Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. Ingmar Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, it is the warmest and most autobiographical film combining the director’s melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joy and sensuality.Read More »
Grave robbing, torture, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath: Benjamin Christensen’s legendary 1922 silent film Häxan uses a series of dramatic vignettes to explore the scientific hypothesis that the witches of the Middle Ages suffered the same hysteria as turn-of-the-century psychiatric patients. But the film itself is far from serious; instead, it’s a witches’ brew of the scary, gross, and darkly humorous.Read More »
Synopsis from IMDb: An absorbing and chilling documentary about the National Socialist aesthetic, and how attempts to create the Aryan Ideal caused the extermination of millions. Aspects covered include: Hitler’s epiphany while viewing Wagner’s opera ‘Rienzi’, the rise of the homo-erotic Grecian/Nordic ideal, the parallels drawn between the ‘degenerate’ art of the cubists and dadaists and the mentally ill/physically deformed, the Nazi obsession with purity and cleanliness, and, finally, the descent of the Jewish people to the level of a virus/vermin.
(by IMDb)Read More »
A child’s ruminations take form in fantasies of colour, during the last of the innocent summer holidays in the archipelago.Read More »
Quote:
“Described as a play for dancers rather than a ballet, De fordomda kvinnornas dans focuses on four women moving in a narrow closed room. They represent ‘generational’ women, i.e., women who live by performing a role imposed upon them by other women of many generations ago. Two of the dancers are damned souls come alive. The third is Death and the fourth a child, born free but forced into the role playing pattern. Ingmar Bergman and Donya Feuer got the idea for the dance play during the shooting of TrollflojtenRead More »
The life and times of the Scandinavian artists’ colony who lived in Skagen on the Danish coast during the 1890s. Not so much a biographical account, rather a portrait of a way of life. The painters became famous for the way they used the light in their work, and this has also been mirrored in the cinematography. Written by Mattias ThuressonRead More »
Two brothers compete for the love of a woman while the impending war threatens to separate them from both sides of the border. Based on the novel “La Débâcle” by Émile Zola.Read More »
PLOT:
Jan fights impotence (literal and symbolic) and anguished childhood memories in a decadent Swedish castle where risqué parties and daring scenes defy 1960s’ movie censorship, reaffirming the ground-breaking role of Swedish films in helping advance adult, sexually concerned themes in international cinema.Read More »
