Ingmar Bergman

[JSC]

Came across some material not included in Marie Nyreröd's extended interviews with Bergman.
I like this sequence where he talks about his utilitarian attitude to clothes, as well as how some
of these clothes have shown up in his films (the sequence also has a rather touching ending).

https://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/blog/be ... shed-style

[phoenix474]

The TV version of Face to Face has shown up on VOD on Vimeo.

[therewillbeblus]

The TV version of Face to Face has shown up on VOD on Vimeo.

That's great, it's so much better

[Berzeli]

After struggling a bit with where exactly to post this; SVT (the Swedish public broadcaster) just announced that they are making an adaptation of Trolösa (Faithless), a Bergman script previously adapted by Liv Ullman into the 2000 movie of the same name.
Heading up the adaptation is Tomas Alfredson, whom you may know, of "mister police I gave you all the clues" fame. Who apparently has been toying with this idea for about 20 years after discussing it with Ingmar himself in 2001 and having the big man describe it as "a fucking drunken idea" before coming around to it and calling it "terribly exciting". And Sara Johnsen, whom you may not, her most recent work was the well received series 22. juli about the Utøya attack.

This is (sort of) Alfredson's second brush with adapting Bergman. His first being the Bergmans Reliquarium segment of Bergman Revisited, six short films commissioned for the centenary. Described as "a visual association play", it's a pop music video with some serious star power having music by Veronica Maggio and featuring "Bergman actors" like Lena Olin, Gunnel Lindblom, and Pernilla August. Should be available to stream internationally here (and personally I think it rules).
side note: this was a collaboration with artist Jesper Waldersten, whom Alfredson also worked with on his ill-fated Bröderna Lejonhjärta (Brothers Lionheart) adaptation.

[domino harvey]

Caught up with Face to Face via the Imprint Blu and while perhaps the TV version is indeed better, it’s hard to imagine 45 more minutes being able to fix all of the problems with what IS in the feature length version. This struck me as bad self-parody (an opinion Bergman apparently later shared) and I’m amazed he got an Oscar nom for Best Director. Speaking of, Ullmann’s Oscar nom for some of the most tortuous overacting you’ll ever see is equally unmerited. I hated pretty much everything about this, from the useless dream sequences to a severely misjudged rape scene to poor Gunnar Bjornstrand stuck in a mostly mute and sidelined pity role, there was never anything worth grabbing onto.

I did not expect this one to be of a piece with Bergman’s clear decline suite of the Touch and Serpent’s Egg, but now they make for quite a trilogy of Bergman failures that I never want to see again

[mteller]

I pretty much agree. I think Ullmann does the best job she can, given the material she has to work with. I bought the Imprint out of Bergman completionism, but haven't brought myself to watch it yet. I've already seen it four times (including once in the TV version, which is no better), always hoping it will be better than I remembered.

[therewillbeblus]

I thought the TV version was messy, but like some of Bergman's best films (even if rare - The Passion of Anna comes to mind), its messiness won me over. It's been a while since I watched the cut version, but I'm hoping I like it more than you guys (ideally aided by Michael Brooke's commentary on the Imprint!)

[MichaelB]

I think there's one scene in the TV cut whose omission from the theatrical version is a genuine shame - the scene in which Jenny dictates what she intends to be a farewell message to her husband. Ullmann himself says that that was the scene that she most regretted being dropped.

Otherwise, I don't think the TV version adds a huge amount. It's certainly not another Scenes from a Marriage situation, where a feature-length film was artificially created from something that had originally been conceived solely as a six-part TV series, and with huge cuts (two hours, if I remember rightly) made along the way. By contrast, the TV and cinema versions of Face to Face were intended from the outset, and Bergman edited both in parallel (starting with the TV version, ending with the film version, but overlapping quite a bit in between) - and there's only about 45 minutes' difference between the two.

One mystery that I was never able to resolve concerned who was responsible for the 118-minute theatrical cut - I couldn't find any reference to Bergman himself having signed off on it (as he undoubtedly did with the TV and 135-minute theatrical cuts), but neither could I find any explanation of who carried it out if not him. You'd have thought the existence of an entire book on Face to Face would have helped here, but Michael Tapper doesn't touch on it either. (In fact, I drew less from that book than I anticipated I would, although it was very strong on the development stages.)

[nicolas]

I thought the TV version was messy, but like some of Bergman's best films (even if rare - The Passion of Anna comes to mind), its messiness won me over. It's been a while since I watched the cut version, but I'm hoping I like it more than you guys (ideally aided by Michael Brooke's commentary on the Imprint!)

Thank you for mentioning Michael’s commentary. I wanted to buy the Imprint BD solely for the commentary but totally forgot about the release when it actually came out. Glad the LE is still available. I’m very much looking forward to this.

[MichaelB]

This is the only review I've found that does more than merely acknowledge the existence of the commentary, but it says some very nice and flattering things about it.

(I'm pretty pleased with it, for the record - it's the longest single-film commentary that I've done to date, but it wasn't at all hard to fill the track as there was always plenty to talk about. Diamonds of the Night and Walkover were only about half the length apiece, but were much tougher!)

[domino harvey]

Stellan Skarsgard says Ingmar Bergman was a Nazi during the war and “cried when Hitler died”

[Mr Sausage]

Bergman admitted as much.

[Zot!]

Also, Stellan is having us on, as he was born 6 years after Hitler died... of course this is what the columnist leads with in a article that ironically includes a quote about Stellan's buddy Von Trier: “Everyone in that room knew he was not a Nazi, that he was the opposite, and yet they all used it as a headline."

[spectre]

Fairly or otherwise, Skarsgård has had it in for Bergman for years – this is from The Guardian back in 2012: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/201 ... rated-bull

Not that there's anything particularly wrong with the point he's making; anyone who knows anything about Bergman's life will know that he was a flawed person, to put it lightly, and yes, newsflash, the capacity to make great art doesn't necessarily correlate with personal virtue (are we really still talking about this?). But Bergman was also bluntly honest about those flaws, which is the reason why we know about this to begin with – and I'm including Skarsgård himself in that "we", even if he did work on a couple of small productions with him in the director's later years. So there's nothing particularly interesting to be gleaned here that can't be found in Bergman's own writing or, for that matter, films.

[Walter Kurtz]

Greatest Feature Performance by a Male Actor Showing His Utter Abject Disappointment With His Son

Stellan Skarsgard in King Arthur

[hearthesilence]

He was 14 when Hitler came to power and about 27 when the war ended. If a Trump sycophant lived that age between 2016 and 2028, I wouldn't see any hope for them, but Bergman came to his senses, felt great shame and intellectually evolved. Maybe there is reason to hope.

[beamish14]

He was 14 when Hitler came to power and about 27 when the war ended. If a Trump sycophant lived that age between 2016 and 2028, I wouldn't see any hope for them, but Bergman came to his senses, felt great shame and intellectually evolved. Maybe there is reason to hope.

Gunter Grass enlisted in the Waffen-SS but developed the self-reflexivity needed to write arguably the most famous post-war German novel, which relentlessly attacks the complacency that allowed Nazism to become acceptable

[Lachino]

Not that there's anything particularly wrong with the point he's making; anyone who knows anything about Bergman's life will know that he was a flawed person, to put it lightly, and yes, newsflash, the capacity to make great art doesn't necessarily correlate with personal virtue (are we really still talking about this?). But Bergman was also bluntly honest about those flaws, which is the reason why we know about this to begin with – and I'm including Skarsgård himself in that "we", even if he did work on a couple of small productions with him in the director's later years. So there's nothing particularly interesting to be gleaned here that can't be found in Bergman's own writing or, for that matter, films.

At the very least, Skarsgård is making accusations which as far as I know, Bergman never talked about or owned up to namely exercising a highly nefarious influence in the Swedish film and theatre world.

[spectre]

He was 14 when Hitler came to power and about 27 when the war ended. If a Trump sycophant lived that age between 2016 and 2028, I wouldn't see any hope for them, but Bergman came to his senses, felt great shame and intellectually evolved. Maybe there is reason to hope.

Gunter Grass enlisted in the Waffen-SS but developed the self-reflexivity needed to write arguably the most famous post-war German novel, which relentlessly attacks the complacency that allowed Nazism to become acceptable

Following on from this, another thing that I think is worth noting is that so many people get caught up in the question of whether a given artist was good or bad (or, to put it in a slightly more nuanced way, whether their flaws are forgivable) that they miss the more important point: that it’s that remorse and self-reflection – or even unprocessed guilt that haunts them, as the case may be – that makes these people’s art interesting. If Bergman were an unrepentant Nazi, or a jug-hooting Trump supporter in this day and age, do we really think he would have been capable of so deeply and profoundly investigating human nature in his work? Seems unlikely. Sure, they could be a great technician like Riefenstahl, but Bergman was so much more than that.

A more challenging question might be whether an artist who's lived a blameless life (and who knows, perhaps such people exist), with nothing to retrospectively feel guilty about and nothing to gnaw at their conscience, is capable of the same.

[JSC]

At the very least, Skarsgård is making accusations which as far as I know, Bergman never talked about or owned up to namely exercising a highly nefarious influence in the Swedish film and theatre world.

As has been stated before, Bergman did talk about this both in his autobiography The Magic Lantern and elsewhere. This is simply
Skarsgård making comments in the heat of the moment (he's probably been irritated with being asked about Bergman for years) and
the press picking up a pull quote, making a headline, and repeating it ad nauseum as if it's some sudden revelation that's only been
recently discovered. Bergman was a flawed individual (who isn't?) and would have been the first to admit it.

[Mr Sausage]

If Bergman were an unrepentant Nazi, or a jug-hooting Trump supporter in this day and age, do we really think he would have been capable of so deeply and profoundly investigating human nature in his work? Seems unlikely.

Artists are often capable of being better people in their art than in their life. Vladimir Nabokov was a subtle critic of bigotry and small mindedness and would use those qualities to show a character was blinded to the world around them--and yet Nabokov was a homophobe in his actual life. He of all people ought to've known better.

Or, to grab something relatively recent from my own country's news cycle, Alice Munro spent a lifetime crafting intricate stories in which she peeled back the layers on how we compromise ourselves, how we become inured to ugly behaviour and begin to collaborate in it, and how the whole sad process eats away at us. She reveals these things with great precision and wisdom. And then last year it was revealed that later in her life not only did Munro know her second husband was a sexual predator who had assaulted her own daughter, but she forgave him and continued to live with him, to the point of siding with him over her now estranged daughter. She became in effect one of the confused, compromised people she laid bare in her own stories. That too is the kind of behaviour you assume, on the surface, would preclude a nuanced ability to investigate the discomforting depths of human nature.

I disagree with what you wrote for the same reason I disagree with, say, Santayana's famous dictum that if we cannot remember the past we're doomed to repeat it: they're untrue because of our enormous capacity for compartmentalization.

[Zot!]

In short...irony is dead. Also journalism.

[spectre]

I disagree with what you wrote for the same reason I disagree with, say, Santayana's famous dictum that if we cannot remember the past we're doomed to repeat it: they're untrue because of our enormous capacity for compartmentalization.

I don’t think we’re in as much disagreement as you think – I completely agree that we have a profound capacity to compartmentalise and that deep insights can sit alongside blind spots. Neither of those examples you mention are particularly unusual in that respect.

But beyond selective bigotries, I do think there’s something all-encompassing about being a fascist – and I’m talking about enthusiastically embracing fascism, not just naively admiring it from afar – that probably creates less fertile ground for deep artistic interrogation of the human condition than most things, because that ideology is peculiarly hostile to the artistic impulse, to humanism and to introspection.

No doubt there’ll always be exceptions (Salvador Dali, Knut Hamsun), but it otherwise seems to me like the proof is in the pudding – who are the great MAGA-hat-wearing artists in America today, after all? And if we could name any, doesn’t their rarity indicate something?

So I guess what I’m trying to say here is not that great talented artists can’t have all kinds of bizarre and alarming beliefs in their personal lives, but that it seems extremely clear to me that Bergman wouldn’t and couldn’t have been the artist he was if he hadn’t turned his back on Naziism. We don’t need biographical scuttlebutt; we can see adequately well for ourselves that his is not the work of a committed fascist.

[Mr Sausage]

I get what you’re saying, re: embracing a totalizing ideology. I thought you were generalizing more than you were.

Tho’ I think the early 20th century produced a bunch of great artists who were fascist or fascist sympathizers: Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and even my beloved W. B. Yeats. And looking back in history will show plenty of regime-loving authoritarian apologists (Vergil, Camoens, Spenser), so, who knows. But modern conservatives have a lot of trouble making good art, that’s for sure.

[zedz]

Artists are often capable of being better people in their art than in their life. Vladimir Nabokov was a subtle critic of bigotry and small mindedness and would use those qualities to show a character was blinded to the world around them--and yet Nabokov was a homophobe in his actual life. He of all people ought to've known better.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Nabokov had two gay uncles (one of whom had a very strong affection for him that wasn't reciprocated), a gay brother, and an adored father who campaigned to decriminalize homosexuality in Russia. He didn't 'get' homosexuality and tended to dismiss his brother Sergey not because of his gayness, but because he thought him shallow and frivolous, but this changed after the war when he belatedly learnt of Sergey's long-term loyalty to his lover, his resistance to the Nazis, and his death in a concentration camp. His relationship with Sergey (and acknowledgement of his own callousness and failure to understand him) informs a number of later novels, such as the treatment of Lucette in Ada.