Word: ullmanns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...example: Dr. Jenny Isaksson (Liv Ullmann), the psychiatrist whose mental disintegration and attempted suicide are analyzed in the film, dreams (after the attempt) that she is in a small room surrounded by a crowd of anguished patients. There are so many of them that she can give only the most perfunctory attention to each. Ullmann approaches one woman and peels off her facial skin, which is a mask hiding a face covered with festering sores. Ullmann turns away. She opens a closet door to discover her near-senile grandfather. "I'm afraid of dying," he whispers. She tells...
...camera work, intensifies resistance to the psychological themes of Face to Face. Here, however, the fault is of degree rather than kind. The relentless close-up is a Bergman trademark. It is successfully used in his other films, but he abuses it here. The camera focuses so obsessively on Ullmann, that, beautiful as she is, we begin to long for a pull-back, an aerial view, anything. No doubt the director intends us to feel irritated; our claustrophobia parallels Jenny's vexation at being walled up with herself, with the memories and impulses she wants to suppress. Unfortunately, Bergman goes...
Face to Face is about a life-and-death struggle in which neither of the alternatives has commanding force. Erland Josephson, who played the husband in Scenes from a Marriage, makes an intelligent, forbearing Tomas, but the movie belongs to Liv Ullmann. She has never been better. Her Jenny is a definitive rendering of an emotional descent into hell. Many actresses have attempted this, but watching Ullmann do it, we realize how few have done it well. Hers is an intelligent, devastating performance. Ullmann's little smile of unsettled wellbeing, the desperation and desolation of her hysteria, are achieved...
...hour chamber opera was composed in 1944 inside Theresienstadt, a "model" camp. The piece was in rehearsal but was banned after a similarity between the Emperor and the Führer was detected. Composer Viktor Ullmann, prolific in prewar Vienna, and Librettist Peter Kien, a young painter and poet, were later sent to Auschwitz, where they died. Their manuscript was rediscovered in London three years ago by British Conductor Kerry Woodward, who presented it with The Netherlands Opera Company in Amsterdam...
...sardonic snap of the libretto's gallows humor is virtually untranslatable except through the music. Ullmann's eclectic style produces a constant interplay between the melancholic and the light comic in Germany's rich musical tradition. Death, in the shabby uniform of a Central European functionary, could be a sadly tired Wotan. The Emperor's edicts are sung in the piercing soprano of the German cabaret...