Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...less cosmic new approach not only brings us closer to Bergman, it brings him closer to his favorite script-writer. The visual effects in Hour of the Wolf made points the dialogue just suggested. Persona was perhaps Bergman's first work that had to be a film, not a novel set to beautiful pictures...
Presumably we'll begin to feel a few rows closer to Bergman with each film from now on. He's now appealing less to our intellect, more to our emotion. If this is true, it's especially worth going to the Charles and seeing The Dove. (Negatives, the feature with it, you can forget about--though then the short will be costing you about a dime a minute). The Dove is funny and pretentious. It will show you what's to be seen on the surface of "classic" Bergman: what probably won't be seen there much longer...