Word: bergmanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...patients, that she knows it's incurable, and that she feels guilty about uncovering the running sores of the soul, then dismissing then in a brisk and cheerful way--all of these are convincing reasons why a seeming model of sanity and success should suddenly break. But Bergman has demonstrated more effective ways of revealing this. The viewer feels so insulted and manipulated by the overexplicit technique of this dream-sequence that he is almost too preoccupied to concentrate on the unfolding story of Jenny's breakdown...
ANOTHER MAJOR technical aspect of the film, the camera work, intensifies resistance to the psychological themes of Face to Face. Here, however, the fault is of degree rather than kind. The relentless close-up is a Bergman trademark. It is successfully used in his other films, but he abuses it here. The camera focuses so obsessively on Ullmann, that, beautiful as she is, we begin to long for a pull-back, an aerial view, anything. No doubt the director intends us to feel irritated; our claustrophobia parallels Jenny's vexation at being walled up with herself, with the memories...
...husband is attending a summer-long conference in Chicago and her daughter is at camp. The family has just moved out of one house, but the new one is not yet ready, so Jenny goes to stay with her grandparents, with whom she spent most of her childhood. Bergman presents a believable situation in which a highly disciplined (and repressed) individual is unsettled by the sudden intrusion of free time. External organization is important to Jenny--later on, as she begins to fall apart, she tells herself, "If you force everything to be as usual, then it will...
...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...