Word: bergmans
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...They certainly launched a generation of film critics, this one included. Dozens of us have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, "This is what I want to study, devote my life to." Here, we saw, was no mere director, collaborating on scripts with other writers, but a full-service auteur. Except for The Virgin Spring, written by Ulla Isaksson, and The Magic Flute, a faithful rendition of the Mozart opera, all of Bergman's most famous film stories sprang from his own fertile, febrile brain - from childhood memories...
...comedy The Magician); with his studies of sexual alienation (The Silence), his inside investigations of minds tumbling into madness (Through a Glass Darkly) or muteness (Persona); with his trips into the poignant past (Wild Strawberries); especially with his long battle with God, to which he devoted an entire trilogy. Bergman made anguish sexy, emotional neediness a turn-on. We had no reservation in naming him the world's greatest filmmaker...
...Bergman's reputation had reached a level so majestic that Woody Allen, fresh from his Oscar-winning Annie Hall, renounced comedy to make Interiors, his first of several dramas in the Bergman style and somber mood. Also in the '70s, indie director Wes Craven remade The Virgin Spring as a low-budget, highly regarded horror film, The Last House on the Left. Stephen Sondheim brought the stately domestic deceptions of Smiles of a Summer Night to Broadway with A Little Night Music (and its worldly-wise ballad, Send in the Clowns...
...body of work that imposing, that serious, was bound to inspire parody - and did, long before Colbert. Allen, for example, had written a burlesque on The Seventh Seal in The New Yorker. Sometimes whole movies were tongue-in-cheek tributes to Bergman: George Coe and Tony Lover's 1968 American short De Duva (where "water" is the subtitle for the mock-Swedish "aitch-two-oh-ska") and the 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The spin-offs might be serious, they might be farcical, but all paid tribute to Bergman's unignorable influence...
...BECOMING BERGMAN...