Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...EMIGRANTS is one of the great films that not only succeeds on its own terms, but could persuade new filmmakers to work according to its standards. It is the freshest film l've seen since Bergman's Passion of Anna--perhaps because writer director photographer-editor Jan Troell believes in examining human responsibility on his social scale as Bergman does on his less expansive but more involved psychological one. Troell and Bergman are not enthralled by suffering, but they know its depths and believe that their characters can take it. It is a rare enough attitude in the twentieth century...
This week The New Yorker is publishing the 12,000-word scenario written by Bergman for his latest movie, Whisperings and Cries, which will be released in the U.S. in a month or so. "It reads like a long piece of fiction," says Editor William Shawn. "It has all his different kinds of images, understanding of people, psychology, and seriousness." The scenario began as a picture in the director's head-"four women with white dresses in a red room"-and over a year or so it slowly developed into a convoluted story of three sisters and their servant...
...dies of cancer, quite visibly and painfully on the screen. Not only are the interiors of all the rooms red, but whole scenes are periodically suffused in crimson hues. "Don't ask me why it's to be that way, because I can't tell you," Bergman writes in his screenplay. "The bluntest and also most tenable [explanation] is probably that the whole thing is internal, and ever since childhood I have imagined the soul to be a damp membrane in varying shades...
...different shades of red may also stand for the psychological subtleties of women, which Bergman likes to explore with loving but clinical precision. He tended to sentimentalize and romanticize women, he says, until he became close to his mother in the months before her death two years ago. Only through intimate talks with her did he learn that she had been smothered in her role as the wife of a Lutheran minister. He also came to understand "the division of sex roles in the middle-class home-the woman's martyrdom, the man's authority. This pattern...
...explorations of middle-class marriage will be shown on both Swedish and American television. Next month CBS Playhouse 90 will tape The Lie, a 1 ½-hour Bergman script about the emotions that seethe under the surface of domestic amenities; and Swedish TV next spring will show his most ambitious project so far in terms of length, a six-part series entitled Scenes Out of a Marriage. Starring Ullmann, the series unmasks a seemingly perfect marriage. "The theme is how the bourgeois ideology of 'security' corrupts people's emotional lives," says Bergman. "It's a sort...