Ingmar Bergman

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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.Read More »

The Passion of Anna is a 1969 Swedish drama film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Its original Swedish title is En passion, which means “A passion”. Bergman was awarded Best Director at the 1971 National Society of Film Critics Awards for the film.

Plot Summary:
Andreas, a man struggling with the recent demise of his marriage and his own emotional isolation, befriends a married couple also in the midst of psychological turmoil. In turn he meets Anna, who is grieving the recent deaths of her husband and son. She appears zealous in her faith and steadfast in her search for truth, but gradually her delusions surface. Andreas and Anna pursue a love affair, but he is unable to overcome his feelings of deep humiliation and remains disconnected. Meanwhile, the island community is victimized by an unknown person committing acts of animal cruelty. Read More »

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With Thirst (1949), Ingmar Bergman began to display an astonishing technical virtuosity and control over the medium of film. A crosshatched, multilayered narrative, sewn together with fascinating side trips and flashbacks, Thirst was adapted by theater critic (and Bergman mentor) Herbert Grevenius from four controversial short stories written by famed Swedish stage actress Birgit Tengroth, and moved Bergman even further away from his theatrical origins. Simultaneously a portrait of a decaying marriage and a dreamlike journey through various characters’ tragic pasts and presents, the film evinces a newfound assurance, both in storytelling complexity and visual invention. Notoriously hard on his own work, Bergman himself was even able to later grant, “The film does show a respectable cinematographic vitality. I was developing my own way of making movies.”Read More »

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Marianne, some thirty years after divorcing Johan, decides to visit her ex-husband at his summer home. She arrives in the middle of a family drama between Johan’s son from another marriage and his granddaughter.

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Roger Ebert
August 4, 2005
Ingmar Bergman is balancing his accounts and closing out his books. The great director is 85 years old, and announced in 1982 that “Fanny and Alexander” would be his last film. So it was, but he continued to work on the stage and for television, and then he wrote the screenplay for Liv Ullmann’s film “Faithless” (2000). Now comes his absolutely last work, “Saraband,” powerfully, painfully honest.Read More »

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Persona is arguably Ingmar Bergman’s most challenging and experimental film. Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullman) is an accomplished stage actress who, in the middle of performing Elektra, ceases to speak. Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson), the young nurse assigned to care for her, learns that there is nothing physically or even psychologically wrong with Elisabeth – she has simply, consciously decided not to speak. Alma (the name, not accidentally, is the Spanish word for soul) describes her initial impressions of Elisabeth as gentle and childlike, but with strict eyes. She takes Elisabeth to the attending physician’s remote summer house to facilitate her recuperation. At first, the two seem ideally suited: a talkative, candid, and inexperienced nurse, and a sophisticated, enigmatic, and silent patient. They take long walks, bask in the sun, and read together. It is obvious that their isolation has cultivated a sense of intimacy between them, albeit one-sided.Read More »

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With the exception of his elderly housekeeper Miss Agda who he treats almost like a surrogate platonic wife, widowed seventy-eight year old Dr. Isak Borg, a former medical doctor and professor, has retreated from any human contact, partly his own want but partly the decision of others who do not want to spend time with him because of his cold demeanor. He is traveling from his home in Stockholm to Lund to accept an honorary degree. Instead of flying as was the original plan, he decides to take the day long drive instead. Along for the ride is his daughter-in-law Marianne, who had been staying with him for the month but has now decided to go home. The many stops and encounters along the way make him reminisce about various parts of his life. Those stops which make him reminisce directly are at his childhood summer home, at the home of his equally emotionally cold mother, and at a gas station where the attendants praise him as a man for his work.
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From ingmarbergman.se

In 1951 there was a conflict in the Swedish film industry. The production companies had declared a ban on filming in protest against the high rate of tax on entertainment. Recently remarried, Ingmar Bergman, found himself with three families to support, and his contract with the Gothenburg City Theatre had expired. In order to earn any income whatsoever that year, he agreed to direct nine commercial for Bris soap on behalf of Swedish Unilever. It seems more than a coincidence that Sweden’s most famous film director should be the one to take the country’s advertising to a higher plane: the Bris films were the most lavishly funded that the country had ever seen.Read More »

The Image Makers (Swedish original title: Bildmakarna) is a 2000 Swedish TV drama directed by Ingmar Bergman and written by Per Olov Enquist.The play was originally written for and staged by the Royal Dramatic Theatre (featuring the same cast), where it premiered on Feb 13, 1998 (directed by Bergman). Following the success of the stage production, it was adapted for Swedish television (SVT) in 2000 with Bergman as a director.The Image Makers portrays an odd meeting of four great Swedish artists: author Selma Lagerlöf, actress Tora Teje, film director Victor Sjöström and film photographer Julius Jaenzon. The drama is set in the year 1920 at Swedish Filmstudios where the great silent film director Victor Sjöström is shooting the silent film The Phantom Carriage, an adaptation of Lagerlöf’s popular novel Körkarlen. He has now invited the book’s grand authoress to take a first look at some early scenes…Read More »

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From the blurb

Pu was born into a stormy household. The courtship and early years of his parents’ marriage are already described in Ingmar Bergman’s novel The Best Intentions. And in Sunday’s Child the eight-year-old boy is all too alert to the recurrent quarrels resounding through the thin walls of the parental bedroom: his daunting father (a priest) and his adored mother, he realises to his terror, no longer want to be together.Read More »