Word: bergman
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Through a Glass Darkly (Svensk Filmindustri; Janus) is one of the best and certainly the ripest of Ingmar Bergman's creations, a film as subtle as Wild Strawberries but solider in substance-the first film in which Bergman creates a hero who can love and characters for whom the spectator cannot help but care. "The other pictures I have made," says Bergman, "have been only études. This is Opus...
...Bergman's Opus I is constructed conscientiously as a quartet, a thematic analysis of four lives. The lives are those of a well-known novelist (Gunnar Bjornstrand), his 17-year-old son (Lars Passgard), his married daughter (Harriet Andersson) and her doctor husband (Max von Sydow), all on vacation on an isolated Baltic island. The daughter, who has recently been electroshocked out of schizophrenia, is trying to face the difficult facts of her life: a devoted husband whom she does not love, a selfish father whose love she needs but cannot have, an ego that stands fascinated, like...
...moment-in fact the whole film-is charged with a simple, sincere feeling that has seldom before been noticeable in Bergman's movies. Bergman's new capacity to touch the heart is not a large capacity, not a teeming oceanic love of all mankind. But it is enough to melt the ice in his irony and to lend his humor a kindly glow. It also pumps some warm blood into his characters, and the warmth has relaxed and inspired his actors: seldom has one film offered four performances of comparable quality...
...every point, moreover, the actors are supported by Bergman's impressive cinematic skill. His script is a marvel of elision, speaking most eloquently in what it does not say. His photography is both poetic and worshipful. In every frame of the film the still light of subarctic summer silently instills an aspect of eternity, a sense of the presence of God. But as always, Bergman's interest centers in his metaphysical insights. In Through a Glass Darkly he proposes one of the most dreadful and most significant symbols he has ever imagined: the Spider God. Many moviegoers will...
...much noise causes fatigue, irritability, even loss of sexual desire, nobody is yet certain of the effects of the drone of decibels that 20th century Americans have come to accept as normal. "Ears are not damaged by the normal sounds of life," says Newman. But some disagree. Audiologist Moe Bergman, director of the Speech and Hearing Center at Manhattan's Hunter College, studied a group of African tribesmen who never heard any outside noises but jungle sounds, compared his findings with a study of a group of Angelenos who worked in relatively quiet areas (no loud industrial noises...