Word: bergmanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ANYONE WHO HAS SEEN The Touch, Ingmar Bergman's first English-language film, knows how tedious and heavy-handed a Bergman movie can be. Even the successful Scenes from a Marriage, with many scenes that are at once profound yet understated in presentation, is sometimes long-winded. In Face to Face, Bergman's newest film, the poigancy of the best scenes is undercut by insistence on spelling out his message over and over. In this case, the overkill is not so much verbal as structural; the entire conception of the film is flawed. In Scenes from a Marriage, one overlooks...
...most irritating structural fault of the film is Bergman's repeated use of heavily symbolic dreamsequences. This is a departure for him, and an unlucky one. Earlier films such as Persona do contain sequences, such as the nocturnal mirror scene, that hang enigmatically between imagination, dream and reality. In Face to Face, the ambiguity is stripped away, leaving a boring and oversimplified didacticism...
Grim Waters. In essence, Argento and Nolte have written an opera for the music lover who also enjoys the dreamscapes of Fellini and early Bergman. Moods billow like the Dry Ice currents that lap across the stage, suggesting waters as grim as the Styx. Characters are rarely who they seem to be. Even Poe is not always sure who or where he is. His antagonist is a shadowy character named Griswold - based on Poe's vindictive literary executor, Rufus W. Griswold - who seems to be lago here, Mephistopheles there, even turns into Poe himself...
Notorious. Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant locked in the longest kiss in movie history. A Hitchcock masterpiece, with Claude Rains as the Nazi operative who at least gets to sleep with Bergman before he kicks off. Roger Ebert, the film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times writes to the Village Voice this week: "In an uninterrupted take showing a character climbing those stairs [in Rains's house] there appear to be exactly 22 steps, but that in the masterful final scene of the descent of those stairs, a count of the steps taken by the various characters indicates that they...
Like much of Bergman's canon, Face to Face is about an emotional quest and a spiritual trial. It concerns Dr. Jenny Isaksson, a Swedish psychiatrist who is enduring the same sort of crisis she is trained to cure. Her husband is off in the U.S. at a convention. Her daughter is away at summer camp. Jenny, for company, moves in with her grandparents, who have decorated her room with all the furnishings of her childhood. Instead of reassuring her, the trappings of girlhood seem to hurry Jenny back to a period of intense vulnerability. She is haunted...