Word: bergman
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This dreamlike visual overture is a stroke worthy of that renowned master of the cinematic art, Ingmar Bergman. And no wonder. The Hedda unveiled by the National Theater troupe last week is a special restaging by Bergman of his 1968 Stockholm production. In it, the play moves out of the sitting room and into the psyche. Bergman's stage is relatively bare and expressionistic, luridly lit when it is not dark. On the peripheries of many of his scenes, characters who are supposed to be offstage linger to eavesdrop on the proceedings that concern them. Somewhat eerily, this shifts...
Libby Meredith (Ingrid Bergman) is bored. Her professorial husband Roger (Fritz Weaver) is a pedant who sprinkles even casual conversation with chalk dust. On Roger's sabbatical, the Merediths flee New York for a Tennessee farm. But while Roger is examining constitutional law, Libby sets to work fracturing some commandments. For lurking in the barn is the local satyr, Will Cade (Anthony Quinn). "I'm a grandmother," protests Libby at first. "There's a lot of woman left in ya," grunts Will...
What does it matter if Anthony Quinn's ersatz Tennessee accent makes him seem the subject of the Scopes trial? Who cares if Ingrid Bergman's good Swedish bones and wholly preserved beauty are squandered? Grandmothers are people too. And Alexander Portnoy isn't the only one with fantasies...
Cued by Clap-Stick. Correspondingly, Bergman's troupe are less actors than musicians. Cued by the bang of a cinematographer's clap-stick, each performer is allowed to stop the flow of the film and analyze the character that he or she is portraying. That now-familiar device stems from what Brecht called the V-Effekt: estranging the audience from the action. Merely watching, say Brecht and Bergman, is not enough. Reality has rent the artist's fabric; now he forces it to pierce the viewer's mind...
Even in a secular age, there are many artists who can be called religious. Bergman, the minister's alienated son, alone can be considered holy. His fatalism has an undertow of sublimity. His films are chapters in a coherent-if desperate -philosophy: Worship God or deny him; rage if you will, love if you can. But feel. For in the universal paradox, what God cannot, man must...