Word: bergman
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...Bergman's reputation grew, so did those of his on-screen company. He exported his actors (notably von Sydow) and actresses (Ullmann, Bibi and Harriet, Ingrid Thulin, Olin) to be glamorous staples of European art cinema and the occasional American film. But though Bergman was frequently financed by U.S. companies, he never went Hollywood; his only English-language movie, The Touch (with Elliott Gould and Bibi Andersson), was filmed in Europe...
...dispute with Swedish authorities exiled him to Norway and Germany for a few years, where he made The Serpent's Egg (with David Carradine), Autumn Sonata (with that other famous Bergman, Ingrid) and From the Life of the Marionettes. But Sweden, love it or hate it, was the home he loved to be estranged from, and he returned there, to Faro and the isolated island of his mind. In TV interviews, Bergman could be a charming, engaging fellow. But his films were truer reflections of "the solemn Swede," as he was called then...
...REDISCOVERING BERGMAN...
...filmmaker will naturally lose some of his celebrity when he stops making films. Bergman officially retired from movies in the mid-'80s, though he kept directing plays; and he wrote film scripts that were directed by Ullmann, his son Daniel (Sunday's Children) and Bille August (The Best Intentions). But the vogue had passed. He'd had a lock on the high end of popular culture, but by the '80s there was no high end; low was now high. A tribute song by Van Halen, The Seventh Seal ("broken now I can't help but feel / someone cracked the seventh...
...Bergman critical consensus also evaporated. His films were dismissed as stage-bound, not real movies because they talked so much, and morbidly full of themselves. As the cultural climate changed, he didn't, and the fashion that Bergman had started and flourished in came back to bite him - and then, worse, to forget him. Hardly anyone (except this one) still thought of him as the world's greatest filmmaker...