A Tribute to Ingmar Bergman
Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge
Friday, December 7-Wednesday, December 12
Tickets and more information
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, who died in July, made too many movies to fit neatly into a polite retrospective. With that in mind, be grateful that the Brattle Theatre has arranged its Bergman tribute around a tidy theme -- films starring Liv Ullmann -- that demonstrates the broad range of Bergman's mastery. (The Harvard Film Archive will offer its own tribute in January.)
Ullmann appeared in ten of Bergman's films. They were lovers and in 1966, had a daughter together. Ullmann was his most accomplished female lead, and Bergman's work in the late sixties and seventies would have suffered without her subtle and psychological performances. The nine movies the Brattle will show over the next week (Scenes from a Marriage (1973) was omitted) are among Bergman's best.
However, it's no easy feat sitting through one Bergman. Watching nine in five days is a recipe for suicide. That's why Bostonist has compiled a guide to the Bergman tribute. It covers the highlights the series, providing a brief assessment of each film and a numeric quantification of the devastation each screening will wreak on your psyche. If your score adds up to ten or more by the end of the week, give someone your belt and shoelaces and stay away from sharp objects.
Friday, 10/07
Persona (1966)
6:00pm and 8:00pm
Devastation Rating: 2
Persona is widely regarded as Bergman's masterpiece, possibly because it is very weird. Ullmann plays a celebrated actress who loses her mind performing Elektra and arrives, mute, in a mental institution. Bibi Anderssen plays the nurse who slowly assumes her identity. It's a movie about selves and others, performing and authenticity -- the sorts of things that make critics indulge themselves. And Bergman uses special effects (melting frames, shots from crazy angles) to stress the "filminess" of the movie, which, combined with the surreality of the material, results in a work more cerebral than emotional. None of which should detract from what the movie does to the theatergoer: Persona is rightly considered one of the best films ever made.
Saturday, 10/08
Shame (1968)
3:00pm and 7:15pm
and
The Hour of the Wolf (1968)
5:15pm
Devastation Rating: 4
Shame caused a ruckus when it first screened in 1968. It's an apolitical war film that was widely hated during that famously politicized year. Critics wanted it to be about Vietnam. Instead, Bergman gave us two musicians (Ullmann and Max von Sydow) and their slow suffering as a fictional civil war chips away at their security and humanity. It's a deeply moral picture about brutality and fear, and a difficult one to watch when you consider that war is the everyday reality for millions of civilians in Iraq.
Bergman gave horror a spin with The Hour of the Wolf, and fans of the genre will find it difficult to swallow. By now, after endless parodies of The Shining, the story of an artist's decline into homicidal madness is old hat. But this film, starring von Sydow as an insomniac painter and Ullmann as his long suffering wife, presents violence of such extremity with such objectivity that it cannot easily be dismissed as a genre exercise gone awry. We should warn you about the necrophilia.
Monday 12/10
Face to Face (1976)
4:30pm, 7:00pm, and 9:30pm
Devastation Rating: ???
This one is not available on video, and Bostonist has to cop to never having seen it. However, we usually hate movies that are just about people going crazy, as Face to Face is reputed to be, so we cannot recommend it on thematic grounds. We should note that Bergman himself was greatly disappointed with this picture, which first saw light as a television series. In his words:
Now when I see Face to Face, I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. It's called The Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says, 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.' When I see Face to Face and Liv Ullmann's incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help thinking of The Road to Morocco.— Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (quoted in bergmanorama.com)
Tuesday 12/11
Cries and Whispers (1972)
5:15pm and 9:30pm
and
Autumn Sonata (1978)
7:30pm
Devastation Rating: 7
Cries and Whispers is so good it is almost unwatchable. Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is dying of cancer in her family's mansion in the late nineteenth century. Her sisters Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Ullmann) serve as her ambivalent caretakers along with Anna (Kari Sylwan), a servant. Bergman tells the family's sordid story through flashbacks. Saturated crimson overwhelms the film's palate, an emblem of the blood and pain of illness.
Autumn Sonata is the only movie to feature cinema's two famous Bergmans. (They aren't related.) In her final film role, Ingrid Bergman plays a concert pianist who returns to the daughter (Ullmann) she had abandoned. Quietly wrenching.
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