guess i've fallen off the map...

Time is weird. I still can't make sense of it.

And, I don't like it.

The major Bergman films bring down the walls of our imaginations. They are lacerating, mind opening, often wearying, and always (alas) solipsistic. (He sometimes turned narcissistic injuries into metaphysical proofs.) How many directors gave us so many masterpieces and near-masterpieces? Smiles of a Summer Night is the finest example of the tragicomic house-party genre after The Rules of the Game. Winter Light has its laughable moments, yet it remains his starkest and, in some ways, most indelible depiction of a man’s loss of faith. Can anyone forget the way he framed his actresses in Persona? Even as he meditated on the mutability of identity, he gave us X-rays of their souls. His Magic Flute is the best of all filmed operas—and also a dialogue between two media, theater and cinema. Shame is the movie ripest for rediscovery: an unyielding portrait of humans in wartime in extremis.

He died on the Swedish island where he’d shot many of his films (the shots low angle for reasons of economy as well as art), his last works memory plays in which the aged artist confronts the disappointed ghosts of his past. Thay have their partisans; I found them narcissistic even in their self-criticism. The important thing is that this faithless master never stopped living by the words of Ibsen: “To live is to battle with trolls in mind and heart / To write is to sit in judgment on oneself.”

No!

Film Legend Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89

by Howie Movshovitz 

 

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Gunnar Seijbold

Ingmar Bergman, photographed in May 1998 in Stockholm. AFP/Getty Images

 

 

 

“Sixty years have passed, nothing has changed, it's still the same fever.”

Ingmar Bergman in 1987, on his passion for filmmaking

 

 

 

Photo Gallery: Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

 

 

 

Bergman In Others' Eyes

• July 30, 2007
  Liv Ullman: 'It Wasn't Like Living With Bob Hope'

 

 

 

Clues to a Life?

Bergman wrote the script for Bille August's The Best Intentions; it's the story of his own parents, and Bob Mondello says it's 'a clue to a life and a lifetime of brilliant work.'

• Hear Mondello's Review
• Bille August on the Film

Human loneliness was one of Bergman's chief themes, as was a fascination with death — Death personified, sometimes, as in The Seventh Seal.

• Watch the Opening Scene

(requires RealPlayer)

Fantasy and memory became one fabric in Bergman's films, perhaps most beautifully in Wild Strawberries.

• Watch the Final Scene

 

 

 

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Lennart Nilsson

An undated photo from the 1960s shows Ingmar Bergman teaching his son Daniel how to handle a camera. Daniel later worked as a film and theater director. AFP/Getty Images

 

 

 

The NPR News Blog: Learning From Bergman, at One Remove

 

 

All Things Considered, July 30, 2007 · At the beginning of Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film The Seventh Seal, the figure of Death stands on a rocky beach and presents himself to a knight just returned from the Crusades. Death is entirely cloaked and hooded in black, in stark contrast to his doughy white face. The image is still one of the most haunting pictures ever put on a movie screen.

Bergman, who died Monday at the age of 89, took on the biggest subjects — life, death, the existence and the silence of God.

"Ingmar Bergman was probably the nearest equivalent to a Shakespeare or a Rembrandt that the cinema has produced," said film historian and critic Peter Cowie, who is also Bergman's biographer.

"He uniquely was able to produce tragedies, comedies, historical works and chamber works which really delved deeply into the human condition. He really was able to get below the surface of the human mask."

Cowie said that like many great artists, Bergman also had a unifying theme in his work: humanity's need for metaphysical belief.

"It started as orthodox Lutheranism, in some of the films," Cowie said. "But over the years that changed to a much wider, nagging concern about man's place in the universe — why we're here, and if we're here, why aren't we better behaved with each other?"

Bergman often used events and images from his life, and his difficult childhood led him to look at how families malfunction. In a rare television interview with Dick Cavett in 1971, Bergman described a beautiful early childhood of making puppets and living in his imagination.

"Suddenly I didn't know if I had dreamt things, or if they existed," he said. "Sometimes life could be very strange, very hard and very cruel. And suddenly, you know, the parents came to me and said, in a very strange way, 'Why did you do that?' Or — and I didn't know why — or 'You have been lying.'

"That was most difficult thing. I didn't know I had been lying, because I mixed things."

One of the most beautiful examples of mixing dreams and reality comes in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, a film from 1957 that many consider his best. After a hard day of memories and self-evaluation, an aging doctor dreams of seeing his parents across a pond. The scene ends with a close-up of the doctor, played by the venerable Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjostrom. The outdoor light was perfect, but Sjostrom was angry about working overtime. Bergman was sure the shot would be a catastrophe, but it turned out to be his favorite close-up.

"We didn't rehearse — we didn't try it, you know, we didn't press it out," he said. "It was not created under pressure. It just came, suddenly. And that is, that face has so much about experience, about tenderness, about an old man's sadness for life's going away."

Bergman directed some of the greatest films ever made — Summer with Monica, The Virgin Spring, Persona, Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage were among his other titles. He directed his first film in 1945, and first gained international attention with 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night, a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music.

And although he "officially" retired from theatrical filmmaking in 1984, he continued to make movies for television, to work in the theater — he was also a prominent stage director and the onetime head of Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater — and to write, until recently.

He was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera," director Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988.

Devoted viewers agree that for the past six decades, Bergman's films have defined the possibilities of the art of film.