Ingmar Bergman Volume 3 (15.)
The Devil's Eye (1960)/ Virgin Spring (1960)/ Through a Glass Darkly (1961)/ The Silence (1963) Winter Light (1963)/ All These Women. (1964)/ Persona (1966) / The Rite (1968.). A five-disc Blu-ray box set from the BFI.
The BFI four-volume Bergman selection arrives in the swinging sixties, at which point Ingmar decides to put away the lighthearted fripperies of films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, stop messing about and really get serious. The BFI is choosing to release this in the early autumn but surely the winter would be more appropriate; attempting to watch Through A Glass Darkly in the afternoon I kept having to adjust the curtains to try and repel any chink of light. These are mediation on darkness that brook no levity. Persona and the Faith trilogy - Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence - are the films that really put the -esque into Bergman.
The collection contains the first two of his three Best Foreign Film Oscar wins, Virgin Spring and Through the Glass Darkly, which enjoyed back-to-back victories at the start of the sixties. Two decades later, Fanny and Alexander would be his final win and that will be a highlight of the concluding Vol 4, due out in late November.
In the last few days, I have gone through three films from the collection: Through the Glass Darkly, Winter Light and Persona, reviewed here. Glass Darkly is the start of the Faith trilogy and is surely all you could want from a Bergman. There is a remote, barren location, Faro Island. It's summertime, but the long hours of sunshine don’t make it any less bleak. A small group of people in a single location have to face up to an emotional crisis. Three men - her distant novelist father (Gunnar Bjornstrand); her devoted husband (Max von Sydow) and younger brother (Lars Passgard) – try to come to terms with the advancing, incurable mental illness that is striking down their daughter/ wife/ sister, Harriet Andersson. It's tightly constructed, a neat 86 minutes, and has a devastating climax. What impresses is how unflinching it is: as Bergman himself increasingly turned to his own life for material the father is a portrait of the exploitative nature of the artist, feeding on the suffering of those closest to him. In any other film the selfless devotion of von Sydow's husband would be presented as noble but here he is harshly dismissed and almost ridiculed.
Winter Light has a day in the life of a priest structure that is almost comical. In a rural community, a disgruntled, disillusioned pastor, Tomas (Bjornstrand) deals with his dwindling flock with barely disguised disdain. Bergman includes a whole sequence of him dishing out the body and blood of Christ to his six bowed parishioners and looking down at each of them with contempt. A glum spinster schoolteacher (Ingrid Thulin) is throwing her attentions at him. Meanwhile, a fisherman (von Sydow) is having suicidal thoughts prompted by news reports about The Chinese having an atom bomb. He comes to the pastor for guidance but Tomas just talks about himself and his doubts. OK, it’s not exactly Father Ted but it's a premise ripe for black comedy. Bergman though goes for brutal, unwavering intensity. The film's pinnacles are two monologues, peerlessly performed by Bjornstrand and Thulin, but around them, it's the desolate sense of place, of being lost in the middle of nowhere that makes it so powerful. It's a portrait of a man whose self-loathing is so total he ultimately doesn't have the courage of his own contempt.
Film reviewers always blather on about the director this and the director that, but the clearest lesson of this selection is that he was a co-creator with cinematographer Sven Nykvist. He becomes his permanent cameraman on Virgin Spring (they had previously only worked together on Sawdust and Tinsel, some years earlier) and his contribution is immense. He was of course incredibly skilled but the key is that his interests and Bergman's neatly dovetailed. These are the films he was born to shoot. Plus he could do you black and white like few others. There's always black and there's always white, but the relationship between them is never quite the same. In Glass Darkly it is almost gothic while for Winter Light he perfected a scheme, after a month of research, that reduced the amount of shadows to replicate the nature of winter light in a church.
Through The Glass Darkly is also the film that introduced him to the island of Faro, which would become his prefered film location and home for the rest of his life. As an aside, I should mention the effect Mia Hansen-Love’s film Bergman Island has had on me. The film is set within the Bergman tourist industry on Faro, with fans visiting his home and the key locations from his famous films. Although the film itself didn't particularly appeal, it awakened in me an envy for the characters' enthusiasm for the director. I've found myself putting aside my long-standing enmity towards Bergman and attempting to embrace his gloom. (It's only fair: I've rarely had problems with other directors' gloom.) I think I'm definitely getting there. As long as you're not someone for whom the revelation of God's non-existence is a devastating Santa Claus disappointment, there's something very therapeutic about Bergman misery. It's misery in a very pure, distilled form and it goes through you like a dose of salts. Afterwards, you feel delightfully cleansed, filled with renewed vigour to face the world.
Extras
Audio commentary on The Virgin Spring by film critic and writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and writer and broadcaster Josh Nelson
Ingmar Bergman Introductions (2003, 10 mins): Ingmar Bergman, in conversation with Marie Nyreröd, provides introductions to Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence
BFI Screen Epiphanies: Richard Ayoade Introduces Persona (2011, 11 mins): the award-winning actor, director and novelist discusses Bergman’s masterpiece in this introduction recorded at BFI Southbank
The Men and Bergman (2007, 52 mins): Eva Beling’s documentary featuring Thommy Berggren, Börje Ahlstedt, Thorsten Flinck and Erland Josephson
Persona trailer
Assorted stills galleries
100-page perfect bound book featuring new essays by Kat Ellinger, Catherine Wheatley, Claire Marie Healy, Jannike Åhlund, Philip Kemp, Ellen Cheshire, Geoff Andrew and Andrew Graves
Newly commissioned artwork by Andrew Bannister
Limited edition of 5,000
The Devil's Eye (1960)/ Virgin Spring (1960)/ Through a Glass Darkly (1961)/ The Silence (1963) Winter Light (1963)/ All These Women. (1964)/ Persona (1966) / The Rite (1968.). A five-disc Blu-ray box set from the BFI.
The BFI four-volume Bergman selection arrives in the swinging sixties, at which point Ingmar decides to put away the lighthearted fripperies of films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, stop messing about and really get serious. The BFI is choosing to release this in the early autumn but surely the winter would be more appropriate; attempting to watch Through A Glass Darkly in the afternoon I kept having to adjust the curtains to try and repel any chink of light. These are mediation on darkness that brook no levity. Persona and the Faith trilogy - Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence - are the films that really put the -esque into Bergman.
The collection contains the first two of his three Best Foreign Film Oscar wins, Virgin Spring and Through the Glass Darkly, which enjoyed back-to-back victories at the start of the sixties. Two decades later, Fanny and Alexander would be his final win and that will be a highlight of the concluding Vol 4, due out in late November.
In the last few days, I have gone through three films from the collection: Through the Glass Darkly, Winter Light and Persona, reviewed here. Glass Darkly is the start of the Faith trilogy and is surely all you could want from a Bergman. There is a remote, barren location, Faro Island. It's summertime, but the long hours of sunshine don’t make it any less bleak. A small group of people in a single location have to face up to an emotional crisis. Three men - her distant novelist father (Gunnar Bjornstrand); her devoted husband (Max von Sydow) and younger brother (Lars Passgard) – try to come to terms with the advancing, incurable mental illness that is striking down their daughter/ wife/ sister, Harriet Andersson. It's tightly constructed, a neat 86 minutes, and has a devastating climax. What impresses is how unflinching it is: as Bergman himself increasingly turned to his own life for material the father is a portrait of the exploitative nature of the artist, feeding on the suffering of those closest to him. In any other film the selfless devotion of von Sydow's husband would be presented as noble but here he is harshly dismissed and almost ridiculed.
Winter Light has a day in the life of a priest structure that is almost comical. In a rural community, a disgruntled, disillusioned pastor, Tomas (Bjornstrand) deals with his dwindling flock with barely disguised disdain. Bergman includes a whole sequence of him dishing out the body and blood of Christ to his six bowed parishioners and looking down at each of them with contempt. A glum spinster schoolteacher (Ingrid Thulin) is throwing her attentions at him. Meanwhile, a fisherman (von Sydow) is having suicidal thoughts prompted by news reports about The Chinese having an atom bomb. He comes to the pastor for guidance but Tomas just talks about himself and his doubts. OK, it’s not exactly Father Ted but it's a premise ripe for black comedy. Bergman though goes for brutal, unwavering intensity. The film's pinnacles are two monologues, peerlessly performed by Bjornstrand and Thulin, but around them, it's the desolate sense of place, of being lost in the middle of nowhere that makes it so powerful. It's a portrait of a man whose self-loathing is so total he ultimately doesn't have the courage of his own contempt.
Film reviewers always blather on about the director this and the director that, but the clearest lesson of this selection is that he was a co-creator with cinematographer Sven Nykvist. He becomes his permanent cameraman on Virgin Spring (they had previously only worked together on Sawdust and Tinsel, some years earlier) and his contribution is immense. He was of course incredibly skilled but the key is that his interests and Bergman's neatly dovetailed. These are the films he was born to shoot. Plus he could do you black and white like few others. There's always black and there's always white, but the relationship between them is never quite the same. In Glass Darkly it is almost gothic while for Winter Light he perfected a scheme, after a month of research, that reduced the amount of shadows to replicate the nature of winter light in a church.
Through The Glass Darkly is also the film that introduced him to the island of Faro, which would become his prefered film location and home for the rest of his life. As an aside, I should mention the effect Mia Hansen-Love’s film Bergman Island has had on me. The film is set within the Bergman tourist industry on Faro, with fans visiting his home and the key locations from his famous films. Although the film itself didn't particularly appeal, it awakened in me an envy for the characters' enthusiasm for the director. I've found myself putting aside my long-standing enmity towards Bergman and attempting to embrace his gloom. (It's only fair: I've rarely had problems with other directors' gloom.) I think I'm definitely getting there. As long as you're not someone for whom the revelation of God's non-existence is a devastating Santa Claus disappointment, there's something very therapeutic about Bergman misery. It's misery in a very pure, distilled form and it goes through you like a dose of salts. Afterwards, you feel delightfully cleansed, filled with renewed vigour to face the world.
Extras
Audio commentary on The Virgin Spring by film critic and writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and writer and broadcaster Josh Nelson
Ingmar Bergman Introductions (2003, 10 mins): Ingmar Bergman, in conversation with Marie Nyreröd, provides introductions to Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence
BFI Screen Epiphanies: Richard Ayoade Introduces Persona (2011, 11 mins): the award-winning actor, director and novelist discusses Bergman’s masterpiece in this introduction recorded at BFI Southbank
The Men and Bergman (2007, 52 mins): Eva Beling’s documentary featuring Thommy Berggren, Börje Ahlstedt, Thorsten Flinck and Erland Josephson
Persona trailer
Assorted stills galleries
100-page perfect bound book featuring new essays by Kat Ellinger, Catherine Wheatley, Claire Marie Healy, Jannike Åhlund, Philip Kemp, Ellen Cheshire, Geoff Andrew and Andrew Graves
Newly commissioned artwork by Andrew Bannister
Limited edition of 5,000
