Skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
I’ve been inspired by Woody Allen week to revisit a lot of old Ingmar Bergman stuff. I’d seen the classics – Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal and Persona, of course – years ago, but there’s a lot I still haven’t seen. I have Cries And Whispers on VHS somewhere in my bunker and I really need to find that. And August Bravo gave me one of the versions of Fanny And Alexander a few years ago. Also, you know which of his movies I’ve always wanted to see? The Silence. For real.
Bergman and Ingrid Thulin during the making of The Silence, 1963.
Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman, part 1:
“Film as a dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.”
-Ingmar Bergman
A sterling example of how film lovers are smarter than non film lovers: one of the first things we’ve learned is that you don’t play chess with Death!
Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman, part 2:
“During a career that spans some four decades, he has made about 50 movies, and in those movies he has created an immediately recognizable world. Whether it is the distant allegorical realm of The Seventh Seal or the banal domestic one of Scenes From a Marriage, this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory at best. God is either silent (as in Winter Light) or malevolent (as in The Silence), and Bergman’s characters find themselves ruled, instead, by the capricious ghosts and demons of the unconscious. More persuasively than any other director, Bergman has mapped out the geography of the individual psyche — its secret yearnings and its susceptibility to memory and desire.”
“Among today’s directors I’m of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh — they all have something to say, they’re passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh’s Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.
-Ingmar Bergman, in 2002
Did Bergman get a pass over his Nazi past that Gunter Grass didn’t?
Ang Lee on Bergman.
Bergman and Woody Allen.
Roger Ebert on Persona, not just once, but twice.
A nice review of The Silence.
“I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.”
-Ingmar Bergman in The New York Times, January 22, 1978
I remember buying you that movie. It was originally 45 dollars and I paid a penny for it. Bargain hunter, I know. I’ve always wanted to see Scenes from a Marriage. I know that’s a criterion as well and they carry it at my trebajo, I’ve just never gotten around to picking it up. Wasn’t it meant to be, like, a miniseries?
Yes, and Saraband is the sequel.