Category Archives: Sweden

Ingmar Bergman – Musik i mörker AKA Music in Darkness (1948)

  By Anybody | February 18, 2015 - 7:49 pm | , , ,
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Bergman writing on the genesis of the film in Images: My Life in Film:
‘In spite of all that happened, Lorens Marmstedt did not throw me out. With great diplomacy he pointed out that now would be the perfect time for at least one modest audience success. Otherwise my days as a movie director migth be numbered. A Ship Bound for India as well as It Rains on our Love had been made for Sweden’s Folkbiografer. Now Marmstedt suggested that I make a film for his own company, Terrafilm. It must be noted that Lorens was a passionate gambler, able to put his money on the same number a whole evening. Continue reading →

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Ruben Östlund – Play (2011)

  By Anybody | January 19, 2015 - 12:27 pm | , , ,
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An insightful and troubling film about race, ethics and manipulation, Ruben Östlund’s Play is based on an actual incident in Gothenburg, Sweden in which a group of black kids manipulated white and Asian teenagers into surrendering their valuables.

In Play, Yannick (Yannick Diakité) and his friends target a trio of younger, pre­sumably wealthier kids, two of them from “traditional” Swedish backgrounds and one whose family emigrated from Asia. Yannick and his pals claim that one of the boys stole a friend’s phone. (It’s the kind of claim only a teenager would put any credence in.) Eventually, they lure their targets outside the city, where they construct an elaborate ruse to relieve them of their belongings. Continue reading →

Ruben Östlund – De Ofrivilliga aka Involuntary (2008)

  By Anybody | January 18, 2015 - 2:22 pm | , , ,
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Involuntary is a series of stories exploring different perspectives on the power of a group over the individual. At once humorous and poignant, each situation raises questions about the value of the opinions of others: a man injured at his own party prefers to soldier on through the festivities rather than ruin the night for everyone else; a group of teenage girls pout, preen and flirt, pushing one another further in social and sexual games; a schoolteacher carries out a psychological experiment on her class to illustrate the power of peer pressure; and, at a drunken reunion a young man exploits his mates’ willingness to go with the flow to take advantage of another friend. Continue reading →

Ingmar Bergman – Viskningar och rop AKA Cries and Whispers [+Extras] (1972)

  By Anybody | December 29, 2014 - 11:26 am | , , , ,
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Quote:
In his book Images, Ingmar Bergman has written: “All my films can be thought of in terms of black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay it says that red represents the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I imagined the soul to be a dragon, a shadow floating in the air like blue smoke – a huge winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon, everything was red.”

Certainly, Cries and Whispers marks the most sophisticated use of color in Bergman’s long career. It was only in 1963 that he turned, somewhat reluctantly, to color for All These Women, and even after that he continued to opt for black and white in such critical films as Persona, Hour of the Wolf, and Shame. With Cries and Whispers, however, Bergman for once – by his own admission – wants the work to be regarded in chromatic terms. Continue reading →

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