Word: nykvist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...concurrent brutality of nameless authority and unceasing Arctic frost define Ivan's world. Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's cameraman, has filled Siberia with beautiful winter horizons of shining white snow, deep blue sky, and soft yellow prison search lights. The harshness of the sub-zero temperatures seem more like the sting in the air of a winter carnival. The beautiful landscapes are totally inappropriate. Wrede's depiction of the guards may be more accurate, but everything is so beautiful one can hardly be bothered to notice them...
...does occasionally convey a tragic sense of life discarded by politics: in the high, empty gossip of the Muscovite prisoners; in the pathetic scramble for a few shreds of tobacco; in the epic wasteland of ice and snow. More illuminating than either the performances or the screenplay is Sven Nykvist's Arctic photography, shot in the glacial reaches of Norway. Long a cinematographer for Ingmar Bergman, Nykvist can achieve a tactile sense of dread; his expanses of snow are more than weather: they seem vast pages upon which no one dares to write...
Based on Ivan Turgenev's novella, First Love is the deceptively elemental narrative of an adolescent smitten by his father's mistress. "It is a story unusually lit with affection and nature," says Schell. "I decided only one photographer could really do it-Sven Nykvist, the artist who does Bergman's films. When he agreed I knew the picture would happen, and that it would work." Schell's instinct has proved infallible. Nykvist has filled the film with indelible imagery. The sunlight is a featured player of humor and warmth. Interiors seem to exhale melancholy. Weightless...
...color provides one of the few pleasant aspects of the film. (Bergman's only other try at color proved dismal in All These Women [1964], an unsuccessful sex comedy, and he has avoided it until now.) Cool gold and turquoise pastels predominate in the soft, grainy texture of Sven Nykvist's photography. Bergman wanted a lyrical-but-resigned-to-suffering flavor and certainly...
...effect," says Wrede, "is supposed to come from focusing on details-cadging an extra bowl of food, finding half a cigarette, making a compassionate gesture. We're being very wary of pretty pictures, those Zhivago-style long wide shots." His cameraman is Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, whose austere lens could seek out the gloom in a travel poster...