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That seems to be the three hour movie version. The complete 6 hour tv-series was released in Sweden last year by SF Film - unfortunately in a pan/scan transfer (and not English Friendly).

The British release from Park Circus seems seems to be in the correct aspect ratio. I don't know much about Park Circus, but their dvd release of the documentary on Clouzot's Inferno was pretty good.

The original post needs MASSIVELY updating, with details for all of Bergman's films on DVD/Blu-Ray, links to discussions on the various films, links to the Forum Discussions, links to Web Resources, info on the best books on Bergman, etc, etc, etc.

If a mod wants to transfer the thread over to me, I'll volunteer to update it

Your wish is granted. Long live Jambi.

An new exhibition titled Ingmar Bergman: Truth and Lies composed of materials from the Bergman Foundation is scheduled to open at the Academy’s Fourth Floor Gallery in Los Angeles on Sept. 16th.

Galen Young wrote:An new exhibition titled Ingmar Bergman: Truth and Lies composed of materials from the Bergman Foundation is scheduled to open at the Academy’s Fourth Floor Gallery in Los Angeles on Sept. 16th.

This is awesome. And you're awesome. Thanks.

For all IB lovers: Today Gunnar Fischer celebrates his one hundred birthday. Born November 18 in 1910.

There will be a celebration at Filmhuset (the filmhouse) in Stockholm tonight and they will screen Wild Strawberries.

A big toast for the jubilee.

Cracked into my stack of Madman Bergmans with Brink of Life. First things first, this is a horrendous transfer. Video-sourced, ragged print, and it appears to either be cropped or, more likely, squished into a frame of closer to ~1.20 than 1.37. Yikes! So, once you acclimate to the viewing conditions, how is the film? Minor stuff, I'm afraid, despite coming in the midst of one of his most productive eras. It's enjoyable enough and all the regulars hit their marks, but Bergman's dip into (very very predictable) melodrama rubs up against some of the more interesting ideas inherent in the material and only strong performances, as per the norm, save the day. It's worth a watch, but most Bergman is anyways, so that's not a huge endorsement!

I was at the Berlinale retrospective of Bergman - and that was quite a treat!!

I was at the discussions with Liv Ullman and Harriet Anderson, very very amazing women. Anyways, it was mentioned during the Anderson-discussion that he thought Touch should NEVER be shown in a cinema again. So, since I was already there, I grabbed a ticket.

And let me say, apart from Elliot Gould struggling with his english and the minor plot, it was a good film!! I just read that a "version in swedish has been found" a few pages back - well, I think I saw that one, since only the scenes with english actors weren't in swedish. \:D/

I loved the colors and the cinematography was GORGEOUS!! Some scenes that struck me hard!!

I hope this will find its way onto DVD eventually! Even if it is his "weakest" out of the 20 I have seen, I would still give it an 8 out of 10. Apart from the weak plot and so-so acting, it is a really good film. If Woody Allen would have made it, it would be considered one of his best. With Bergman, I guess, the film isn't so fortunate.

domino harvey wrote:Cracked into my stack of Madman Bergmans with Brink of Life. First things first, this is a horrendous transfer. Video-sourced, ragged print, and it appears to either be cropped or, more likely, squished into a frame of closer to ~1.20 than 1.37. Yikes! So, once you acclimate to the viewing conditions, how is the film? Minor stuff, I'm afraid, despite coming in the midst of one of his most productive eras. It's enjoyable enough and all the regulars hit their marks, but Bergman's dip into (very very predictable) melodrama rubs up against some of the more interesting ideas inherent in the material and only strong performances, as per the norm, save the day. It's worth a watch, but most Bergman is anyways, so that's not a huge endorsement!

I can't believe I missed your post before until now. I've been meaning to contact you about the Madman discs because since I remember you ordering them. You ordered the four Bergmans, if I remember correctly. If you've gotten around to them, how did the others fair compared to the "Brink Of Life" disc? I had the Swedish releases of the same four films ordered from MegaStore.se but then I couldn't recall if the Swedish releases contained English subtitles or not, so I canceled.

I have the Swedish Brink of Life and yes it is subtitled in English and is a good transfer from a cursory look at it. But, granted, it is a minor entry during one of Bergman's great periods. Me, I'm waiting for a good Summer Interlude and Monika. Criterion, get on the ball, please.

isakborg wrote:I have the Swedish Brink of Life and yes it is subtitled in English and is a good transfer from a cursory look at it. But, granted, it is a minor entry during one of Bergman's great periods. Me, I'm waiting for a good Summer Interlude and Monika. Criterion, get on the ball, please.

I went with the UK Tartan release for both of those films and don't have any complaints as far as picture quality. Outside of what Criterion's released I have around 11 or 12 of the UK Tartan releases to fill in the voids of what hasn't been released on DVD in the USA. The only one that I'm still looking for at a decent price is their release of "The Rite."

Bergman switched at birth. Adds an interesting layer to Karin's Face if true, huh.

More details, in slightly awkward English (but it's much better than a Google Translate version would be).

I think it's amazing that four years after his death, Bergman can still be tabloid front page news!

"BERGMAN SCANDAL - was he really a dog?"

I've seen 25 of this guy's films. I saw all of them (except for Persona) in chronological order. Next up will be All These Women. I haven't managed to get ahold of Night Is My Future yet.

1. Persona - A+
2. The Silence - A+
3. The Virgin Spring - A
4. A Lesson in Love - A-
5. Summer Interlude - A-
6. Wild Strawberries - A-
7. Winter Light - B+
8. Smiles of a Summer Night - B+
9. Dreams - B
10. To Joy - B
11. Brink of Life - B
12. The Magician - B
13. The Seventh Seal - B-
14. A Ship to India - B-
15. Summer with Monika - B-
16. Secrets of Women - C+
17. The Devil's Wanton - C
18. The Devil's Eye - C-
19. Thirst - C-
20. Through a Glass Darkly - C-
21. Crisis - C-
22. Sawdust and Tinsel - C-
23. Port of Call - C-
24. This Can't Happen Here - D
25. It Rains on Our Love - D

Why did that happen

I'd be interested in why you rank The Silence above Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly, as I always thought it the weakest of the trilogy.

I know I'm not the one you're asking, but I also find it the strongest. The reason being is that it by it's premise eliminates the weakest element of Bergman: the dialogue. There's a lot less repetition to the images and it doesn't feel like he's over explaining a joke. Admittedly the trilogy on the whole has this problem less than his other films, but The Silence eliminates it entirely.

I think The Silence is fantastic. It felt like Bergman discovering something new about himself as a filmmaker, which I think is true - this was the first time he truly moved away from his signature chamber-drama affect (an affect that could easily become affectation as is evident in some of his lesser films) and learned to express in a looser way more dependent on image and editing. He said that he thought about music while making the film, and thinking about the film's tableaux as notes on a page here really enrichens the experience. I think the fact that the performances were so strong and the images so vivid despite this stylistic departure gave Bergman some confidence to make films like Persona... although I have yet to explore his later films so perhaps I will be surprised by what he does!

I really dislike Through a Glass Darkly, which I think is the worst-case scenario of Bergman's tormented spiritual reflection diving up its own ass. Some of the scenes, like the final one ("daddy spoke to me!") I found to be shockingly reaching for a kind of spiritual profundity they just don't qualify for. Doesn't help that I am in no way a fan of Harriet Andersson who I found here to be babytalking her way through yet another role beyond her depth emotionally.

Winter Light I liked but one can sort of feel Bergman's investment in spiritual concerns whittling away throughout the film. It seems like the last gasp before the experimentation and stylistic extremes of The Silence. Narratively I feel like the story deserved to be drawn on a larger canvas... and by this point I was a bit bored by Björnstrand's Bergman tics. I was never convinced that this man was ever truly devout, even if the events we see are those of his loss of faith. Basically I see this as a feature-length redux of his Through a Glass Darkly role, and when Björnstrand gets heavy I find he is less interesting and emotionally stimulating.

I don't feel like the dialogue is always a problem with Bergman, but often there's a real taste of writerly effort to the words. So far I see A Lesson in Love as his best screenplay, with To Joy, Summer Interlude and Wild Strawberries also very good. He was a skilled writer but his dialogue often feels more novelesque than cinematic to me.

puxzkkx wrote:He was a skilled writer but his dialogue often feels more novelesque than cinematic to me.

Well, aside from just the general absurdity of complaining that a movie's words are too much like words, your comparison is off point in an odd way. If you're going to complain about the literariness of Bergman's dialogue, there's a better comparison than novels staring you in the face: plays. His dialogue is theatrical (I mean that without any pejorative connotation), which makes sense for a man who began his career in the theatre. So, yes, his dialogue is often heightened. Why that should be a unique fault in cinema but perfect for plays I don't know (I'd have thought two dramatic mediums using spoken words would be mutually compatible in this area). It certainly makes little sense considering how many people adore musicals, for instance, in which all the big emotions and conflicts are expressed mostly through song. That's about as heightened an effect as you can get. But heaven forbid you decide to use dialogue in a heightened manner in anything except plays and novels, because...?

It's so very, very odd to me when people refuse to take a movie on its own terms.

While I agree that theatrical is a more accurate place to put his usage of dialogue there are things that differentiate the mediums that make it so that theatrical dialogue (in the sense I believe we are both using) doesn't work within a cinematic context. I do think as he went on he got better at applying theatrical reasoning to cinema's grammar, but throughout his career and especially before the '60s his application didn't recognize the differences.

Just to make more sense of what I'm saying a good example is of how a Beckettesque style is used in cinema versus theater. The sort of minimalism of Beckett wouldn't strictly apply to a film because of the editing (the reason I'm specifying Beckett is because we have the on film project for evidence to any argument) which greatly dilutes his intent. The solution that Beckett found in his own Film and others have since is to use the roving camera like dialogue and to cut out the actual dialogue.

That's simplified slightly, but it still shows that certain effects that work in the theater must be altered to achieve the same means in cinema. The theatrical dialogue that you've identified as a motif works in the same way. The way it's done in the early films is repetitive to the images. It's sort of like the 'I am dead' (paraphrased) line from Macbeth. It's absolutely needed in the stage version, but comes across as silly in a filmed version. What Bergman's doing is more about the themes and experimental, but often does the same thing. Starting in the '60s I think he begins to realize this as his dialogue while still remaining of the stage in how they effect the audience works within the cinematic grammar that Bergman's developed.

Just to check my bases, this doesn't mean only his dialogue changed, but so did his silences and camerawork. This is probably why The Silence is one of the most important Bergman films up until that point, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries are also pretty clearly major turning points. It's him throwing away his theatrical crutch while attempting to achieve many of those things using the cinematic grammar he had been exploring fully for only about a decade up until that point (the pre-1957 films while occasionally good or even great are so mostly for the scripts and acting with Bergman's directing having a minimal of flourishes). Much like dialogue turns into editing in my Beckett comparison much of the same occurs with Bergman.

Just as a postscript something being heightened isn't bad in itself, but if done so it should be done in a way that works within the medium which is something Bergman had to learn over time.

I see throughout this guy's career a conscious effort to express in cinematic grammar. There are many passages in his earlier studio potboilers that mark a director trying to put his own stamp on material that was handed to him. Because of that I count some of Bergman's theatrical dialogue as flaws in his film. It works well and is appropriate in, say, The Devil's Eye (although I don't like that film for other reasons) but in a film like Dreams or Summer with Monika it is out of place.

I find the style of Bergman's dialogue an endearing quality of his work, which I think is why The Silence didn't click with me as I found it meandering, although I do love the scenes involving Lindblom. Since I'm a terrible judge of the quality of acting no matter the language I can rarely separate good from bad performances, I found Andersson in Through a Glass Darkly compelling, but I can see how her proclamation of "God is a spider!" could be taken as overly bombastic. Winter Light I rank among Bergman's best as his examinations of faith are for me the most compelling of his films, and I think it's the closest he comes to reaching the profundity of Dreyer.