Ingmar Bergman

A judge in an unnamed country interviews three actors, together and singly, provoking them while investigating a pornographic performance for which they may face a fine. Their relationships are complicated: Sebastian, volatile, a heavy drinker, in debt, guilty of killing his former partner, is having an affair with that man’s wife. She is Thea, high strung, prone to fits, and seemingly fragile, currently married to Sebastian’s new partner, Hans. Hans is the troupe leader, wealthy, self-contained, growing tired. The judge plays on the trio’s insecurities, but when they finally, in a private session with him, perform the masque called The Rite, they may have their revenge.Read More »

A couple traveling across a war-ravaged Europe. A disintegrating marriage. A ballet dancer’s scarred past. Her friend’s psychological agony. Meanwhile, a widow resists seductions from two different persons – her psychiatrist and a lesbian friend. Told in flashbacks and multiple narrative threads, Ingmar Bergman’s Thirst shows people enslaved to memory and united in isolation.Read More »

Synopsis
In the early fifties Ingmar Bergman got himself a cine-camera, a 9.5 mm Bell & Howell, which he often used both privately and in his work. “Bilder från lekstugan” (“Images from the Playground”) embark on these films, giving a diverse representation of one of the greatest artists in cinema.Read More »

Quote:
Bergman’s production Yukio Mishima’s play Madame de Sade was not the first work by the Japanese playwright to be performed in Sweden. In 1959, Dramaten had produced some of Mishima’s Noh plays and in 1970, the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki visited Dramaten with a version of Madame the Sade. Mishima had been nominated several times to the Novel Prize in literature but was passed over in favour of his mentor Kawabata (1968).

The setting of Madame de Sade begins in France in 1772 and ends twelve years later, nine months after the French Revolution. Six Women, one of them Madame de Sade, discuss their views and feelings of the notorious sadist and sodomist Marquis de Sade.

An enthusiastic critical corps focussed on Bergman’s ensemble of actresses and on the concentration and musicality of his staging.Read More »

Set in beautiful 14th century Sweden, it is the sombre, powerful fable of wealthy land-owning parents whose daughter, a young virgin, is brutally raped and murdered by goat herders after her half sister has invoked a pagan curse. By a bizarre twist of fate, the murderers ask for food and shelter from the dead girl’s parents, who, discovering the truth about their erstwhile lodgers, exact a chilling revengeRead More »

Following the suicide of his beloved brother and deaths of even the most distant acquaintances, Abel Rosenberg attempts to discover the truth while facing depression, alcoholism, and anti-semitism.

Vincent Canby wrote:

BERLIN, NOV. 3-11, is a city without sunlight. Mostly it rains. It snows occasionally but it’s the kind of snow that is already gray by the time it reaches the cobblestones. Everything is damp, chilled. No winter coats anywhere. People cling to one another for warmth, but there is none. In effect, life is over in Ingmar Bergman’s new film, “The Serpent’s Egg.” What we witness are involuntary twitches, the glazing of eyeballs—the onset of rigor mortis.Read More »

Inventor Carl Åkerblom is a rosy-cheeked 54 year-old admirer of Franz Schubert – and a patient in the psychiatric ward of Akademiska Hospital in Uppsala, after having attempted to beat to death his fiancée, Pauline Thibault. Together with another patient, Professor Osvald Vogler, they set up a film project: the living talkie. Before long, they set off on a frantic tour with their film, “The Joy of the Joyous Girl”… (IMDB)Read More »

ingmarbergman.se wrote:
The Misanthrope

Bergman took one of his favourite plays to Copenhagen for a guest performance, which was even broadcast on Danish TV.

In his Copenhagen The Misanthrope, Bergman maintained a dual approach. On the one hand, a production of Molière’s play as a theatrical game performed in style and intellectually conceived; on the other hand, an exposure, through physical and psychological intensity, of the emotional tragedy in which Alceste and Celemine are both victims.Read More »

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 »