970 Best Foreign Language Film • National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA 1969 Best Actress Liv Ullmann; Best Director; Best Film
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Ulla Ryghe
pd: P.A. Lundgren
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph AB / Svensk Filmindustri (SF) AB)
w: Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Sigge Fürst, Gunnar Björnstrand, Birgitta Valberg, Hans Alfredson, Ingvar Kjellson, Frank Sundström, Ulf Johansson, Vilgot Sjöman, Bengt Eklund, Gösta Prüzelius, Willy Peters, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs, Agda Helin
pr: 29 Sep 1968
aw: Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain 1970 Mejor Película Extranjera • Guldbagge Awards 1969 Bästa kvinnliga huvudroll Liv Ullmann • Kansas City Film Critics Circle Awards 1970 Best Foreign Film • National Board of Review, USA 1970 Best Foreign Language Film • National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA 1969 Best Actress Liv Ullmann; Best Director; Best Film
rt: 98:44 (+4%PAL= 103) min
dvd-rl: 10 Mär 2006
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish
st: German
supp: --
dvd-rl: 10 Mär 2006
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish
st: German
supp: --
Bergman's magisterial confrontation with war, set in a characteristically ambivalent decor, either a peaceful farm somewhere in Sweden or a landscape from Goya secreting intimations of disaster. Here live a man and wife, indifferent to the war until it arrives on their doorstep to strip their lives to the bone. Presenting war with shattering power as a blindly destructive force, Bergman uses it brilliantly as a background to the real pain: the way the couple are forced to look at each other, and to realise that the only honest feeling they have about their relationship is shame. It ends with one of the cinema's most awesomely apocalyptic visions: not the cheeriest of films, but a masterpiece.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The middle segment of Ingmar Bergman's late '60s trilogy of films set on the island of Fårö, "Shame" is less enigmatic than "Hour of the Wolf" and more harrowing than "The Passion of Anna". It's impossible to think that Bergman wasn't in some way affected by the worldwide debate over American involvement in Vietnam when he wrote the script for "Shame", though its politics are neutral. Bergman is much more interested in exploring the inability of civilians to get out of the way of a war and what the consequences are when it does touch them. Precisely because Jan and Eva Rosenberg take no sides in the civil conflict they are trying to avoid, their basic reaction to danger is one of pure survival. Whatever side is winning is the side they are on, whether it means granting sexual favors or killing an old friend. With those two acts, the Rosenbergs betray each other and leave themselves morally stripped bare. By the final scenes, on a boat moving through waters choked with corpses, Jan and Eva are almost zombies. When Eva tries to recall a remark that would comfort her, her memory fails her; it's one of the most powerful scenes in the career of one of the world's greatest filmmakers.
— Tom Wiener, AMG
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
The middle segment of Ingmar Bergman's late '60s trilogy of films set on the island of Fårö, "Shame" is less enigmatic than "Hour of the Wolf" and more harrowing than "The Passion of Anna". It's impossible to think that Bergman wasn't in some way affected by the worldwide debate over American involvement in Vietnam when he wrote the script for "Shame", though its politics are neutral. Bergman is much more interested in exploring the inability of civilians to get out of the way of a war and what the consequences are when it does touch them. Precisely because Jan and Eva Rosenberg take no sides in the civil conflict they are trying to avoid, their basic reaction to danger is one of pure survival. Whatever side is winning is the side they are on, whether it means granting sexual favors or killing an old friend. With those two acts, the Rosenbergs betray each other and leave themselves morally stripped bare. By the final scenes, on a boat moving through waters choked with corpses, Jan and Eva are almost zombies. When Eva tries to recall a remark that would comfort her, her memory fails her; it's one of the most powerful scenes in the career of one of the world's greatest filmmakers.
— Tom Wiener, AMG
(Der Ritus [de])
Sweden 1969
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment/DVD (Region 0 de)
Sweden 1969
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment/DVD (Region 0 de)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Siv Lundgren
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph AB)
w: Ingmar Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Anders Ek, Erik Hell, Ingrid Thulin
pr: 25 Mär 1969
c: Sven Nykvist (b/w)
e: Siv Lundgren
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph AB)
w: Ingmar Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Anders Ek, Erik Hell, Ingrid Thulin
pr: 25 Mär 1969
rt: 72:25 (+4%PAL= 75) min
dvd-rl: 09 Jun 2006
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono • German Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: German (fixed)
supp: • Biography Ingmar Bergman
• Production Notes
• Bonus Trailers for ”Drum” (1:34 min); ”L'Enfant - Das Kind” (1:17 min); ”Der Freund meiner Freundin” (1:47 min); ”Hoffmanns Erzählungen” (2:52 min); ”Boogie Nights” (1:56 min); ”Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein” (2:49 min); ”Elvis: Loving you - Gold aus heißer Kehle” (2:20 min); ”Die Reise der Pinguine” (1:53 min)
dvd-rl: 09 Jun 2006
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono • German Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: German (fixed)
supp: • Biography Ingmar Bergman
• Production Notes
• Bonus Trailers for ”Drum” (1:34 min); ”L'Enfant - Das Kind” (1:17 min); ”Der Freund meiner Freundin” (1:47 min); ”Hoffmanns Erzählungen” (2:52 min); ”Boogie Nights” (1:56 min); ”Es ist nicht leicht ein Gott zu sein” (2:49 min); ”Elvis: Loving you - Gold aus heißer Kehle” (2:20 min); ”Die Reise der Pinguine” (1:53 min)
All Bergman's films around this time centre on isolated social groups (often the partners of a marriage) and show them under attack from both inside and out: Laingian fissures and cracks open up between the characters, and their precarious security is challenged by irruptions from the outside world. Bergman preserves and extends his private mythologies (witness the way that images and names recur from film to film), but in a broader (less precious, more honest) context: The Rite, with a trio of actors under examination by a judge on charges of obscenity, tries to expose the bonds that tie an artist to his audience, and pushes towards a theory of non-communication. A bold step forward in Bergman's analysis of human isolation.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Wo das Theater des Absurden seine Bewegungssysteme auf der Bühne ausbreitet (selbst wenn sich, wie in "Spiel" von Beckett keiner mehr vom Fleck bewegt), da geht Bergman - dabei auch der visuellen Logik des Films im Kontrast zu der des Theaters folgend - unbeirrbar in eine Tiefe der Figuren, an deren Individualität (und an deren Psychologie) er festhält. Großaufnahmen dominieren den Film, es wird nach Details geforscht, wie schon die erste Einstellung nahe legt. Den Richter sieht man da, wie er in einer Großaufnahme frontal in die Kamera blickt, und dann mit einer vors Auge gehaltenen Lupe einerseits seine Ermittlungen weiterführt und andererseits aus unserer Perspektive sein Gesicht noch einmal vergrößert.
Auch dass sich mit der Sprache nichts Neues, nichts Persönliches (mehr) ausdrücken ließe, kann Bergman nicht hinnehmen. Hier stellt er sich frontal gegen die Moderne, veranstaltet gewissermaßen seinen eigenen linguistic turn, den François Truffaut (der übrigens "Der Ritus" zu den "rührendsten" Werken Bergmans zählte) mit "Befreiung des Dialogs" umschrieben hat: Die Sprache wird als sinnliches Element immer stärker, löst sich von der Funktionalität ab, ohne aber ihre Möglichkeit zum individuellen Ausdruck aufzugeben. Selten war so viel Dialog so spannend anzuhören und mitzulesen wie hier. Wie Truffaut festgestellt hat, stellt sich diese neue Macht der Sprache nicht zuletzt dank der ungewohnten Sprachmelodie des Schwedischen ein, eines hier sehr rhythmischen Genudels mit vielen wunderbar langen Umlauten.
Überhaupt ist das Asketische, Entleerte nur die eine Seite dieses Films: Wo Gegenstände auftauchen, da spielen sie gleich mit und werden inszeniert, wie bei Max Ophüls, und geben sich nicht selten anachronistisch verziert (z.B. ein altmodisches Telefon im Büro des Richters oder ein geschwungener Handspiegel), als wollten sie sich ebenfalls dagegen versperren, reine Funktion, Anlass für Bewegung wie im Theater des Absurden zu werden. Auch die dominant anonyme Architektur hat in einigen wenigen bildreichen Flächen (religiöse Abbildungen auf einem Beichtstuhl; ein ornamental geschwungenes Fenster im Büro des Richters; ein Flammenring, den einer der Künstler in seinem Bett entzündet) ihr logisches Anderes, an dem ein weniger radikaler Geist sichtbar wird. Die Üppigkeiten in Sprache und Dekor kann man als Zeichen eines bürgerlichen Kunstverständnisses, als Skrupel vor der Moderne lesen.
— Joachim Schätz, filmzentrale
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Wo das Theater des Absurden seine Bewegungssysteme auf der Bühne ausbreitet (selbst wenn sich, wie in "Spiel" von Beckett keiner mehr vom Fleck bewegt), da geht Bergman - dabei auch der visuellen Logik des Films im Kontrast zu der des Theaters folgend - unbeirrbar in eine Tiefe der Figuren, an deren Individualität (und an deren Psychologie) er festhält. Großaufnahmen dominieren den Film, es wird nach Details geforscht, wie schon die erste Einstellung nahe legt. Den Richter sieht man da, wie er in einer Großaufnahme frontal in die Kamera blickt, und dann mit einer vors Auge gehaltenen Lupe einerseits seine Ermittlungen weiterführt und andererseits aus unserer Perspektive sein Gesicht noch einmal vergrößert.
Auch dass sich mit der Sprache nichts Neues, nichts Persönliches (mehr) ausdrücken ließe, kann Bergman nicht hinnehmen. Hier stellt er sich frontal gegen die Moderne, veranstaltet gewissermaßen seinen eigenen linguistic turn, den François Truffaut (der übrigens "Der Ritus" zu den "rührendsten" Werken Bergmans zählte) mit "Befreiung des Dialogs" umschrieben hat: Die Sprache wird als sinnliches Element immer stärker, löst sich von der Funktionalität ab, ohne aber ihre Möglichkeit zum individuellen Ausdruck aufzugeben. Selten war so viel Dialog so spannend anzuhören und mitzulesen wie hier. Wie Truffaut festgestellt hat, stellt sich diese neue Macht der Sprache nicht zuletzt dank der ungewohnten Sprachmelodie des Schwedischen ein, eines hier sehr rhythmischen Genudels mit vielen wunderbar langen Umlauten.
Überhaupt ist das Asketische, Entleerte nur die eine Seite dieses Films: Wo Gegenstände auftauchen, da spielen sie gleich mit und werden inszeniert, wie bei Max Ophüls, und geben sich nicht selten anachronistisch verziert (z.B. ein altmodisches Telefon im Büro des Richters oder ein geschwungener Handspiegel), als wollten sie sich ebenfalls dagegen versperren, reine Funktion, Anlass für Bewegung wie im Theater des Absurden zu werden. Auch die dominant anonyme Architektur hat in einigen wenigen bildreichen Flächen (religiöse Abbildungen auf einem Beichtstuhl; ein ornamental geschwungenes Fenster im Büro des Richters; ein Flammenring, den einer der Künstler in seinem Bett entzündet) ihr logisches Anderes, an dem ein weniger radikaler Geist sichtbar wird. Die Üppigkeiten in Sprache und Dekor kann man als Zeichen eines bürgerlichen Kunstverständnisses, als Skrupel vor der Moderne lesen.
— Joachim Schätz, filmzentrale
(Passion [de])
Sweden 1969
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment/DVD (Region 0 de)
Sweden 1969
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment/DVD (Region 0 de)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor, b/w))
e: Siv Lundgren
pd: P.A. Lundgren
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph / Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell, Sigge Fürst, Britta Brunius, Lars-Owe Carlberg, Malin Ek, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs
pr: 10 Nov 1969
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor, b/w))
e: Siv Lundgren
pd: P.A. Lundgren
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph / Svensk Filmindustri (SF))
w: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell, Sigge Fürst, Britta Brunius, Lars-Owe Carlberg, Malin Ek, Barbro Hiort af Ornäs
pr: 10 Nov 1969
rt: 96:09 (+4%PAL= 101) min
dvd-rl: 22 Nov 2005
ar: 1.66:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: German
supp: --
dvd-rl: 22 Nov 2005
ar: 1.66:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: German
supp: --
All Bergman's films in the late '60s centre on isolated social groups (often the partners of a marriage) and show them under attack from both inside and out: Laingian fissures and cracks open up between the characters, and their precarious security is challenged by irruptions from the outside world. Bergman preserves and extends his private mythologies (witness the way that images and names recur from film to film), but in a broader (less precious, more honest) context. Liv Ullmann says it all in The Shame when she dreams of 'living in the truth'. Here, another bold step forward in Bergman's analysis of human isolation, the public and private manias of Hour of the Wolf are brought down to earth among middle class intruders in an island community.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Andreas Winkelmann withdraws from the world to live in solitude-Bergman's Simon of Fårö Island. As he rifles through a purse left by Anna Fromm (Liv Ullmann), he finds a letter with a phrase that warns of "physical and psychical acts of violence." His seduction (or redemption) by the world moves dramatically to confirm that phrase. Into the grays, browns, and greens of Bergman's newly mastered color palette burst the reds that threaten to become the sign of any human relationship-the deeper, the more violence necessary to break through to the other person. With Persona, The Passion of Anna marks the high point of Bergman's achievement in the sixties. Liberated from any direct confrontation with theology, Bergman here translates his concerns into new terms. "Why don't you do something you believe in?" Anna asks the architect, and Bergman's Brechtian cinematic practices are this film's answer."
Bergman interrupts the narrative with two unusual devices that only serve to increase the profundity--and believability--of the film: each character is given a lengthy passage in which to reveal the most important incident in his or her life; and each actor has a moment in which to comment on the role being played. Penelope Gilliatt calls The Passion of Anna (also known as A Passion), "supreme...one of the most specifically modern films I have ever seen."
— William Nestrick ("William Nestrick Selects: Cinema of the Unseen," PFA, 1985)
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Andreas Winkelmann withdraws from the world to live in solitude-Bergman's Simon of Fårö Island. As he rifles through a purse left by Anna Fromm (Liv Ullmann), he finds a letter with a phrase that warns of "physical and psychical acts of violence." His seduction (or redemption) by the world moves dramatically to confirm that phrase. Into the grays, browns, and greens of Bergman's newly mastered color palette burst the reds that threaten to become the sign of any human relationship-the deeper, the more violence necessary to break through to the other person. With Persona, The Passion of Anna marks the high point of Bergman's achievement in the sixties. Liberated from any direct confrontation with theology, Bergman here translates his concerns into new terms. "Why don't you do something you believe in?" Anna asks the architect, and Bergman's Brechtian cinematic practices are this film's answer."
Bergman interrupts the narrative with two unusual devices that only serve to increase the profundity--and believability--of the film: each character is given a lengthy passage in which to reveal the most important incident in his or her life; and each actor has a moment in which to comment on the role being played. Penelope Gilliatt calls The Passion of Anna (also known as A Passion), "supreme...one of the most specifically modern films I have ever seen."
— William Nestrick ("William Nestrick Selects: Cinema of the Unseen," PFA, 1985)
(Schreie und Flüstern [de])
Sweden 1972
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment / Arthaus (Region 0 de)
Sweden 1972
d: Ingmar Bergman
Kinowelt Home Entertainment / Arthaus (Region 0 de)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor)
e: Siv Lundgren
pd: Marik Vos-Lundh
m: Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph AB / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI))
w: Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, Anders Ek, Inga Gill, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Årlin, Lena Bergman, Lars-Owe Carlberg, Malin Gjörup, Greta Johansson, Karin Johansson, Ann-Christin Lobråten, Börje Lundh, Rosanna Mariano, Monika Priede, Linn Ullmann, Ingrid von Rosen
pr: 21 Dez 1972
aw: Academy Awards 1974 Oscar Best Cinematography; Nominated Oscar Best Costume Design; Best Director; Best Picture; Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced • Bodil Awards 1974 Bedste europæiske film • Cannes Film Festival 1973 Won Technical Grand Prize • Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain 1975 Mejor Película Extranjera • David di Donatello Awards 1974 David Migliore Regista Straniero; Special David: Harriet Andersson Kari Sylwan Ingrid Thulin Liv Ullmann • Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists 1974 Silver Ribbon Regista del Miglior Film Straniero • National Board of Review, USA 1973 Best Director; Best Foreign Language Film • National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA 1973 Best Cinematography; Best Screenplay • New York Film Critics Circle Awards 1973 Best Actress; Best Director; Best Film; Best Screenplay
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor)
e: Siv Lundgren
pd: Marik Vos-Lundh
m: Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin
p: Lars-Owe Carlberg (Cinematograph AB / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI))
w: Harriet Andersson, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, Anders Ek, Inga Gill, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Årlin, Lena Bergman, Lars-Owe Carlberg, Malin Gjörup, Greta Johansson, Karin Johansson, Ann-Christin Lobråten, Börje Lundh, Rosanna Mariano, Monika Priede, Linn Ullmann, Ingrid von Rosen
pr: 21 Dez 1972
aw: Academy Awards 1974 Oscar Best Cinematography; Nominated Oscar Best Costume Design; Best Director; Best Picture; Best Writing, Story and Screenplay Based on Factual Material or Material Not Previously Published or Produced • Bodil Awards 1974 Bedste europæiske film • Cannes Film Festival 1973 Won Technical Grand Prize • Cinema Writers Circle Awards, Spain 1975 Mejor Película Extranjera • David di Donatello Awards 1974 David Migliore Regista Straniero; Special David: Harriet Andersson Kari Sylwan Ingrid Thulin Liv Ullmann • Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists 1974 Silver Ribbon Regista del Miglior Film Straniero • National Board of Review, USA 1973 Best Director; Best Foreign Language Film • National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA 1973 Best Cinematography; Best Screenplay • New York Film Critics Circle Awards 1973 Best Actress; Best Director; Best Film; Best Screenplay
rt: 87:29 (+4%PAL= 91)min
dvd-rl: 03 Jän 2006
ar: 1.66:1 (4:3 Letterboxed Widescreen)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: German
supp: --
dvd-rl: 03 Jän 2006
ar: 1.66:1 (4:3 Letterboxed Widescreen)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
st: German
supp: --
You can interpret "Cries and Whispers" through a whole religious metaphysic, and no doubt Bergman himself would; but latterly this has been something of a red herring for a director whose talent lies more in straight psychodrama. None of the films immediately preceding have been more visually seductive than "Cries", so much so that form, repeatedly, gets the better of content. Mostly Bergman is able to regain control, which is where the scenes that make the film come in: for instance, the short sequence where Thulin, in period costume, is undressed by her maid, which says all there is to say about clothes, disguise, repression. "Cries" is about bodies, female bodies, in extremity of pain, isolation or neglect (the cards are heavily stacked). Karin (Thulin) mutilates her cunt with a piece of broken glass and, stretched out on her marital bed, smiles through the blood she's smeared across her mouth at her husband in celebration of a marriage that's a 'tissue of lies'. Maria (Ullman) finds herself lacking a thread that would tie her irreversibly to life. Bergman's hour remains resolutely that of the wolf.
— VG, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Similar to Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych", death confers a profound revelation whose meaning escapes the survivors. "Cries and Whispers" is a beautifully devastating story of isolation, communication, love, and death.
Ingmar Bergman resisted using color as a novelty. His use of color in the film is precise and deliberate. Contrast the pale, muted landscape to the rich, deep colors inside the house. The color red, featured prominently in the film (as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Red") is used to create a multifaceted visual theme. The effect is one of immersion: a soul foundering in the corporal life blood, a stifling, forced intimacy arising from absence and isolation, and a body slowly consumed by illness. "Cries and Whispers" is a remarkable film of intoxicating beauty and extraordinary depth, a sublime work of art from a true master.
— Acquarello
•••••
Bergman's intimate examination of the passions and anxieties of four women - Agnes, who is dying in the house in which she was born; Karin and Maria, her two married sisters who have come to look after her; and Anna, her devoted maid. Seen by many as Bergman's quintessential "women's film," Cries and Whispers swept the National Critics' Awards, although feminist critic Connie Penley found it to be "the filmic paradigm of woman as Other...of woman as cosmic victim...." Few, however, would disagree with Vincent Canby's assessment that Cries and Whispers "is not an easy film to describe or to endure. It stands alone, and it reduces almost everything else you're likely to see this season to the size of a small cinder."
— PFA
•••••
In a film as formal as a clock's tick, Bergman restricts his palette to colors of blood, his close-ups to the image of the soul. The four women want strength to face life, to overcome fear, to remove the curtain from behind which they look and admire, but do not go forth to touch. They are the same person in different stages of realizing that to love is to empty oneself of desire; to forgive oneself; to hear fully the cry of the present through the searing whispers from the past; to imagine a love that gives without knowing how to heal or provide rest, yet is vast and vigilant, because that is life's meaning: to be saved by giving one's body and soul.
— Ryan DeRosa, PFA 1996
•••••
Ingmar Bergman resisted using color as a novelty. His use of color in the film is precise and deliberate. Contrast the pale, muted landscape to the rich, deep colors inside the house. The color red, featured prominently in the film (as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Red") is used to create a multifaceted visual theme. The effect is one of immersion: a soul foundering in the corporal life blood, a stifling, forced intimacy arising from absence and isolation, and a body slowly consumed by illness. "Cries and Whispers" is a remarkable film of intoxicating beauty and extraordinary depth, a sublime work of art from a true master.
— Acquarello
•••••
The last scene in the film is intuitive filmmaking at its best. We see and viscerally experience a passage from Agnes's diary. A paradisiacal summer day. The four women are walking together outdoors. They stop at a swing. Agnes writes about the scene: "All my aches and pains were gone. The people I'm most fond of in the world were with me. I could hear them chatting around me, I felt the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands." At this moment, she experiences a few minutes of "perfection."
The image is so sensitively rendered in austere visual terms and so precious in contrast to the sadness that precedes it (the omnipresent cries and whispers of loneliness, pain, grief, and noncommunication in the valley of the shadow of death) that one cannot help but be moved to a deep feeling of catharsis. Call it a dream within Bergmann's dreams. Call it an illusion. Or call it a few minutes of love that makes a lifetime worth living. It is an unforgettable scene.
— Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality & Health Publishing
•••••
the most distinctive feature of "Cries and Whispers" is its striking color palette made almost exclusively from shades of red, black and white. These colors have a definite metaphorical connotation for Bergman and are used throughout the film to support the narrative. In "Cries and Whispers", the colors, and the images that they form, seem to be more important than the dialogue, and the entire film gives the impression of portraying a cinematic space belonging to Lacan's pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic realm. The color red dominates almost every single scene that takes place inside the manor, and as the quote that opens this essay suggests, it represents the interior of the soul, and most probably, is also used as an allegory for the interior of the womb. White is a color often linked to the virginal Agnes, and stands symbolically for sexual repression. Finally, black is a color that Bergman has consistently associated with priests and Christianity in his films. It is important to note that these colors mostly appear in two combinations, either red and white, or red and black, creating an arresting visual and thematic dichotomy. Therefore, Bergman seems to suggest how seemingly opposite forces affect the human condition, the nature of the soul on one side, and socio-cultural repressions on the other.
The unique visual dichotomy of "Cries and Whispers" can be considered as part of a much greater structure of oppositional forces that permeates the film. Consider for instance the title of the film – Cries and Whispers – which seems to be borrowed from a description of the Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto given by Swedish music critic Yngve Flycht. Without doubt, this is a title that clearly conveys oppositions. Within the context of the narrative cries are related to emotional conditions such as pain, anguish, impotency, loneliness, guilt and suffocation. In contrast, whispers are associated with feelings of tenderness, tolerance, love and compassion. All the characters in "Cries and Whispers" appear to be trapped in a complex web of emotions, unsure if they want to cry or to whisper at any given time, as if they were being torn apart by their conflicting feelings. However, even with Agnes' ultimate sacrifice, this film does not provide any closure or resolution to these antagonisms. Instead, "Cries and Whispers" is a beautiful film that invites the viewer to think about the nature of the human condition. For some viewers, the ambivalent end of the film places Agnes in a heavenly paradise, where she is absolved of her painful martyrdom. For others, it merely suggests the futility of her sacrifice. Nevertheless, as with many other works directed by Bergman, the film's conclusion is not as important as the unforgettable process of self-discovery endured by characters and viewers alike.
— Marco Lanzagorta, Senses of Cinema February 2003
•••••
"I had had an image...for more than a year, I think. I had this image that kept coming back to me time and again. A strange image, and they're often forebodings of a film. One particular image. This image depicted a room that was completely red. The wallpaper was red, the carpet was red, and the furniture was in various shades of red. And in the back of the room there were four women. They wore dresses from the turn of the century, from before World War I. They were all dressed in white nightgowns. They spoke with each other, facing each other as they did. I stood far away from them. I saw them from far off in the room in this image. Far off in the room. This image persistently returned to me. One good way is to try to write about these women. It's always been the case whenever there's been an image. The best way is always to start writing. Because if it vanishes, then there's nothing more to it. One can abandon the project. But if these women persist, or the image persists, then one should continue writing. And so I did....Once I had realized who these women were...and had identified them and given them a background and ages and life circumstances, it all went very quickly...which was fun. Although the story is a very sad one....For me, Cries and Whispers is so much about music. 'Cries and whispers' is not my own phrase but comes from a review of a piano sonata by Mozart. I can't remember which one. It said that the slow movements were like cries and whispers, and I thought that fit very well. Because it is, in fact, a piece of music translated into images."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
— VG, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Similar to Leo Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych", death confers a profound revelation whose meaning escapes the survivors. "Cries and Whispers" is a beautifully devastating story of isolation, communication, love, and death.
Ingmar Bergman resisted using color as a novelty. His use of color in the film is precise and deliberate. Contrast the pale, muted landscape to the rich, deep colors inside the house. The color red, featured prominently in the film (as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Red") is used to create a multifaceted visual theme. The effect is one of immersion: a soul foundering in the corporal life blood, a stifling, forced intimacy arising from absence and isolation, and a body slowly consumed by illness. "Cries and Whispers" is a remarkable film of intoxicating beauty and extraordinary depth, a sublime work of art from a true master.
— Acquarello
•••••
Bergman's intimate examination of the passions and anxieties of four women - Agnes, who is dying in the house in which she was born; Karin and Maria, her two married sisters who have come to look after her; and Anna, her devoted maid. Seen by many as Bergman's quintessential "women's film," Cries and Whispers swept the National Critics' Awards, although feminist critic Connie Penley found it to be "the filmic paradigm of woman as Other...of woman as cosmic victim...." Few, however, would disagree with Vincent Canby's assessment that Cries and Whispers "is not an easy film to describe or to endure. It stands alone, and it reduces almost everything else you're likely to see this season to the size of a small cinder."
— PFA
•••••
In a film as formal as a clock's tick, Bergman restricts his palette to colors of blood, his close-ups to the image of the soul. The four women want strength to face life, to overcome fear, to remove the curtain from behind which they look and admire, but do not go forth to touch. They are the same person in different stages of realizing that to love is to empty oneself of desire; to forgive oneself; to hear fully the cry of the present through the searing whispers from the past; to imagine a love that gives without knowing how to heal or provide rest, yet is vast and vigilant, because that is life's meaning: to be saved by giving one's body and soul.
— Ryan DeRosa, PFA 1996
•••••
Ingmar Bergman resisted using color as a novelty. His use of color in the film is precise and deliberate. Contrast the pale, muted landscape to the rich, deep colors inside the house. The color red, featured prominently in the film (as in Krzysztof Kieslowski's "Red") is used to create a multifaceted visual theme. The effect is one of immersion: a soul foundering in the corporal life blood, a stifling, forced intimacy arising from absence and isolation, and a body slowly consumed by illness. "Cries and Whispers" is a remarkable film of intoxicating beauty and extraordinary depth, a sublime work of art from a true master.
— Acquarello
•••••
The last scene in the film is intuitive filmmaking at its best. We see and viscerally experience a passage from Agnes's diary. A paradisiacal summer day. The four women are walking together outdoors. They stop at a swing. Agnes writes about the scene: "All my aches and pains were gone. The people I'm most fond of in the world were with me. I could hear them chatting around me, I felt the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands." At this moment, she experiences a few minutes of "perfection."
The image is so sensitively rendered in austere visual terms and so precious in contrast to the sadness that precedes it (the omnipresent cries and whispers of loneliness, pain, grief, and noncommunication in the valley of the shadow of death) that one cannot help but be moved to a deep feeling of catharsis. Call it a dream within Bergmann's dreams. Call it an illusion. Or call it a few minutes of love that makes a lifetime worth living. It is an unforgettable scene.
— Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality & Health Publishing
•••••
the most distinctive feature of "Cries and Whispers" is its striking color palette made almost exclusively from shades of red, black and white. These colors have a definite metaphorical connotation for Bergman and are used throughout the film to support the narrative. In "Cries and Whispers", the colors, and the images that they form, seem to be more important than the dialogue, and the entire film gives the impression of portraying a cinematic space belonging to Lacan's pre-symbolic, pre-linguistic realm. The color red dominates almost every single scene that takes place inside the manor, and as the quote that opens this essay suggests, it represents the interior of the soul, and most probably, is also used as an allegory for the interior of the womb. White is a color often linked to the virginal Agnes, and stands symbolically for sexual repression. Finally, black is a color that Bergman has consistently associated with priests and Christianity in his films. It is important to note that these colors mostly appear in two combinations, either red and white, or red and black, creating an arresting visual and thematic dichotomy. Therefore, Bergman seems to suggest how seemingly opposite forces affect the human condition, the nature of the soul on one side, and socio-cultural repressions on the other.
The unique visual dichotomy of "Cries and Whispers" can be considered as part of a much greater structure of oppositional forces that permeates the film. Consider for instance the title of the film – Cries and Whispers – which seems to be borrowed from a description of the Mozart's 21st Piano Concerto given by Swedish music critic Yngve Flycht. Without doubt, this is a title that clearly conveys oppositions. Within the context of the narrative cries are related to emotional conditions such as pain, anguish, impotency, loneliness, guilt and suffocation. In contrast, whispers are associated with feelings of tenderness, tolerance, love and compassion. All the characters in "Cries and Whispers" appear to be trapped in a complex web of emotions, unsure if they want to cry or to whisper at any given time, as if they were being torn apart by their conflicting feelings. However, even with Agnes' ultimate sacrifice, this film does not provide any closure or resolution to these antagonisms. Instead, "Cries and Whispers" is a beautiful film that invites the viewer to think about the nature of the human condition. For some viewers, the ambivalent end of the film places Agnes in a heavenly paradise, where she is absolved of her painful martyrdom. For others, it merely suggests the futility of her sacrifice. Nevertheless, as with many other works directed by Bergman, the film's conclusion is not as important as the unforgettable process of self-discovery endured by characters and viewers alike.
— Marco Lanzagorta, Senses of Cinema February 2003
•••••
"I had had an image...for more than a year, I think. I had this image that kept coming back to me time and again. A strange image, and they're often forebodings of a film. One particular image. This image depicted a room that was completely red. The wallpaper was red, the carpet was red, and the furniture was in various shades of red. And in the back of the room there were four women. They wore dresses from the turn of the century, from before World War I. They were all dressed in white nightgowns. They spoke with each other, facing each other as they did. I stood far away from them. I saw them from far off in the room in this image. Far off in the room. This image persistently returned to me. One good way is to try to write about these women. It's always been the case whenever there's been an image. The best way is always to start writing. Because if it vanishes, then there's nothing more to it. One can abandon the project. But if these women persist, or the image persists, then one should continue writing. And so I did....Once I had realized who these women were...and had identified them and given them a background and ages and life circumstances, it all went very quickly...which was fun. Although the story is a very sad one....For me, Cries and Whispers is so much about music. 'Cries and whispers' is not my own phrase but comes from a review of a piano sonata by Mozart. I can't remember which one. It said that the slow movements were like cries and whispers, and I thought that fit very well. Because it is, in fact, a piece of music translated into images."
— Ingmar Bergman, interview with Marie Nyreröd for SVT Svensk Television, 2003
(Fanny and Alexander—The Theatrical Version [en])
Sweden 1983
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
Sweden 1983
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor)
e: Sylvia Ingemarsson
pd: Susanne Lingheim
m: Daniel Bell, Frans Helmerson, Marianne Jacobs; Non-Original Music by Benjamin Britten, Robert Schumann (from "Piano quintet in E flat, Op 44, 2nd movement"), Robert Schumann (from Lieder "Frauenliebe und -leben, IV. Du Ring an meinem Finger"), Frédéric Chopin (from "Funeral March/Nocturne")
p: Jörn Donner; Daniel Toscan du Plantier (uncredited) (Cinematograph AB [se] / Gaumont [fr] / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) [se] / Personafilm / SVT Drama [se] / Tobis Filmkunst [de])
w: Kristina Adolphson, Börje Ahlstedt, Pernilla Allwin, Kristian Almgren, Carl Billquist, Axel Düberg, Allan Edwall, Siv Ericks, Ewa Fröling, Patricia Gélin, Majlis Granlund, Maria Granlund, Bertil Guve, Eva von Hanno, Sonya Hedenbratt
pr: 17 Dez 1982
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor)
e: Sylvia Ingemarsson
pd: Susanne Lingheim
m: Daniel Bell, Frans Helmerson, Marianne Jacobs; Non-Original Music by Benjamin Britten, Robert Schumann (from "Piano quintet in E flat, Op 44, 2nd movement"), Robert Schumann (from Lieder "Frauenliebe und -leben, IV. Du Ring an meinem Finger"), Frédéric Chopin (from "Funeral March/Nocturne")
p: Jörn Donner; Daniel Toscan du Plantier (uncredited) (Cinematograph AB [se] / Gaumont [fr] / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) [se] / Personafilm / SVT Drama [se] / Tobis Filmkunst [de])
w: Kristina Adolphson, Börje Ahlstedt, Pernilla Allwin, Kristian Almgren, Carl Billquist, Axel Düberg, Allan Edwall, Siv Ericks, Ewa Fröling, Patricia Gélin, Majlis Granlund, Maria Granlund, Bertil Guve, Eva von Hanno, Sonya Hedenbratt
pr: 17 Dez 1982
rt: 189:09 min
dvd-rl: 16 Nov 2004
ar: 1.66:1 (16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • English Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #263
New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound, enhanced for widescreen televisions
• Audio commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie
• A new essay by novelist Rick Moody ("The Ice Storm", "Purple America", "Demonology")
• Theatrical Trailer (02:43 min)
dvd-rl: 16 Nov 2004
ar: 1.66:1 (16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • English Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #263
New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound, enhanced for widescreen televisions
• Audio commentary by film scholar Peter Cowie
• A new essay by novelist Rick Moody ("The Ice Storm", "Purple America", "Demonology")
• Theatrical Trailer (02:43 min)
Bergman's magisterial turn-of-the-century family saga, largely seen through the eyes of a small boy and carrying tantalising overtones of autobiography. Perhaps more accurately described as an anthology of personal reference points, designed as an auto-critique analysing his repertoire of artistic tricks. Years ago, in "The Face", Bergman was agonising over the humiliations of the artist caught out in his deceptions and manipulations; but "Fanny and Alexander" cheerfully acknowledges his role as a charlatan conjuring his own life into dreams and nightmares for the edification or jollification of humanity. Here again are the smiles of a summer night (transferred to a dazzling evocation of traditional Christmas celebrations), the terror of the small boy harried by a sternly puritanical father, the crisis of religious doubt, the apocalyptic materialisation of God through a glass darkly (but seen this time to be only a marionette). Pulling his own creations apart to show how they tick, Bergman demonstrates the role of art and artifice, ocassionally slipping in a stunning new trick to show that the old magic still works. Certainly the most illuminating and most entertaining slice of Bergman criticism around, even better in the uncut TV version which clocks in at 300 minutes.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Ingmar Bergman announced that this 197-minute film from 1983 would be his last theatrical feature (though it is actually, like "Scenes From a Marriage", the condensed version of a much longer television series). It is less an autumnal summation of his career than an investigation of its earliest beginnings: through the figure of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman traces the storytelling urge, developing from dreams and fairy tales into theater and (implicitly) movies. The film doesn't so much surmount Bergman's usual shortcomings--the crude contrasts, heavy symbolism, and preachy philosophizing--as find an effective context for them. Tied to a child's mind, the oversimplifications become the stuff of myth and legend. As in Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter", a realistic psychological drama is allowed to expand into fantasy; the result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Bergman's beautiful, dreamlike family chronicle has the feel of literature-perhaps a sprawling nineteenth century novel-though in fact it is based on an original screenplay. In the film version, the sense that there is somehow more to this Ekdahl family than we are given is frustrating. All the characters and nearly all the scenes are there, but in Bergman's original television mini-series they are fleshed out, scenes and characters-and thus motivations-given time to develop. If the 1983 film was "lumpy," as critic Michael Sragow noted, in this original format those narrative lumps are smoothed out. Bergman said that "Fanny and Alexander" was his final movie, but he made no such claim for his work in the theater, his first and continuing love. In "Fanny and Alexander" he follows the fortunes of an upper middle class theatrical family who are sheltered from the deepening chaos of the outside world by their own theatrics. Bergman has the grace, in this most graceful film, not to view their histrionics and eccentricities as neuroses. One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander, whose imagination fuels the magical goings-on leading up to and following the death of his father, the actor Oscar Ekdahl. His mother's remarriage to a stern prelate banishes Alexander and his sister Fanny from all known joys, and thrusts them and the movie into a kind of gothic horror. In the mini-series, not only do we comprehend Emilie Ekdahl, and thus her attraction to the Bishop Edvard, better, but Edvard, given his own scenes, becomes less a tyrannical figure out of Dickens than a very Bergmanesque character whose severity has gone awry. He has become sinister. The film's round rejection of Edvard in favor of "kindness, affection, and goodness" is perhaps Bergman's fondest farewell to his own cinema.
— PFA
•••••
"It may still be too early to designate Fanny and Alexander as Bergman's The Tempest, but he is very near the point when lyrical reverie somehow supplants the most tentative gesture of dramatic conflict. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Fanny and Alexander as irretrievably schematic or sentimental. As in all of Bergman's films, there are in Fanny and Alexander a multitude of privileged moments and incisive observations that only Bergman can provide. No matter how hard his characters try to fit into their period costumes, they can never erase from their expressions the gleam of modernist afterthoughts. The singleminded intensity and formal rigour of a Dreyer or a Bresson have never been Bergman's strong suits. With Fanny and Alexander we see more clearly than ever that Bergman's oeuvre has always been the proper province less of the theologian than of the psychoanalyst. Bergman remains one of the few genuine grown-ups ever to make movies, and we need him now more than ever."
— Andrew Sarris, Village Voice (21 June 1983)
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Ingmar Bergman announced that this 197-minute film from 1983 would be his last theatrical feature (though it is actually, like "Scenes From a Marriage", the condensed version of a much longer television series). It is less an autumnal summation of his career than an investigation of its earliest beginnings: through the figure of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman traces the storytelling urge, developing from dreams and fairy tales into theater and (implicitly) movies. The film doesn't so much surmount Bergman's usual shortcomings--the crude contrasts, heavy symbolism, and preachy philosophizing--as find an effective context for them. Tied to a child's mind, the oversimplifications become the stuff of myth and legend. As in Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter", a realistic psychological drama is allowed to expand into fantasy; the result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Bergman's beautiful, dreamlike family chronicle has the feel of literature-perhaps a sprawling nineteenth century novel-though in fact it is based on an original screenplay. In the film version, the sense that there is somehow more to this Ekdahl family than we are given is frustrating. All the characters and nearly all the scenes are there, but in Bergman's original television mini-series they are fleshed out, scenes and characters-and thus motivations-given time to develop. If the 1983 film was "lumpy," as critic Michael Sragow noted, in this original format those narrative lumps are smoothed out. Bergman said that "Fanny and Alexander" was his final movie, but he made no such claim for his work in the theater, his first and continuing love. In "Fanny and Alexander" he follows the fortunes of an upper middle class theatrical family who are sheltered from the deepening chaos of the outside world by their own theatrics. Bergman has the grace, in this most graceful film, not to view their histrionics and eccentricities as neuroses. One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander, whose imagination fuels the magical goings-on leading up to and following the death of his father, the actor Oscar Ekdahl. His mother's remarriage to a stern prelate banishes Alexander and his sister Fanny from all known joys, and thrusts them and the movie into a kind of gothic horror. In the mini-series, not only do we comprehend Emilie Ekdahl, and thus her attraction to the Bishop Edvard, better, but Edvard, given his own scenes, becomes less a tyrannical figure out of Dickens than a very Bergmanesque character whose severity has gone awry. He has become sinister. The film's round rejection of Edvard in favor of "kindness, affection, and goodness" is perhaps Bergman's fondest farewell to his own cinema.
— PFA
•••••
"It may still be too early to designate Fanny and Alexander as Bergman's The Tempest, but he is very near the point when lyrical reverie somehow supplants the most tentative gesture of dramatic conflict. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Fanny and Alexander as irretrievably schematic or sentimental. As in all of Bergman's films, there are in Fanny and Alexander a multitude of privileged moments and incisive observations that only Bergman can provide. No matter how hard his characters try to fit into their period costumes, they can never erase from their expressions the gleam of modernist afterthoughts. The singleminded intensity and formal rigour of a Dreyer or a Bresson have never been Bergman's strong suits. With Fanny and Alexander we see more clearly than ever that Bergman's oeuvre has always been the proper province less of the theologian than of the psychoanalyst. Bergman remains one of the few genuine grown-ups ever to make movies, and we need him now more than ever."
— Andrew Sarris, Village Voice (21 June 1983)
(Fanny and Alexander-The TV Version [en])
Sweden 1982
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
Sweden 1982
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor)
e: Sylvia Ingemarsson
pd: Susanne Lingheim
m: Daniel Bell, Frans Helmerson, Marianne Jacobs; Non-Original Music by Benjamin Britten, Robert Schumann (from "Piano quintet in E flat, Op 44, 2nd movement"), Robert Schumann (from Lieder "Frauenliebe und -leben, IV. Du Ring an meinem Finger"), Frédéric Chopin (from "Funeral March/Nocturne")
p: Jörn Donner; Daniel Toscan du Plantier (uncredited) (Cinematograph AB [se] / Gaumont [fr] / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) [se] / Personafilm / SVT Drama [se] / Tobis Filmkunst [de])
w: Kristina Adolphson, Börje Ahlstedt, Pernilla Allwin, Kristian Almgren, Carl Billquist, Axel Düberg, Allan Edwall, Siv Ericks, Ewa Fröling, Patricia Gélin, Majlis Granlund, Maria Granlund, Bertil Guve, Eva von Hanno, Sonya Hedenbratt
pr: 17 Dez 1983
c: Sven Nykvist (Eastmancolor)
e: Sylvia Ingemarsson
pd: Susanne Lingheim
m: Daniel Bell, Frans Helmerson, Marianne Jacobs; Non-Original Music by Benjamin Britten, Robert Schumann (from "Piano quintet in E flat, Op 44, 2nd movement"), Robert Schumann (from Lieder "Frauenliebe und -leben, IV. Du Ring an meinem Finger"), Frédéric Chopin (from "Funeral March/Nocturne")
p: Jörn Donner; Daniel Toscan du Plantier (uncredited) (Cinematograph AB [se] / Gaumont [fr] / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) [se] / Personafilm / SVT Drama [se] / Tobis Filmkunst [de])
w: Kristina Adolphson, Börje Ahlstedt, Pernilla Allwin, Kristian Almgren, Carl Billquist, Axel Düberg, Allan Edwall, Siv Ericks, Ewa Fröling, Patricia Gélin, Majlis Granlund, Maria Granlund, Bertil Guve, Eva von Hanno, Sonya Hedenbratt
pr: 17 Dez 1983
rt: 308:08 min
dvd-rl: 16 Nov 2004
ar: 1.66:1 (16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #262
New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound, enhanced for widescreen televisions
• "A Bergman Tapestry: Fanny and Alexander", a new documentary featuring exclusive interviews with cast and crew (39:18 min)
dvd-rl: 16 Nov 2004
ar: 1.66:1 (16:9 Anamorphic Widescreen)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #262
New high-definition digital transfer, with restored image and sound, enhanced for widescreen televisions
• "A Bergman Tapestry: Fanny and Alexander", a new documentary featuring exclusive interviews with cast and crew (39:18 min)
Bergman's magisterial turn-of-the-century family saga, largely seen through the eyes of a small boy and carrying tantalising overtones of autobiography. Perhaps more accurately described as an anthology of personal reference points, designed as an auto-critique analysing his repertoire of artistic tricks. Years ago, in "The Face", Bergman was agonising over the humiliations of the artist caught out in his deceptions and manipulations; but "Fanny and Alexander" cheerfully acknowledges his role as a charlatan conjuring his own life into dreams and nightmares for the edification or jollification of humanity. Here again are the smiles of a summer night (transferred to a dazzling evocation of traditional Christmas celebrations), the terror of the small boy harried by a sternly puritanical father, the crisis of religious doubt, the apocalyptic materialisation of God through a glass darkly (but seen this time to be only a marionette). Pulling his own creations apart to show how they tick, Bergman demonstrates the role of art and artifice, ocassionally slipping in a stunning new trick to show that the old magic still works. Certainly the most illuminating and most entertaining slice of Bergman criticism around, even better in the uncut TV version which clocks in at 300 minutes.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Ingmar Bergman announced that this 197-minute film from 1983 would be his last theatrical feature (though it is actually, like "Scenes From a Marriage", the condensed version of a much longer television series). It is less an autumnal summation of his career than an investigation of its earliest beginnings: through the figure of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman traces the storytelling urge, developing from dreams and fairy tales into theater and (implicitly) movies. The film doesn't so much surmount Bergman's usual shortcomings--the crude contrasts, heavy symbolism, and preachy philosophizing--as find an effective context for them. Tied to a child's mind, the oversimplifications become the stuff of myth and legend. As in Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter", a realistic psychological drama is allowed to expand into fantasy; the result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Bergman's beautiful, dreamlike family chronicle has the feel of literature-perhaps a sprawling nineteenth century novel-though in fact it is based on an original screenplay. In the film version, the sense that there is somehow more to this Ekdahl family than we are given is frustrating. All the characters and nearly all the scenes are there, but in Bergman's original television mini-series they are fleshed out, scenes and characters-and thus motivations-given time to develop. If the 1983 film was "lumpy," as critic Michael Sragow noted, in this original format those narrative lumps are smoothed out. Bergman said that "Fanny and Alexander" was his final movie, but he made no such claim for his work in the theater, his first and continuing love. In "Fanny and Alexander" he follows the fortunes of an upper middle class theatrical family who are sheltered from the deepening chaos of the outside world by their own theatrics. Bergman has the grace, in this most graceful film, not to view their histrionics and eccentricities as neuroses. One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander, whose imagination fuels the magical goings-on leading up to and following the death of his father, the actor Oscar Ekdahl. His mother's remarriage to a stern prelate banishes Alexander and his sister Fanny from all known joys, and thrusts them and the movie into a kind of gothic horror. In the mini-series, not only do we comprehend Emilie Ekdahl, and thus her attraction to the Bishop Edvard, better, but Edvard, given his own scenes, becomes less a tyrannical figure out of Dickens than a very Bergmanesque character whose severity has gone awry. He has become sinister. The film's round rejection of Edvard in favor of "kindness, affection, and goodness" is perhaps Bergman's fondest farewell to his own cinema.
— PFA
•••••
"It may still be too early to designate Fanny and Alexander as Bergman's The Tempest, but he is very near the point when lyrical reverie somehow supplants the most tentative gesture of dramatic conflict. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Fanny and Alexander as irretrievably schematic or sentimental. As in all of Bergman's films, there are in Fanny and Alexander a multitude of privileged moments and incisive observations that only Bergman can provide. No matter how hard his characters try to fit into their period costumes, they can never erase from their expressions the gleam of modernist afterthoughts. The singleminded intensity and formal rigour of a Dreyer or a Bresson have never been Bergman's strong suits. With Fanny and Alexander we see more clearly than ever that Bergman's oeuvre has always been the proper province less of the theologian than of the psychoanalyst. Bergman remains one of the few genuine grown-ups ever to make movies, and we need him now more than ever."
— Andrew Sarris, Village Voice (21 June 1983)
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Ingmar Bergman announced that this 197-minute film from 1983 would be his last theatrical feature (though it is actually, like "Scenes From a Marriage", the condensed version of a much longer television series). It is less an autumnal summation of his career than an investigation of its earliest beginnings: through the figure of ten-year-old Alexander (Bertil Guve), Bergman traces the storytelling urge, developing from dreams and fairy tales into theater and (implicitly) movies. The film doesn't so much surmount Bergman's usual shortcomings--the crude contrasts, heavy symbolism, and preachy philosophizing--as find an effective context for them. Tied to a child's mind, the oversimplifications become the stuff of myth and legend. As in Laughton's "The Night of the Hunter", a realistic psychological drama is allowed to expand into fantasy; the result is one of Bergman's most haunting and suggestive films.
— Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader
•••••
Bergman's beautiful, dreamlike family chronicle has the feel of literature-perhaps a sprawling nineteenth century novel-though in fact it is based on an original screenplay. In the film version, the sense that there is somehow more to this Ekdahl family than we are given is frustrating. All the characters and nearly all the scenes are there, but in Bergman's original television mini-series they are fleshed out, scenes and characters-and thus motivations-given time to develop. If the 1983 film was "lumpy," as critic Michael Sragow noted, in this original format those narrative lumps are smoothed out. Bergman said that "Fanny and Alexander" was his final movie, but he made no such claim for his work in the theater, his first and continuing love. In "Fanny and Alexander" he follows the fortunes of an upper middle class theatrical family who are sheltered from the deepening chaos of the outside world by their own theatrics. Bergman has the grace, in this most graceful film, not to view their histrionics and eccentricities as neuroses. One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family is viewed through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander, whose imagination fuels the magical goings-on leading up to and following the death of his father, the actor Oscar Ekdahl. His mother's remarriage to a stern prelate banishes Alexander and his sister Fanny from all known joys, and thrusts them and the movie into a kind of gothic horror. In the mini-series, not only do we comprehend Emilie Ekdahl, and thus her attraction to the Bishop Edvard, better, but Edvard, given his own scenes, becomes less a tyrannical figure out of Dickens than a very Bergmanesque character whose severity has gone awry. He has become sinister. The film's round rejection of Edvard in favor of "kindness, affection, and goodness" is perhaps Bergman's fondest farewell to his own cinema.
— PFA
•••••
"It may still be too early to designate Fanny and Alexander as Bergman's The Tempest, but he is very near the point when lyrical reverie somehow supplants the most tentative gesture of dramatic conflict. Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Fanny and Alexander as irretrievably schematic or sentimental. As in all of Bergman's films, there are in Fanny and Alexander a multitude of privileged moments and incisive observations that only Bergman can provide. No matter how hard his characters try to fit into their period costumes, they can never erase from their expressions the gleam of modernist afterthoughts. The singleminded intensity and formal rigour of a Dreyer or a Bresson have never been Bergman's strong suits. With Fanny and Alexander we see more clearly than ever that Bergman's oeuvre has always been the proper province less of the theologian than of the psychoanalyst. Bergman remains one of the few genuine grown-ups ever to make movies, and we need him now more than ever."
— Andrew Sarris, Village Voice (21 June 1983)
(Das Fanny und Alexander-Dokument [de] • The Making of Fanny and Alexander [en])
Sweden 1986
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
Sweden 1986
d: Ingmar Bergman
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Ingmar Bergman
c: Arne Carlsson (Color)
e: Sylvia Ingemarsson
p: Cinematograph AB [se] / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) [se]
w: Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Allan Edwall, Ewa Fröling, Erland Josephson, Lars Karlsson, Sven Nykvist, Ulf Pramfors, Peter Schildt, Gunn Wållgren
pr: 24 Jän 1986
c: Arne Carlsson (Color)
e: Sylvia Ingemarsson
p: Cinematograph AB [se] / Svenska Filminstitutet (SFI) [se]
w: Daniel Bergman, Ingmar Bergman, Gunnar Björnstrand, Allan Edwall, Ewa Fröling, Erland Josephson, Lars Karlsson, Sven Nykvist, Ulf Pramfors, Peter Schildt, Gunn Wållgren
pr: 24 Jän 1986
rt: 109:44 min
dvd-rl: 16 Nov 2004
ar: 1.66:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #264
New restored high-definition digital transfer
DISC 1
• "Ingmar Bergman Bids Farewell to Film", a conversation between Bergman and Nils Petter Sundgren made for Swedish television in 1984 (4:3, 59:08 min)
• Costume sketches
• Video footage of the film’s set models (7:15 min)
• Stills gallery
DISC 2
• Rare introductions by Bergman to eleven of his films (2003, 4:3, 45:04 min)
• A selection of Bergman theatrical trailers
dvd-rl: 16 Nov 2004
ar: 1.66:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: Swedish Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #264
New restored high-definition digital transfer
DISC 1
• "Ingmar Bergman Bids Farewell to Film", a conversation between Bergman and Nils Petter Sundgren made for Swedish television in 1984 (4:3, 59:08 min)
• Costume sketches
• Video footage of the film’s set models (7:15 min)
• Stills gallery
DISC 2
• Rare introductions by Bergman to eleven of his films (2003, 4:3, 45:04 min)
• A selection of Bergman theatrical trailers
"The Making of Fanny and Alexander" is a fascinating look at the creation of a masterpiece. Directed by Ingmar Bergman himself, this feature-length documentary chronicles the methods of one of cinema’s true luminaries as he labors to realize his crowning production. Featuring Bergman at work with many of his longtime collaborators—including cinematographer Sven Nykvist and actors Erland Josephson, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Harriet Andersson.
d = director; sc = screenplay; c = cinematographer; e = editor; pd = production design / art director;
m = music score ; p = producer; w = cast; pr = premiere; aw = awards;
rt = runtime; dvd-rl = dvd release; ar = aspect ratio; sd = soundtracks; st = subtitles; supp = supplements
m = music score ; p = producer; w = cast; pr = premiere; aw = awards;
rt = runtime; dvd-rl = dvd release; ar = aspect ratio; sd = soundtracks; st = subtitles; supp = supplements