Word: bergmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first few minutes of Saraband, certain viewers will slip instantly into the world of Ingmar Bergman. The immediate clue is the presence of two familiar actors, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, stalwarts of the Swedish writer-director's informal repertory troupe. Here they are revisiting the roles they played in the 1972 Scenes from a Marriage, to which the new work is not so much a sequel as a descendant. There are also echoes of a dozen or more of Bergman's despairing, exhilarating films. The old themes nudge you: death, and those who aspire to it; love...
...Dear seekers of light summer entertainment, you have gathered that Bergman's film is not Shrek 2 or Wedding Crashers. It's more like Shriek 42 or Marriage Crushers. To moviegoers raised in the Age of Facetiousness, a dead-serious story about the pain people maliciously or clumsily inflict on themselves and one another must seem a blast from the past. A blast of musty air, that is, best suited for quaint old art-film houses, where the scent of cappuccino mixes with an aura of intellectual smugness. Titles like The Naked Night, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh...
...Bergman, who made Saraband two years ago and turns 87 on Thursday, is secure enough not to care what people think of him, or to fret that they may not think of him at all. Neither do I. I've been a Bergman admirer since the 1950s, as I will itemize ad infinitum in my next column. So I welcome his return. No matter how severe the emotional landscape, his palpable presence behind the camera, and the force he still bring to a wrestling match with his demons, are causes for celebration. The Master has returned, in triumph...
...that mixture of the confessional and the majestic that made him, in the '50s and '60s, the living symbol of film as literature, movies as high art. With his dense, dead-serious studies of God and death, love and sex, Bergman was dubbed the Shakespeare of the cinema. Two-week-long retrospectives of his films ran in commercial theaters around the country. Critics in the U.S., Britain, France and Sweden wrote full-length studies of his films. In 1960 Bergman graced the cover of TIME, and Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays--a rare tribute...
...whether or not they knew his name, moviegoers saw Ingmar Bergman films. His influence was everywhere: in the look and some of the scenes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (inspired by The Seventh Seal), in the horror film The Last House on the Left (a remake of The Virgin Spring) and any number of Woody Allen films, including Interiors (in the manner of Cries and Whispers). On Broadway, Stephen Sondheim transposed the domestic deceptions of Smiles of a Summer Night into A Little Night Music...