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Home > Programmes > The Passion of Ingmar Bergman
Film Description: NEW 35MM PRINT! The combination of Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as mother and daughter ensured the success of AUTUMN SONATA, a psychological chamber drama about the damage caused by emotional repression. Bergman, a famous concert pianist, visits her daughter after a seven-year absence. The mother, nursing her grief over the recent death of her Italian lover, is indifferent to the raw pain of her dowdy daughter, who has lived a life of empty self-sacrifice. Over the course of twenty-four hours, all of their familial guilt, lies and resentments erupt in a series of emotional assaults and confessions. Cathartic, acted with wounding ferocity by Ullmann and Bergman, SONATA is as visually austere as it is emotionally draining. "With an intensity equalling that of PERSONA and CRIES AND WHISPERS, AUTUMN SONATA is at once gruelling and exhilarating, frequently recalling Dreyer in its formal precision and its brief flashbacks viewed statically through arched doorways, and exquisitely shot in burnished colours by Sven Nykvist" (Adrian Turner).
Film Description: NEW 35MM PRINT! CRIES AND WHISPERS, one of the great Bergman films, is a traumatizing "dream play" set in a manor house at the turn of the century. Two women (Thulin and Ullmann) tend to their dying sister (Harriet Andersson), who finds more succour from her peasant servant (Kari Sylwan), a woman unafraid of pain and death. Bergman employs his mise en scène to express the spiritual and physical anguish of the three sisters. (The engorged scarlet colour scheme was an attempt, Bergman said, to visualize "the interior of a soul.") Part nightmare, part requiem, CRIES AND WHISPERS offers some of the greatest ensemble acting in the history of cinema: Ullmann, Thulin, and Andersson seem to harrow hell in their performances as the three tortured sisters. "Superbly photographed by Sven Nykvist in a style suggesting Edvard Munch, and with blood-red backgrounds, the film is smooth and hypnotic; it has oracular power and the pull of a dream" (Pauline Kael). "One of the ten greatest films in the history of cinema" (Terence Davies).
Film Description: NEW 35MM PRINT! One of the most praised and prized films of Bergman’s career – it won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Golden Globe and César as well as dozens of other awards – this sumptuously detailed family chronicle is set in 1907 in the mansion of the Ekdahl clan. The matriarch, Helena, is a retired actress who is approaching death. (Her three sons are familiar Bergman types: the mediocre actor, the good-hearted hedonist, and the grim neurotic.) Bergman focuses on the eponymous brother and sister, whose father suddenly dies, and whose mother marries a pinched, puritanical bishop. Wrenched from the upholstered enclave of the Ekdahl home, the children find themselves in the cold, austere home of their new father, who turns out to be a tyrant and sadist. "Another triumph in the career of one of our greatest living filmmakers" (Vincent Canby, The New York Times).
Film Description: In a foreword to the manuscript of this masterpiece of psychological horror, Bergman wrote: "The hour of the wolf is the time between night and dawn. It is the hour when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palpable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. It is also the hour when most children are born." Max von Sydow plays a painter obsessed with the memory of a young woman (Ingrid Thulin), who was his lover until he was placed in a mental institution. The painter’s pregnant wife (Liv Ullmann) – "quite simply, the most beautiful character in Bergman’s whole work" (Robin Wood) – is unable to stop his descent into madness, and in the harrowing second half of the film, he does battle with demonic visions of sexual humiliation and ritual murder. "Brilliant . . . handled with typical virtuosity with a dazzling flow of surrealism, expressionism and full-blooded Gothic horror" (Tom Milne, Time Out Film Guide).
Film Description: BEAUTIFUL 35MM PRINT! Bergman’s enigmatic masterpiece is one of his most enduring and inexhaustible films. (He says of it in his book Images: "PERSONA was a breakthrough, a success that gave me the courage to keep on searching along unknown paths.") A key work of modernist cinema, PERSONA explores the relationship between two women: an actress (Ullmann) who has suffered a nervous breakdown and lost the power of speech, and her nurse (Andersson), whose own anguish is unleashed by the mysterious woman in her care. The two women, who look very much alike, begin to merge and converge . . . or are they actually two facets of one divided personality? PERSONA is famous for many things: Bergman’s metacinema devices; the eerie, erotic charge of the two women’s agonized relationship; the superimpositions which suggest their psychic dissolution and convergence. Pauline Kael cites the sequence on the island as "one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history," and P. Adams Sitney calls "the moment near the middle of PERSONA, when the film rips (or seems to rip) [and] burns . . . the greatest visual shock in all of Bergman’s often startling oeuvre." Among the critics and filmmakers who have chosen PERSONA as one of the ten greatest films in the history of cinema are John Harkness, Atom Egoyan, Paul Cox, and Neil Jordan. "One of the most courageous films ever made" (Robin Wood).
Film Description: "One of Bergman’s greatest films, this is one of the least known" (Pauline Kael). Despite winning the awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress from the National Society of Film Critics, SHAME did not find an audience, partly because of its subject matter: the effect of a civil war on a married couple. Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow are the couple who flee to an isolated island to escape the horrors of the war, which soon engulfs the island, driving the couple to indescribable extremes to survive. (The sequence in which they escape through corpse-crammed waters will haunt your dreams.) SHAME ranks with the greatest works made about war. "Simple, masterly . . . the film has the inevitability of a common dream. Liv Ullmann is superb in the demanding central role" (Kael). "Ends with one of cinema’s most awesomely apocalyptic visions . . . a masterpiece" (Tom Milne, Time Out).
Film Description: We are especially pleased to present a print of "one of the few classics of carnal comedy" (Pauline Kael) in which the candid sexual dialogue is subtitled; earlier North American prints had only intermittent subtitles for the risqué exchanges. Mozartian in structure and tone, this upstairs/downstairs comedy of manners is set in a mansion in the Swedish countryside, in which a mid-summer party turns into a sexual roundelay, with the hostess trying to win back the man she loves. Played out against a landscape suffused with erotic possibility – rococo rooms, sun-dappled glades, and secluded pavilions – SMILES made Bergman’s reputation outside Sweden when it became the hit of the Cannes film festival. The basis for the Sondheim musical "A Little Night Music," SMILES is "without doubt Bergman’s most perfectly achieved comedy" (Philip Kemp).
Film Description: "I love SUMMER INTERLUDE," pronounced Jean-Luc Godard, who paid hommage to it in his own films. Bergman authority Jorn Donner called it "a great work," and Robin Wood pronounced it "a masterpiece." Pauline Kael wrote: "Bergman found his style in this film, and it is regarded by cinema historians not only as his breakthrough but also as the beginning of ‘a new, great epoch in Swedish films.’" A graceful, plangent work about the loss and memory of love, INTERLUDE opens as Marie, a student at the Opera Ballet School, becomes enamoured of a shy young student, Henrik. Their romantic "summer interlude" ends tragically, and, many years after becoming a prima ballerina, Marie secures Henrik’s diary, and its revelations force her back to the cottage where they spent their romantic idyll. As Godard suggests, SUMMER INTERLUDE is about "paradise lost and time regained," and is one of the most tender and evocative of Bergman’s films. "This movie, with its rapturous yet ruined love affair, also has a lighter side: an elegiac grace and sweetness" (Kael).
Film Description: NEW 35MM PRINT! A smash hit in North America at the height of late fifties Bergmania and one of Fellini’s two favourite Bergman films, THE MAGICIAN is an attack on modern rationality. Max von Sydow plays Vogler, the nineteenth-century mesmerist, who unleashes a troupe of illusionists on a Swedish village whose townspeople do not believe in magic. Described as a comedy by Bergman, but characteristically dark and metaphysical in its concerns, THE MAGICIAN addresses such key Bergman themes as the oppositions of faith and rationality, magic and science, illusion and reality, art and life. He also establishes the illusionists’ art as a metaphor for filmmaking. Max von Sydow broods magnificently, and the film’s imagery is full of famous grisly jokes. "Rich in comedy and melodrama, as well as deep philosophic thought, and wonderful in its graphic details. It is a thoroughly exciting film" (The New York Times).
Film Description: A quartet of Bergman’s finest actors make this extraordinary film a study in ensemble performance. Set on the island of Farö, PASSION charts the relationship between an ascetic man with a crime in his past (von Sydow), the unhappy widow he takes up with (Ullmann), a spiteful architect (Josephson) who sees through everyone and lets them know it, and his bored wife (Andersson), who sleepwalks through life. The tortured and slaughtered animals which suddenly begin appearing on the island become emblematic of the relationships amongst the four. As the film proceeds to its chilling resolution, discovering the identity of the killer develops into a sort of spiritual mystery. "One of Bergman’s two finest films since PERSONA, incomparably superior to CRIES AND WHISPERS and prefiguring (and surpassing) much of SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE. Aside from being a profound document about the impossibilities of love relationships, this film is a veritable compendium of technical achievements, and contains some of the most marvellous color cinematography, in the subtlest tones, ever seen" (New York Magazine).
Film Description: Essential Bergman. Max von Sydow plays Antonius Blok, a fourteenth-century knight who returns home after a decade fighting in the Holy Crusades. His country, ravaged by the black plague, is in a frenzy of self-flagellation and witch hunts. When Death comes to claim the knight, he attempts a gambit: he challenges the grim reaper to a game of chess, hoping to gain enough time to overcome his spiritual doubt before he perishes. The film’s darkness and starkness are not just aesthetic choices suggested by the brooding austerity of medieval paintings; they were dictated by Bergman’s small budget and short shooting schedule. (His reminiscence, Images: My Life in Film, published in 1994, revealed that the famous Dance of Death that ends the film was improvised in a matter of minutes.) "A magically powerful film – the story seems to be playing itself out in a medieval present. . . . The actors’ faces, the aura of magic, the ambiguities, and the riddle at the heart of the film all contribute to its stature" (Pauline Kael).
Film Description: THE SILENCE is one of the director’s most disturbing and beautiful works, a candidate for the pantheon if there ever was one. Amongst Bergman’s personal favourites, it brings his celebrated trilogy to a commanding close. A large portion of Sweden’s population saw the film in the first two months of its release, and hundreds of editorials and letters were published debating whether it was pornography or art. The film went on to scandalize American critics and audiences with its sexual frankness, its themes of lesbian incest, autoeroticism, and voyeurism. Two sisters, the voluptuous young Anna and the sickly, arid Ester, are travelling through an unnamed war-torn country with Anna’s little son. In an eerie hotel, Anna rebuffs her sister’s advances, and each woman plunges into a neurotic sexual frenzy which ends in abandonment and death.
Film Description: NEW 35MM PRINT! Bergman’s harshly beautiful rendering of a fourteenth-century legend is one of the director’s most important works; it won the Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film. SPRING begins as two sisters – the virginal Karin and the feral Inger – set off on a pilgrimage. Three goatherds brutally rape and murder Karin, then ask for shelter at her father’s farm. The vengeance her father takes is Biblical in its extremity – he kills even a child who witnessed the rape – and is met with what seems a sign of divine acceptance. Composed in the style of a medieval frieze, its rough-hewn austerity encompassing the extremes of idyll and barbarity, THE VIRGIN SPRING seems less a recreation of a time and place than a direct transcription of it. "Even in the Bergman canon I can think of no other modern work of art that so potently evokes the dawn of the Dark Ages" (Penelope Gilliatt). "THE VIRGIN SPRING is a near-perfect film that, for all the Academy Award and superficial acclaim, has not had the recognition it deserves" (Robin Wood).
Film Description: "The other pictures I have made," said Bergman upon the release of this film, "have been only études. This is Opus I." Winner of the Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film, THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY chronicles twenty-four hours in the life of a family on an isolated Baltic island. The father is a famous novelist who has sacrificed his family to his art. He is joined by his teenaged son, unstable daughter and her doctor husband. The daughter has just come out of treatment for schizophrenia, and it is not long before she is seized by horrific visions, including one of God as a spider. (Foreshadowing THE SILENCE, her growing madness culminates in an act of incest.) In the subarctic chill of a Baltic dawn, the film concludes with a surprising act of affirmation. "One of the best of Bergman’s creations, as subtle as WILD STRAWBERRIES, but solider in substance" (Time). "Possibly the most beautiful [of Bergman’s films] in its setting and the most heartbreaking in its theme" (The New Yorker).
Film Description: NEW 35MM PRINT! Many consider WILD STRAWBERRIES to be not only Bergman’s masterpiece, but also one of the greatest films in cinema history. The venerable Swedish director and actor Victor Sjöström (whose films we presented last spring) plays a professor of medicine, a dour old man who dreams of his own death the night before he sets out on a cross country trip to receive an honorary degree from the University of Lund. His daughter-in-law (Thulin), running away from her husband, accompanies him, seizing every opportunity to confront the bitter old man with the ruin he has caused through his emotional remoteness. Famous for merging past and present, dream and waking, memory and actuality, "WILD STRAWBERRIES is to Ingmar Bergman what King Lear was to Shakespeare" (Roger Manvell). "Possibly Ingmar Bergman’s finest film and a staple in film history. . . . A fascinating, compelling picture, WILD STRAWBERRIES is viewed by many as Bergman’s greatest achievement. . . . Sjöström, in his final film, delivers the finest performance in any Bergman film" (James Monaco).
Film Description: "Of its kind, the most impressive film Bergman has created" (Jorn Donner). The spare and moving WINTER LIGHT is perhaps Bergman’s most anguished exploration of the spiritual crisis which arose from his overwhelming sense of "the silence of God." (Bergman commented: "In WINTER LIGHT I swept my house clean.") In an isolated village, a pastor finds that his attempts to minister to the needs of his parishioners and to offer them comfort are becoming increasingly futile and meaningless. When a local fisherman becomes obsessed with fear of the atomic bomb and commits suicide, the pastor is driven to one final act of faith. Sven Nykvist’s textured cinematography evokes an atmosphere of wintry isolation and failing light for Bergman’s magnificently performed passion play. "One of the most moving films I have ever seen. The total effect is shattering" (Commonweal). Bergman writes in Images: My Life in Film: "It is satisfying to see WINTER LIGHT after a quarter of a century. I believe that nothing in it has eroded or broken down." |
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