Word: bergman
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...Western audiences, the most accessible filmmaker to recognize contradictions between his themes, and his style and method is Ingmar Bergman. Although the contradictions he recognized were not political-as were those of the self-proclaimed revolutionaries-the problems he encountered illustrate an archetypal confrontation between a "self-contained" artist and social turmoil he could not avoid...
...Persona arrived in 1967, Godard was first wavering in his arrogant use of collage, and the Cinema Novo movement, meant to create new expressions for emerging cultures, was largely unknown. Bergman started questioning a career based on the expression of personal psychological torments. His previous themes were tied to a consideration of man as an individual, his damning separateness. Bergman new asked: Does aesthetic tradition justify a director who uses the screen to produce a dream world and imposes his will on actors and audiences? Or does the director merely create barriers between the audience and screen characters...
...quoted sentiment, Bergman stated that he wished to work unknown, for a common ideal, as did the artisans of the cathedral at Chartres. In Persona he is faced by the self-defeat of such a hope in a world swayed by countervailing tensions each of which claims ascendance and leaves little solace or purpose to the individual. Bergman's actress-heroine is not able to portray the theatrical tragedy of Electra while horrifying war is waged in a country far distant from neutralist Sweden. Alma turns on her TV set, and the immolation of a Buddhist monk produces...
...burden for Bergman is doubled by his need to communicate the meaning of Alma's pain. Upheaval and repression sometimes go unquestioned because of the rhetorical baggage that goes with them. Bergman's way of exposing the content of human conflict is anti-ideological, but his moral anger bears latent political meaning. He reduces a state of warfare to the level of personal violence, where it can be explored in detail, and views it as the last measure to which frustrated people resort when their associations are blocked for the sake of someone's self-gratification...
...Muscovite prisoners; in the pathetic scramble for a few shreds of tobacco; in the epic wasteland of ice and snow. More illuminating than either the performances or the screenplay is Sven Nykvist's Arctic photography, shot in the glacial reaches of Norway. Long a cinematographer for Ingmar Bergman, Nykvist can achieve a tactile sense of dread; his expanses of snow are more than weather: they seem vast pages upon which no one dares to write...