Word: bergman
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What should one think of all this: the disturbing psychology, the terrifying moments, the obviously scientific atmosphere that fills bit by bit with a powerful spirituality? Bergman meets William Peter Blatty? Or Kubrick meets Kierkegaard? Actually, an academic search for allusions and comparisons will not stick here, because Solaris is an unsettling, spooky and unfamiliar world. Or put it this way: You know how it feels to come out of a movie that creates a compelling, comfortable reality and to return into the yapping, yawning crowd, step in the stale popcorn and walk into the unalluring street, still as noisy...
...that put security ahead of initiative, welfare ahead of opportunity and to envelop life in a cocoon of red tape. It was the labyrinth of tax regulations administered by a stern bureaucracy that prompted the self-exile of one of Sweden's most creative citizens: Writer-Director Ingmar Bergman, 58, who settled in Hollywood in April after suffering a nervous breakdown brought on by his arrest on tax-evasion charges. (The courts have yet to decide whether Bergman does indeed owe back taxes...
Adding to the Swedes' frustration over tax rates is the sweeping power of the tax collectors. They can enter houses without court order, inspect bank records, even survey private medical records. The Bergman case prompted Author Kjell Sundberg to declare angrily, "The way society treated Bergman is the way ordinary people are daily treated by the tax authorities, the judicial system, the penal system, the schools...
...pleasure. The fact is, there are no contemporary writers of importance. Not one. O'Neill and Tennessee Williams had moments, but I don't regard them as great classical writers. Movies? Forget it. I'm convinced that the larger the gross, the worse the picture. Bergman and Buñuel are visionaries, wonderful artists and craftsmen. How many people in the world have ever seen one of their films or ever heard of them? How can you take movies seriously? You go on the set with the script in your back pocket. You take...
...history we watch out of morbid curiosity; it is meant to tell us something about ourselves. People less repressed than Jenny are subject to similar, less easily explicable feelings of arid alienation and despair. The character of Jenny is too idiosyncratic, and one has the option of dismissing her. Bergman forces us into excruciatingly close contact with his character, but, he leaves us a loophole by means of which we can evade the larger implications of his film...