Ingmar Bergman
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Eclisse
- Joined: Tue Mar 15, 2005 3:29 pm
Sortini wrote:When he was a critic, yes. He loved "The Summer with Monika". When he became a film-maker himself, things changed.
Some people take these quotes way too seriously. I always have fun with them. From Truffaut's classic "Once a shit, always a shit" (To Godard), to Orson Welles take on Fellini:The most beautiful film (Monika) of the most original of cineastes
The cinema is not a craft. It is an art . . . One is always alone on the set as before a blank page. And for Bergman, to be alone means to ask questions. And to make films means to answer them. Nothing could be more classically romantic.
Whatever...I'm just glad their job was to make great films and not bitch slap each other on the press. But I do feel sorry for Godard, who I think took some unnecessary punches from a lot of people (a lot of his "idols"). Even poor old Billy Wilder destroys him on that Cameron Crowe interview book.His films are a small-town boy's dream of a big city. His sophistication works because it's the creation of someone who doesn't have it. But he shows dangerous signs of being a superlative artist with little to say.
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tartarlamb
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 1:53 am
- Location: Portland, OR
I was being a bit cheeky -- none of Bergman's films strike me as really being soapy. I find it hard to believe that a 40 something woman would crack a bottle of dry sherry for a daytime TV viewing of The Touch. Its a middle-class romantic drama only on the surface. The same goes for any of his films being Godardian; they may employ some of the same conventions, but none of Bergman's films seem very similar to Godard's (and I doubt that they were meant to be).Tommaso wrote:That is true, but still rather surprising to me, as the film is so very much removed from all the middle-class niceties one would associate with the term 'soap'.
I dug out my VHS of The Touch and watched it again -- or tried. I was either bored with it, or not in the mood, so I didn't get through the whole thing. But my opinions have changed: there's not much of a political or pseudo-Marxist shot being taken here. It may have started that way, but Bergman has too great an interest in his characters to make a film that is strictly a slam of the middle class. The film is a peculiar failure and surprisingly slight. Bibi Anderson is still hilarious in her role, though. One scene of her trying on outfits to the sound of goofy pop music was not far from something you'd see in a cereal commercial. And, my god does Bergman show us one of the clumsiest seductions and grotesquely awkward sex scenes ever.
While I'm revisiting Bergman films, I should add that I watched From the Life of the Marionettes today. I'd completely forgotten what an amazing unsung hero it is amongst Bergman's 70s films.
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ByMarkClark.com
- Joined: Thu Apr 14, 2005 3:59 pm
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Anonymous
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Lino
- Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 6:18 am
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My Man Godfrey
- Joined: Mon Apr 30, 2007 2:47 pm
- Location: Austin
I know I'm way late to this discussion, but I wanted to throw my two cents in on The Serpent's Egg. It's insanely underrated!
I was just reading Dave Kehr's review, in which he says something like "the film veers dangerously close to camp." It reminded me of some reviews of Roman Polanski's Italian horror homage The Ninth Gate, which didn't give Polanski enough respect to consider that the campiness and awkwardness of the movie was a choice, if a bad one. And Roger Ebert, in his review of the Serpent's Egg, even had the balls to say that the movie "doesn't have a statement to make." (Well, no need to perform a thoughtful critical analysis, then!)
There are plenty of bad choices in The Serpent's Egg, and plenty of choices that are almost too weird to evaluate. On the other hand, some of the aspects of the film that are usually ridiculed out of hand ("rubbish," "a total failure," "stupid") are more interesting, more defensible, than you might think from reading the criticism.
David Carradine is bizarrely miscast -- and terribly stagey -- and Liv Ullman is indeed "histrionic" for much of the movie (and unintelligible the rest of the time; I had to keep turning the subtitles on). And yet: if Brian De Palma had directed this movie, all we'd be hearing about is how brilliantly bad the acting was . . . high praise for the director's "Brechtian style" (and there'd be some truth in it, by the way). I've seen critiques that refer, in passing, to the way The Serpent's Egg distances the viewer from the characters, as if it were self-evident that this was a flaw. Well: I didn't get the feeling that Bergman wanted me to be ripping my pocket off and weeping in sympathy with the characters. If I believed that that was what he wanted, then my emotional detachment from the characters might be evidence of its failure. But this is also a movie that spits gore at the viewer -- how many mangled corpses here, total? -- in an affectless way. It's a cold movie! It's a movie about the death of human connections, about the systems by which inhumanity becomes acceptable. It may be a clumsy or facile take on this theme (I don't think so), but it frustrates me when critics won't at least try to engage with a movie on its own terms.
Bergman is one of the easiest directors to ridicule (as Bunuel illustrates in that quote that appears in one of the comments above: "Dude, talking about 'the meaning of life' is so gay. And your work is all, like, boozhy and shit. But, like, without the discreet charm."), and The Serpent's Egg is one of his easiest films to ridicule. So easy that the people who have defended it here have had to sheepishly concede that "it isn't a masterpiece." Okay: so what? "Minor Bergman" -- so what? It isn't an out-and-out disaster: the look of the film is amazing -- I can almost call it one-of-a-kind. And the sets are equally impressive, just as moody as the cinematography; the movie is filled with horrible places where I found myself wanting, perversely, to linger. Unlike Steven Spielberg, who paid a jillion dollars for the fakest looking pirate ship on earth, Bergman got his money's worth here. In several of the scenes -- in the archives, for instance -- I felt like Bergman was achieving what Steven Soderbergh would later reach for in Kafka. (And the preposterous bleakness of Carradine's job is intentionally comic, not inadvertently camp; Bergman shows a fuckin' jail door slamming on Carradine's sad face. I also love, by the way, that Carradine, long after he's started the job, continues to need directions to his little cell.)
I'll also say that I haven't seen a movie that presents this particular picture of Weimar Germany; I almost felt like Bergman was responding to Hollywood films like Cabaret (and many, many others), which revel in the glamour and opulence of the era in a way that makes Hitler's rise to power less, rather than more, comprehensible; here, it's true, there are plenty of grotesque scenes in cabarets (and Liv Ullman's wig is fuckin' awesome -- come on, haters, give me that, at least!), but what comes across to me most profoundly in those scenes is the deadness of Carradine's character; he doesn't seem to be soaking up (or wallowing in) the indulgent atmosphere; he's a drinker, but he isn't decadent. The opening credits -- which make sense by the end of the film -- are fairly successful in introducing this contrast -- between the frenziedly alive, the madly colorful . . . and the dead, the gray. It can't be easy to dramatize an inflation crisis in an organic way, as The Serpent's Egg actually does pretty well. (And I liked the off-the-wall scene with the hysterical laughing hookers.)
As I said before -- and as anyone would have to admit -- there are things in this movie that don't work. But it's not a total failure. Nor, for that matter, are Fanny and Alexander and Cries and Whispers out-and-out triumphs. Sometimes it can be fun to push back against conventional wisdom a little -- right?
And please don't reply by pointing out that Bergman himself hates this movie, or that he's said he wasn't up to anything worthwhile with this film. Bergman hates a lot of his best stuff. That's not to say that The Serpent's Egg is some of his best work. I'm just saying that the film merits thoughtful discussion, vs. snarky dismissal. (And how can you sniff at the film as Bergman's failed grab for box office glory? Have you seen it?)
Unrelated thought: Dreams is surprisingly underappreciated as well. Why is Douglas Sirk praised -- again, correctly -- for infusing his soap opera material with depth and spark, while people are so damn hard on Bergman for the melodramatic elements of his early work?
Apologies for the long post. I've got to keep myself away from this message board; I always end up writing novels on this site.
I was just reading Dave Kehr's review, in which he says something like "the film veers dangerously close to camp." It reminded me of some reviews of Roman Polanski's Italian horror homage The Ninth Gate, which didn't give Polanski enough respect to consider that the campiness and awkwardness of the movie was a choice, if a bad one. And Roger Ebert, in his review of the Serpent's Egg, even had the balls to say that the movie "doesn't have a statement to make." (Well, no need to perform a thoughtful critical analysis, then!)
There are plenty of bad choices in The Serpent's Egg, and plenty of choices that are almost too weird to evaluate. On the other hand, some of the aspects of the film that are usually ridiculed out of hand ("rubbish," "a total failure," "stupid") are more interesting, more defensible, than you might think from reading the criticism.
David Carradine is bizarrely miscast -- and terribly stagey -- and Liv Ullman is indeed "histrionic" for much of the movie (and unintelligible the rest of the time; I had to keep turning the subtitles on). And yet: if Brian De Palma had directed this movie, all we'd be hearing about is how brilliantly bad the acting was . . . high praise for the director's "Brechtian style" (and there'd be some truth in it, by the way). I've seen critiques that refer, in passing, to the way The Serpent's Egg distances the viewer from the characters, as if it were self-evident that this was a flaw. Well: I didn't get the feeling that Bergman wanted me to be ripping my pocket off and weeping in sympathy with the characters. If I believed that that was what he wanted, then my emotional detachment from the characters might be evidence of its failure. But this is also a movie that spits gore at the viewer -- how many mangled corpses here, total? -- in an affectless way. It's a cold movie! It's a movie about the death of human connections, about the systems by which inhumanity becomes acceptable. It may be a clumsy or facile take on this theme (I don't think so), but it frustrates me when critics won't at least try to engage with a movie on its own terms.
Bergman is one of the easiest directors to ridicule (as Bunuel illustrates in that quote that appears in one of the comments above: "Dude, talking about 'the meaning of life' is so gay. And your work is all, like, boozhy and shit. But, like, without the discreet charm."), and The Serpent's Egg is one of his easiest films to ridicule. So easy that the people who have defended it here have had to sheepishly concede that "it isn't a masterpiece." Okay: so what? "Minor Bergman" -- so what? It isn't an out-and-out disaster: the look of the film is amazing -- I can almost call it one-of-a-kind. And the sets are equally impressive, just as moody as the cinematography; the movie is filled with horrible places where I found myself wanting, perversely, to linger. Unlike Steven Spielberg, who paid a jillion dollars for the fakest looking pirate ship on earth, Bergman got his money's worth here. In several of the scenes -- in the archives, for instance -- I felt like Bergman was achieving what Steven Soderbergh would later reach for in Kafka. (And the preposterous bleakness of Carradine's job is intentionally comic, not inadvertently camp; Bergman shows a fuckin' jail door slamming on Carradine's sad face. I also love, by the way, that Carradine, long after he's started the job, continues to need directions to his little cell.)
I'll also say that I haven't seen a movie that presents this particular picture of Weimar Germany; I almost felt like Bergman was responding to Hollywood films like Cabaret (and many, many others), which revel in the glamour and opulence of the era in a way that makes Hitler's rise to power less, rather than more, comprehensible; here, it's true, there are plenty of grotesque scenes in cabarets (and Liv Ullman's wig is fuckin' awesome -- come on, haters, give me that, at least!), but what comes across to me most profoundly in those scenes is the deadness of Carradine's character; he doesn't seem to be soaking up (or wallowing in) the indulgent atmosphere; he's a drinker, but he isn't decadent. The opening credits -- which make sense by the end of the film -- are fairly successful in introducing this contrast -- between the frenziedly alive, the madly colorful . . . and the dead, the gray. It can't be easy to dramatize an inflation crisis in an organic way, as The Serpent's Egg actually does pretty well. (And I liked the off-the-wall scene with the hysterical laughing hookers.)
As I said before -- and as anyone would have to admit -- there are things in this movie that don't work. But it's not a total failure. Nor, for that matter, are Fanny and Alexander and Cries and Whispers out-and-out triumphs. Sometimes it can be fun to push back against conventional wisdom a little -- right?
And please don't reply by pointing out that Bergman himself hates this movie, or that he's said he wasn't up to anything worthwhile with this film. Bergman hates a lot of his best stuff. That's not to say that The Serpent's Egg is some of his best work. I'm just saying that the film merits thoughtful discussion, vs. snarky dismissal. (And how can you sniff at the film as Bergman's failed grab for box office glory? Have you seen it?)
Unrelated thought: Dreams is surprisingly underappreciated as well. Why is Douglas Sirk praised -- again, correctly -- for infusing his soap opera material with depth and spark, while people are so damn hard on Bergman for the melodramatic elements of his early work?
Apologies for the long post. I've got to keep myself away from this message board; I always end up writing novels on this site.
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Tommaso
- Joined: Fri May 19, 2006 10:09 am
A good defense of the film, Godfrey, and while I'm not about to write a novel about it at the moment, some few thoughts.
And what you say about the representation of Weimar Germany also fits: but the comparison -and obvious influence, as in "The Life of the Marionettes" - would be Fassbinder, who was infinitely better in transporting the 'seedy' quality of the era. Bergman was trying to adapt too many different influences (and thematically, Lang's "Mabuse" is another obvious one), resulting in a hodge-podge which actually does LOOK good, but ends up with a sort of Hollywood pastiche of the Germany of the 20s.
If "Serpent's egg" had been made by some second tier US director it probably would not have gotten the dismissal it has received. But Bergman is Bergman, and comparing it to the rest of his work, "The serpent's egg" indeed seems like a curious oddity. It may not be a total failure (NONE of his films is, not even "The devil's eye"), but it's among his weakest in the sense that it only replays his old ideas in a less convincing and far too superficial manner than before.
But these are the terms that apply to the vast majority of Bergman's films from at least "The silence" on. Most of them are about the death of human relations, coldness, distance etc. The problem with "Serpent's egg" is that he replays these themes in a far less convincing way than in most of his other works, precisely because of the lavish designs, the use of the English language (in which Liv apparently doesn't feel all too comfortable), and indeed the miscasting of the main character.My Man Godfrey wrote:. It's a cold movie! It's a movie about the death of human connections, about the systems by which inhumanity becomes acceptable. It may be a clumsy or facile take on this theme (I don't think so), but it frustrates me when critics won't at least try to engage with a movie on its own terms.
The very fact that you come up with comparisons like Soderbergh is telling: Bergman seems to adapt his ideas to a more 'received' version of what a film should look like, and in the process loses his own individuality.My Man Godfrey wrote: And the sets are equally impressive, just as moody as the cinematography; the movie is filled with horrible places where I found myself wanting, perversely, to linger. Unlike Steven Spielberg, who paid a jillion dollars for the fakest looking pirate ship on earth, Bergman got his money's worth here. In several of the scenes -- in the archives, for instance -- I felt like Bergman was achieving what Steven Soderbergh would later reach for in Kafka.
And what you say about the representation of Weimar Germany also fits: but the comparison -and obvious influence, as in "The Life of the Marionettes" - would be Fassbinder, who was infinitely better in transporting the 'seedy' quality of the era. Bergman was trying to adapt too many different influences (and thematically, Lang's "Mabuse" is another obvious one), resulting in a hodge-podge which actually does LOOK good, but ends up with a sort of Hollywood pastiche of the Germany of the 20s.
If "Serpent's egg" had been made by some second tier US director it probably would not have gotten the dismissal it has received. But Bergman is Bergman, and comparing it to the rest of his work, "The serpent's egg" indeed seems like a curious oddity. It may not be a total failure (NONE of his films is, not even "The devil's eye"), but it's among his weakest in the sense that it only replays his old ideas in a less convincing and far too superficial manner than before.
Fine, but what is wrong with "Cries and whispers"? I admit that the one scene where one of the actresses slashes herself is way over the top, but otherwise?My Man Godfrey wrote:As I said before -- and as anyone would have to admit -- there are things in this movie that don't work. But it's not a total failure. Nor, for that matter, are Fanny and Alexander and Cries and Whispers out-and-out triumphs. Sometimes it can be fun to push back against conventional wisdom a little -- right?
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Joshua Dago
- Joined: Sat Jul 07, 2007 10:12 am
- Location: Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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domino harvey
- Dot Com Dom
- Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 2:42 pm
I just saw All These Women last night, I don't remember the last time I bought a DVD only to discover that even the liner notes distances itself from the film. Luckily the film wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to believe, but it is also certainly not funny for one second. It reminded me a lot of the plays you always see Bergman characters rehearsing for. The Tartan DVD is horrible, filled with digital artifacts--Janus owns the rights so I am sure it'll turn up in a Late Bergman Eclipse set.
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miless
- Joined: Sat Apr 01, 2006 9:45 pm
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colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
When I finally got around to watching the Bergman box set last year I had heard a lot of the criticism of The Serpent's Egg and was prepared for an excruciatingly bad film. However, I was pleasantly surprised by liking the film much more than I had expected to. As well as tackling Kafka there is also that amazing 1984-esque sequence near the end of the film when we realise the character's new abode has been a kind of open prison, every movement monitored and filmed by Vergerus.
Is this a comment on the way Bergman is experimenting with the relationships between his characters in his films? Manipulating them like chess pieces in a created, period world to connect more deeply with the themes that My Man Godfrey talks about - how conditions for inhumanity become acceptable.
I don't have as much trouble with the stagey performance by Carradine or histrionics by Ullman (though doesn't Carradine give her a run for her money at one point early in the film by running screaming down a corridor and jumping from a balcony onto the floor below?(!)). They feel like moments when the characters burst out with impotent rage at the world - useless and pointless against the madness, but organised and managed insanity as everyone tries to keep the facade of normalcy going, around them. The last signs of 'real' (and therefore unpredictable and dangerous) emotion before we shift to the final scenes detailing the objective experiments.
And that is quite a shift. Watching the film without a knowledge of the final scenes it was a shock, but not really a surprise, when they occurred. They deepened the themes so it didn't feel annoying or tactless that such themes were introduced so late on - instead they felt like a natural progression once the horror of day to day survival in the society at the time and personal traumas of the characters (which could stand for many other individual traumas) had been explored.
I might agree that this is a less personal Bergman film, but watching the previous films in the MGM Bergman set it felt like an interesting departure (even a development in the guise of a departure). Whether it was intended as such or more forced by the circumstances of the production would be interesting to debate.
Perhaps it was the period proto-Nazi setting with the human experimentation ending that worked against the film - after all the 70s were full of Nazisploitation films, from the Oscar-winning of Cabaret to the arty Night Porter, Salo and The Damned to the sleazy SS Experiment Camp and Salon Kitty. This film came around the time even the sleazy exploitation films were winding down (and moving on to zombies and cannibals!) so perhaps audiences were just too burnt out from all the extreme (or at least more uncomfortable than the usual Allies vs Axis war film) material to want to watch another film of that type, even if it was set a decade or so earlier so as to describe the conditions which the regime that followed was able to thrive in.
So I agree, Serpent's Egg is well worth a reappraisal and might even be a little underrated - sadly I haven't yet seen Dreams. Keep writing the novels My Man Godfrey, it was very interesting to read!
Is this a comment on the way Bergman is experimenting with the relationships between his characters in his films? Manipulating them like chess pieces in a created, period world to connect more deeply with the themes that My Man Godfrey talks about - how conditions for inhumanity become acceptable.
I don't have as much trouble with the stagey performance by Carradine or histrionics by Ullman (though doesn't Carradine give her a run for her money at one point early in the film by running screaming down a corridor and jumping from a balcony onto the floor below?(!)). They feel like moments when the characters burst out with impotent rage at the world - useless and pointless against the madness, but organised and managed insanity as everyone tries to keep the facade of normalcy going, around them. The last signs of 'real' (and therefore unpredictable and dangerous) emotion before we shift to the final scenes detailing the objective experiments.
And that is quite a shift. Watching the film without a knowledge of the final scenes it was a shock, but not really a surprise, when they occurred. They deepened the themes so it didn't feel annoying or tactless that such themes were introduced so late on - instead they felt like a natural progression once the horror of day to day survival in the society at the time and personal traumas of the characters (which could stand for many other individual traumas) had been explored.
I might agree that this is a less personal Bergman film, but watching the previous films in the MGM Bergman set it felt like an interesting departure (even a development in the guise of a departure). Whether it was intended as such or more forced by the circumstances of the production would be interesting to debate.
Perhaps it was the period proto-Nazi setting with the human experimentation ending that worked against the film - after all the 70s were full of Nazisploitation films, from the Oscar-winning of Cabaret to the arty Night Porter, Salo and The Damned to the sleazy SS Experiment Camp and Salon Kitty. This film came around the time even the sleazy exploitation films were winding down (and moving on to zombies and cannibals!) so perhaps audiences were just too burnt out from all the extreme (or at least more uncomfortable than the usual Allies vs Axis war film) material to want to watch another film of that type, even if it was set a decade or so earlier so as to describe the conditions which the regime that followed was able to thrive in.
So I agree, Serpent's Egg is well worth a reappraisal and might even be a little underrated - sadly I haven't yet seen Dreams. Keep writing the novels My Man Godfrey, it was very interesting to read!
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s.j. bagley
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montgomery
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tubal
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malcolm1980
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Here's an amusing Bergman spoof on SCTV.
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Jeff
- Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 9:49 pm
- Location: Denver, CO
I'm posting this here to avoid sending the memoriam thread off topic. If there is one good thing to come from the death of great artists, it is often that more people become exposed to and aware of their work. With filmmakers this usually means retrospective series. I suspected that Bergman and Antonioni would each get a series at Film Forum, but it looks like Janus has something more substantial in store for Bergman. I just received this note in a member email from the Denver Film Society's director of programming.
I imagine Janus had this cooked up before Bergman's death, and I suspect this will be a touring retrospective like the ones Janus previously put together for Kurosawa and Ozu. Hopefully, it will come to several U.S. cities. Persona is the only Bergman film I can recall playing in Denver in 35mm in a long time, so I'm anxious to see some of his other masterworks in their proper format.
Also, Patrick's post above mine is creepy now.
Keith Garcia wrote:Normally I use this space to remind you about the great film events we have going on this week in a nutshell. I want you to come out and celebrate your love of film as often as possible. This week though I'd just like to acknowledge the passing of two individuals that celebrated their love of film everyday: directors Ingmar Bergman and Michaelangelo Antonioni.
The mythic tower I imagine when I hear the word 'film' is made up of many, many bricks. Bergman and Antonioni supplied a large portion of that tower's foundation that, without them, could never have gained such an impressive height. We plan on honoring these artists (and others we have lost recently) in the coming months (Bergman will have a special Janus Films series this winter) for their vision and contribution to the special art that we all love to watch.
I imagine Janus had this cooked up before Bergman's death, and I suspect this will be a touring retrospective like the ones Janus previously put together for Kurosawa and Ozu. Hopefully, it will come to several U.S. cities. Persona is the only Bergman film I can recall playing in Denver in 35mm in a long time, so I'm anxious to see some of his other masterworks in their proper format.
Also, Patrick's post above mine is creepy now.