Ingmar Bergman

Not that you're asking me, but Persona is a ten. Beautiful movie.

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I was just about to point out this is one of my favorite hidden gems of Bergman's career. Anyways this is my top ten/eleven(ish)

Wild Strawberries
Fanny and Alexander
Scenes from a Marriage
The Virgin Spring
Through a Glass Darkly

Persona
Magic Flute
Cries and Whispers
From the Life of the Marionettes

Summer with Monika
Seventh Seal

Somewhere around 8 or 8.5 probably. Think it's a good introduction to the cinematic world of Ingmar Bergman. Bergman had one heck of a crew with him. The actors' performances are sublime, to say the least. I don't think it get's any better than what we saw from Liv Ullman and especially Bibi Andersson. The whole film is basically carried by the one woman, conveying all the emotions so perfectly. It's fascinating. Ofcourse, we can't talk about Persona without talking the brilliance behind the camera, Sven Nykvist. It's the little things that camera does that enhances the viewers experience and sometimes puts us in the character's shoes. I must have paused the movie a dozen times at least in awe of what I was witnessing. Perhaps the only other time I've ever done that is while watching Alfed Hitchcock's "Rebecca".

Think I'm gonna have a good time catching up with Bergman's films.

Winter Light is one of my favorite Bergman films. I see it as a movie about a minister who never really understood the gospel. He went into the ministry because he was expected to. He finally sees the light after the church's caretaker unwittingly explains it to him. Made my list for the top 100 Foreign movies.

Same.


Interesting HBOMax news: Next month will premiere an American take on Bergman’s über-iconic Scenes from a Marriage. The stars will be Oscar Isaac & Jessica Chastain who, in the extras for A Most Violent Year, said they would love to film together again. So, the cast is perfect, but it’s nervy to do a remake of Bergman’s opus. The critics will either tear it to pieces or love it. I’m very much looking forward to this & see no reason why it can’t be a success.

Other Bergman news: In October a movie with Vicki Krieps (Phantom Thread) & Tim Roth will be released called Bergman Island. They play a film-maker couple who travel to Faro in Sweden where Bergman lived for a long time & where he died. Sounds very interesting.
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Episode one aired last night. Very strong episode. Really liked it. Looks like hbo is giving us a single episode each Sunday, but that could change & they drop more.

Episode 2 very good last night. One very strong 20 minute scene done without any cuts.

For some strange reason I thought Scenes from a Marriage is a ten-parter. No idea why I thought this, but dismayed to find out the finale is this Sunday, which makes it a five-parter.

Very powerful limited series.

From the BFI


Where to begin with Ingmar Bergman
A beginner’s path through the soul-searching cinema of Swedish arthouse legend Ingmar Bergman.
14 July 2016
By Alex Barrett
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Why this might not seem so easy
In his 59 years as a filmmaker (1944-2003), Ingmar Bergman wrote and/or directed more than 60 films. It’s a daunting figure for newcomers, but not bad going for a filmmaker who considered cinema to be merely his ‘mistress’. Still, Bergman’s long-suffering ‘wife’, the theatre, was hardly neglected: somehow, Bergman also found time to direct more than 170 plays, both in his native Sweden and abroad. Add in the fact that many of his films feature small casts speaking at length in confined locations, and it’s unsurprising that his cinema work is often criticised for being ‘theatrical’.
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Ingmar Bergman on location for Wild Strawberries (1957)
Of course, Bergman often countered this ‘theatricality’ with a playful modernism that revelled in the very medium of cinema, but even these experimental innovations might now be seen as passé. The view of Bergman as ‘outdated’ is only compounded by his exploration of a certain kind of existentialism that philosophy (and cinema) have mostly left behind. Furthermore, as the 60s wore on, his work became increasingly pessimistic and oblique, reflecting both a world which permitted such horrors as the Vietnam war, and the then fashion for authorless, ‘open texts’.
But Bergman’s work was not, and never could be, authorless: maybe more than any other filmmaker, Bergman used cinema as an exploration (or exorcism) of personal demons. His recurring themes of harsh parenting, infidelity, death, humiliation and faith were all seemingly ever-present concerns in his life. It’s perhaps this deeply personal connection that made Bergman such an expert at exploring the psyche on screen – this, and a refusal to turn away from uncomfortable truths about human nature. If Bergman’s work is hard to watch, it’s because he forces us to confront aspects of ourselves that we would rather shy away from.
The best place to start – Wild Strawberries
Given the size, scale and quality of Bergman’s output, it’s impossible to label any one work as the definitive entry point, but Wild Strawberries (1957) certainly offers an accessible introduction to many of his key motifs and narrative devices. Here, as elsewhere, Bergman uses a physical journey – that of Isak Borg, an ageing emeritus professor driving across Sweden to receive an honorary degree – to represent an interior journey of the soul, in which self-confrontation leads to self-discovery. Bergman recounts the story using voiceover, flashbacks and dreams, all the better to draw us further into Borg’s mind.
The first dream comes to us as an expressionistic nightmare, a memento mori in which Borg witnesses a crashing hearse and a coffin containing his own still-living corpse: time and again, Bergman’s characters are stalked by the spectre of death and encroaching old age. The dream is wordless, reflecting Bergman’s love of silent cinema (and Borg, of course, is played by Victor Sjöström, one of the great directors of the silent era and a former mentor of Bergman’s).
Wild Strawberries (1957)
Borg is accompanied on his journey by Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), wife of his estranged son Evald (Gunner Björnstrand). Along the way they pick up a trio of young hitchhikers and a bickering middle-aged married couple. Like many of Bergman’s lovers, the latter humiliate each other in heated, vitriolic exchanges, while Marianne recounts Evald’s descent into cynical misanthropy – presented here as the end result of parental coldness. Thankfully, the young hitchhikers offer Borg a note of grace, inciting memories that allow him to confront his past and work towards a sense of reconciliation, both with himself and with his son. In all, the film remains one of Bergman’s warmest and most touching works.
What to watch next
Cries and Whispers (1972)
Although the trio of young hitchhikers argue briefly, almost comically, about God, the larger questions of faith remain beneath the surface of Wild Strawberries. Those looking for a more explicit exploration of this famous theme of Bergman’s could try the medieval pageantry of The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960): in the former, a knight attempts to perform at least one meaningful deed before he dies, while in the latter a father enacts a bloody revenge upon three goatherds who have raped and murdered his daughter.
From there, a logical next step would be the so-called ‘Trilogy of Faith’, comprising Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963), in which Bergman continued to grapple with God’s enduring silence.
Meanwhile, those seeking further exploration of tortured family dynamics could continue with Cries and Whispers (1972), about a dying woman and her two sisters; Autumn Sonata (1978), about a mother’s visit to her estranged daughter; or Fanny and Alexander (1982), about two children and the efforts of their mother, uncles and grandmother to protect them from their new, wicked stepfather.
For those more interested in tales of humiliated lovers and infidelity, Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) or Scenes from a Marriage (1973) offer a good way forward. Alternatively, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and A Lesson in Love (1954) offer lighter takes on the same themes, and serve as a good reminder that, despite his serious reputation, Bergman made a number of successful comedies.
Finally, from the later, serious work, one should also be sure not to miss the masterful Persona (1966), about a nurse caring for an actress who retreats into a state of total silence, and Shame (1968), about a married couple struggling to survive as a savage, unnamed war rages all around them.
Shame (1968)
Where not to start
In 1976 Bergman was arrested and charged with income tax evasion. Though later exonerated, the effect was profound: Bergman suffered a nervous breakdown, was hospitalised for depression, and temporarily fled into self-imposed exile in Germany. While there, Bergman made two of his bleakest and most pessimistic works: The Serpent’s Egg (1977), about a Jewish man living in the hostile world of 1920s Berlin; and From the Life of the Marionettes (1980), which psychologically probes the murderer of a prostitute. Bergman would later acknowledge the former as an “artistic failure”, but said the latter “belongs among my best films, an opinion shared by few”. If, in truth, it’s one of his most richly textured portraits of the human psyche, it’s also desolately bleak and best approached with caution.

Finished this series. Excellent & just as good as Bergman’s original. Planning to rewatch the entire thing.

Do you know how long this is? I saw this movie a handful of years ago, but I'm not sure which version.

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Ambivalent question as I don’t know exactly what you’re referring to, but:

New hbo American version has 5 episodes of roughly an hour each.

Original Swedish series is 282 minutes long. Original Swedish movie version is 168 minutes long.

I’ve seen every version. All excellent.

It seems you do know what I mean, lol. I guess I saw the original movie version. I'm wondering if Bergman made it for TV first, and then just cut some "fat" to make it under 3 hours to make it more movie-friendly? I don't even remember it being almost 3 hours long, but there's a lot of movies with 5 different time lengths (sometimes nudity is excised, director's cuts, etc etc)

TV came first.

Watched Scenes from a Marriage all over again. Powerful, very powerful. For sure l think Ingmar Bergman would have loved this re-make.

I am currently working my way through the huge box-set that Criterion put out (nearing the halfway point soon), and while there are some obvious classics that everyone can appreciate---I have so far found a few personal favorites in:

-Dreams: Whereas so many of his other films about relationships deal with the crises of attachment and the seeming impossibility of connecting with others on an intimate/authentic level, I thought that Dreams captured the feeling of one-directional longing very profoundly and movingly.

-From the Life of the Marionetts: I was totally floored and shocked by this when I saw it. It was like a flash of negative lightnings from out of nowhere. The transitions from color to black and white, the intense violence, probing psychology... so much and all masterfully presented. It reminded me strongly of Giallo movies, believe it or not.

What I did NOT like was Scenes From A Marraige. I watched both the television and theatrical versions of this one, and neither one worked for me. Maybe part of the problem is that I am not and have never been married, but the characters each felt quite annoying to me---not to mention self-centered in their own ways.

I love both

I try to label every video, because this happens all the time. Reminder reminder.

In all fairness, though, I would say that I much preferred the mini-series to the film, which felt far too abreviated/superficial in comparison with the depth that Bergman achieved when he had more time.

What is ironic, however, is that I loved the sequel, Saraband. I don't know why yet, at least not entirely, but I very much enjoyed that one. I think it had to do with the wider range of central characters.