Bergman: A Year in A Life (15.)
Directed by Jane Magnusson.
Featuring Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Gunnel Lindblom, Lena Endre, Arnold Weinstein, Dick Cavett, Elliott Gould, Barbra Streisand. 117 mins.
The Bergman is Ingmar and the year is 1957, during which he will deal with seven productions - two films, one TV production and four plays - and a stomach ulcer. In there are the releases of two of his most famous films, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Magnusson's treatise is that although he's already been making films for over a decade, this is the decisive year in his career: the time when he decides to make his work largely autobiographical. Well, he had more than enough of it to go round; by this time Bergman already had three wives, six children and various lovers. As one contributor puts it, "He must've existed in a testosterone-filled hubris bubble."
When I was in my teens I spent a Sunday afternoon in the Scala cinema watching a triple bill of Bergman films from the 50s, including Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. I have rarely been so bored in a cinema, but I stuck it out in the hope that the next one would explain why he was such a big deal. The message from this film is that if you thought the films were bad, they were nothing compared to the man who made them.
The 1957 thing is a very loose through line on which to hang a conventional biography on. Not much of the film is spent in that year, as it heads back and forward to moments of interest in his career. Collaborators and admirers appear to talk about how great he was but this is not some unmodulated gush of adulation. Bergman was a compulsive liar, a Nazi sympathiser in his younger days, a domineering tyrant on set, and a workaholic who neglected and used just about everybody he came into contact with. The film has managed to get access to footage from a TV interview with brother Dag, from the 1980s which Ingmar had managed to suppress and prevented being broadcast.
The film is about the length needed to go for artistic greatness. My teenage objections to Bergman was that it was just a bunch of subtitled misery, but there's more to this portrait than just the cliché of the suffering artist. It's the ruthless, workaholic devotion to his art, and himself. At one point the film reads out an edited section of his autobiography where he describes himself in such a rage during an argument with his lover that he realises that he is strangling her and banging her head against the floor while penetrating her. The narration then asks why he would cut that out of his book, but even in liberal Sweden, I think they draw the line at murderous sexual assaults for artistic inspiration.
The film brings up issues of what leeway we should give the artist. Throughout the film I kept thinking he wouldn't get away with it now. As bad boy directors go, he made Lars Von Trier (who pops up to express his admiration) look like Ron Howard.
Directed by Jane Magnusson.
Featuring Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann, Gunnel Lindblom, Lena Endre, Arnold Weinstein, Dick Cavett, Elliott Gould, Barbra Streisand. 117 mins.
The Bergman is Ingmar and the year is 1957, during which he will deal with seven productions - two films, one TV production and four plays - and a stomach ulcer. In there are the releases of two of his most famous films, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. Magnusson's treatise is that although he's already been making films for over a decade, this is the decisive year in his career: the time when he decides to make his work largely autobiographical. Well, he had more than enough of it to go round; by this time Bergman already had three wives, six children and various lovers. As one contributor puts it, "He must've existed in a testosterone-filled hubris bubble."
When I was in my teens I spent a Sunday afternoon in the Scala cinema watching a triple bill of Bergman films from the 50s, including Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. I have rarely been so bored in a cinema, but I stuck it out in the hope that the next one would explain why he was such a big deal. The message from this film is that if you thought the films were bad, they were nothing compared to the man who made them.
The 1957 thing is a very loose through line on which to hang a conventional biography on. Not much of the film is spent in that year, as it heads back and forward to moments of interest in his career. Collaborators and admirers appear to talk about how great he was but this is not some unmodulated gush of adulation. Bergman was a compulsive liar, a Nazi sympathiser in his younger days, a domineering tyrant on set, and a workaholic who neglected and used just about everybody he came into contact with. The film has managed to get access to footage from a TV interview with brother Dag, from the 1980s which Ingmar had managed to suppress and prevented being broadcast.
The film is about the length needed to go for artistic greatness. My teenage objections to Bergman was that it was just a bunch of subtitled misery, but there's more to this portrait than just the cliché of the suffering artist. It's the ruthless, workaholic devotion to his art, and himself. At one point the film reads out an edited section of his autobiography where he describes himself in such a rage during an argument with his lover that he realises that he is strangling her and banging her head against the floor while penetrating her. The narration then asks why he would cut that out of his book, but even in liberal Sweden, I think they draw the line at murderous sexual assaults for artistic inspiration.
The film brings up issues of what leeway we should give the artist. Throughout the film I kept thinking he wouldn't get away with it now. As bad boy directors go, he made Lars Von Trier (who pops up to express his admiration) look like Ron Howard.
