At Stockholm University, where Bergman studied art and literature, he spent most of his time around the student theatre. Almost the only other thing he seems to have been ardent about in his teenage years was the charismatic power of Adolf Hitler, whom he saw address a Nazi rally in Weimar during a summer holiday. After he left university, his film career began in earnest in with some work re-writing scripts. Over the next decade, he patiently learned his craft by directing or writing.
Disillusioned knight Antonius Block Max von Sydow returns from the Crusades to find that the plague is wiping out his homeland. It is a memorably dark movie. The film includes the startling image of the knight playing Death — in the form of the Grim Reaper — at chess.
Death, who naturally uses the black pieces, wins. In the disturbing finale, the cloaked figure leads a chain of doomed victims across a desolate moor. By the time he was in his late fifties, he was sanguine about the inevitability of the grave or good at pretending this was the case.
Wild Strawberries , released in December , is also full of haunting, indelible images — such as a clock with no hands and shocked look on an old man as he is being pulled into the coffin by his own dead body. When Bergman was asked in whether the film was a positive tale of redemption, Bergman was unconvinced. Do you? They may have a moment of illumination, they may see themselves, have awareness of what they are, but that is the most they can hope for. During the making of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries , he was also enjoying an intense affair with year-old Bibi Andersson, the lead actor in both films.
At the time, his marriage to the journalist and linguist Gun Grut was starting to unravel. His personal relationships with women seem at odds with his respect for them on screen.
And it is truly strange that he, at the same time, gave his actors such amazing roles. In this aspect Bergman is ahead of his time, even today. He was born in — maybe his attitude to women in his personal life reflects his generation. This movie was banned in the then West German state of Bavaria because of what was, at the time, a relatively drastically staged rape scene. Two sisters and one of the women's ten-year-old son are stranded in a hotel in a city whose language they do not understand.
Explicit sex scenes and the combination of sexuality and religion came as a shock to many moviegoers in the early s. The drama film was censored and banned many times. In "Persona," Bergman focused on the medium cinema. Again, everything revolves around two women, their relationship to each other, and with the outside world. Sexuality and faith are at the center of this story, too, in a film that is formally more experimental and gave fundamental thought to art and cinema.
Bergman again remained true to himself with this film: a deep look into the female psyche, grand emotions, brilliant actors, all in the form of a chamber play.
This glimpse behind the facade of a marriage, the reality behind appearances, is the epitome of his career for Bergman connoisseurs. Initially a six-part TV mini series shot with a small budget, the story was shortened for the big screen. This period drama was also produced in two versions, as a feature film and a longer TV film. Poetic, entertaining and humorous, at times serious and full of bitterness, Bergman looked back on his childhood and family home in a semi-autobiographical story.
Hailed by many as the greatest film director of the 20th century, Ingmar Bergman — who was born on July 14, and died more than a decade ago — was certainly one of the pioneers of the seventh art of filmmaking. Ten years before his death, the Cannes Film Festival awarded the Swede a special prize: "The Palme of Palmes," effectively proclaiming him the best director of all time.
Such superlatives are of course questionable, but they affirm the indelible mark on the industry that Bergman has left, along with an incredible body of work. Born in Uppsala, Sweden, Bergman was a workaholic behind the camera and on stage. Between and , he directed numerous films, mostly for the big screen. Bergman, though, was a one-man film movement; his instant eminence created a cottage industry of Bergmania.
Janus Films, with U. Full-length studies of his work appeared in English, French, Swedish. For a generation of budding cinephiles, that settled it. Film was literature. Movies were art. I want to become an orchestral musician. I want to be surrounded by a sea of sound, in that enormous common effort. Not sit on a podium alone and exposed. I want to live a regular life.
I want to belong. This aspect would have been further emphasized in a scene that was never realized. Bergman cancelled the scene for technical reasons—the digital cameras needed could not be made available—although a deal had been negotiated with the orchestra. But let us think about it for a second: what a marvellous scene it would have been, featuring Karin surrounded by a hundred or so musicians.
Twenty-five years after Autumn Sonata and fifty-three after To Joy , Bergman had found a beautiful musical metaphor of music-making as a means of having a meaningful and authentic life. But the clown symbolizes death and is thus connected to the Shakespearian epigraph. The two outcasts can connect with Schubert and Veith, as both are immensely suffering, abused, and maltreated servants. At the end of the play, Schubert and organist Marcus Jacobi perform his Great C Major Symphony—his last and most prominent symphonic work—in a four-hand version, and Schubert receives devastating feedback: it is too long, the violin and woodwind parts are unplayable, and the last movement is too furious and repetitive.
He responds with despair. It is definitely one of his most moving speeches:. Schubert: The motif, the main motif, the constantly recurring motif … is a cry… of joy! Every minute, I was in hell.
But God sent me that cry of joy, that cry that is so short. And it helped, it made the pain unimportant, the disease meaningless. It turned the rage of the medicines into distant echoes. I thought that… My intention was to… I thought that other people… tormented by their hellish humiliation as I am tormented… I thought I would cry out to them as to myself.
And I cry out so long and so often… the pain becomes unreal and the illness a phantom. Vogler: The large-scale form has never been your form, Schubert. You are no Beethoven. You have done your friend the greatest of favours. You have told the truth. From where did Bergman derive this dialogue and the Schubert-related threads? His sketchbooks in the Bergman Archives provide no answer, and my interview with the executive producer Pia Ehrnvall did not reveal anything—Bergman typically never talked analytically about his works during production, she told me—but given his previous intriguing comments on music in his films, he may simply have created the connection himself.
And as Anyssa Neumann put it so well, through this plot,. By sometimes questioning the common understanding of the classical repertoire, Bergman points to its complexities. Beyond Observation offers a historical analysis of ethnographic film from the birth of cinema in until It covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles, in many different parts of the world, from the Arctic to Africa, from urban China to rural Vermont.
It is the first extensive historical account of its kind and will be accessible to students and lecturers in visual anthropology as well as to those previously unfamiliar with ethnographic film. Among the early genres that Paul Henley discusses are French reportage films, the Soviet kulturfilm, the US travelogue, the classic documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Basil Wright, as well as the more academic films of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Among the leading film-makers of the post-war period, he discusses Jean Rouch, John Marshall and Robert Gardner, as well as the emergence of Observational Cinema in the s. In the final part, he examines the recent films of David and Judith MacDougall, the Harvard Sensory Media Lab, and a range of films authored in a participatory manner, as possible models for the future. This book illuminates the personal experience of being at the centre of a media scandal.
0コメント