Word: ingmar
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...Ingmar Bergman, Swedish film director: "I'm not a writer. I'm just someone who writes plays and scripts for a single purpose -to serve as skeletons awaiting flesh and sinew...
Directed and Written by Ingmar Bergman...
This is not the sort of creativity one expects to find preoccupying an austere and sober artist like Ingmar Bergman. Yet it must be said that his liveliest attentions in The Serpent's Egg are lavished on the marvelous Berlin city block, circa 1923, that Producer Dino De Laurentiis provided him for this picture. The thing comes complete with a real working streetcar, which the director sets to clanging at every possible opportunity. When he is not busy with that, he is filling his street with crowds in all kinds of moods, showing it at all times...
...gives a towering performance. In intensity, innate authority and mordant humor, this is acting in the thermodynamic range. Bibi Andersson is pallid by comparison, a picture-postcard beauty who recites her lines without the intent to lacerate-rather strange considering her snake-fanged delivery as a wife in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Eileen Atkins is in Von Sydow's league. She encases herself in a palpable shield of silence and then hurls her lines like javelins dead on the mark...
...Debby's fantasy world, to which she retreats from an unpleasant reality, further emphasizes his direction's shallowness. Green described a world complete with a separate language and gods who alternately seduce and torment Debby; but such a world could only be shown on film by a master like Ingmar Bergman, who can create powerful, metaphorical dream-images that evoke our own hidden anxieties through the use of visual symbols. Page's portrayal of Debby's private gods as primitive tribesmen--who induce her to mutilate herself because she poisons other people--implies that she is possessed by these gods...