Word: bergman
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Directors like Antonioni recognize the death of God, and say man has to take it from there; but Bergman is trying to discover how to live at least with His memory. In 1960 Bergman wrote...
...terrified by Hour of the Wolf and Persona, stilled by The Silence, and dragged naked through the fourteenth century in The Seventh Seal. But the distance remains -- the first six rows at the Brattle become an impassable Nordic wasteland. As Stanley Kauffmann said of The Silence, "The film is Bergman musing, and we have intruded...
...ironic (if unsurprising) that Ingmar Bergman, amidst his low-key lighting and contrasty soundtracks, huge closeups and merciless symbolism, should fall prey to his own musing. Bergman's intellect and intuition never quite fuse: they live separately in Bergman the scriptwriter and Bergman the film director. Film is the most direct medium, but Bergman sees his ideas as literary...
...even though his movies are full of beautiful images, their ideas tend to ride on the soundtrack. Truffaut's Jules and Jim was adapted from a novel, yet its moments of revelation (the morning scenes at the beach-house, for instance) are visual. When Bergman tries to escape the literary--in The Silence, with almost no dialogue--the result is a crude, sometimes ludicrous reliance on symbols...
...Bergman's latest film, Shame, has yet to be released here. But the last two we've seen, Persona and Hour of the Wolf, suggest he's at last finding an answer to both his problems. The films still deal with mind vs. intuition, but it's become a personal rather than a religious dilemma: the crisis in faith has become the crisis in personality. Today we think in terms of psychology, not belief, so the new Bergman is easier to take. Seventh Seal has the aura of a morality play: Hour of the Wolf a cerebral horror film...