Ingmar Bergman
1) Actor, playwright, and stage director
2) Along with Godard, Fellini, and Antonioni is considered one of the most
important directors in world cinema
Alf Sjobert / Victor Sjostrom / Mauritz Stiller
1)Bergman learned from Alf Sjoberg (Mast and Kawin identify his as Sweden's
most important director during the 30' and 40's.
2)Sjoberg learned in the silent era from Victor Sjostrom and Mauritz Stiller.
3)Mauritz discovered Greta Garbo.
4)Sjostrum worked in Hollywood in the 20's. Best known for
The Phantom Carriage (1921) and The Wind (1928) (starred Lillian Gish)
5)The silent films of Sweden use natural imagery to evoke human passions, to
satirize social injustices, and to show the influence of metaphysical forces.
*)The 60's depicted complete nudity and found an international market.
*)Vilgot Sjoman's I am Curious Yellow (1967) features intercourse
Bergman
1)Is mostly known for his earlier work years between 50's-70's
2)His central concerns:
a)Painful Relationship between humans and a silent(or absent) God.
3)Bergman is a good example of "the auteur theory at work, or how a single
person can express their preoccupations through the collaborative art of
cinema."
4)There is a group of actors well known for working with Bergman: Max von
Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Liv Ullmann.
1960's
1)He got a new cinematographer in the 60's Sven Nykvist
2)During this time, he became increasingly concerned with psychology
Persona (1966)
1)Persona (1966) is his masterpiece (according to Mast and Kawin)
2)he film is about an actress (Liv Ullmann) who refuses to speak. The actress
is treated by a nurse (Bibi Andersson) in a mental hospital, where the
women share an intimate relationship. (I would say emotional relationship)
3)What is interesting about the film is how it tells its story
4)Persona is elliptical and nonlinear.
5)Mast and Kawin explain Bergman presents Persona as both a film and a
kind of mental movie screen on which the events of the film appear.
6)he film constantly refers to itself. Bergman calls attention to the film as a
film because he wants to emphasize that what follows is a fiction, an illusion
—a sequence of light and shadow on a flat screen.
Wild Strawberries (1957)
1)It's about a doctor named Borg (director Victor Sjöström) who has a dream in which he dies.
2)The film depicts his reflection about the value of his life
3)He encounters two groups on his way to receive an honorary degree: hikers
and a middle-aged couple.
4)The hikers stimulate the doctor’s dream of his childhood. In the film,
summer and sunshine are metaphors for moments of happiness.
5)In the following post credits dream sequence, Borg dreams that he has died
Analysis by scholar
Film scholar Mark Le Fanu locates the darkness in the scene: "And yet the film is, of course, about dark things—the viewer can’t miss this. It’s there from the opening, that extraordinary postcredits sequence (surely, in its detail and particularity, one of the finest evocations of dream in the whole of cinema) in which a coffin that has fallen from a broken carriage opens up to reveal to the passing Professor Borg his image and likeness—a classical doppelgänger that, stretching out an arm, attempts to drag the old man down into the darkness of the tomb. The screen goes black at this point. Cut to our protagonist shaking his head and awakening. We are back in the world of normality—a normality in fact already established in the precredits sequence, where we have seen Professor Borg in his home environment, seated comfortably at his desk, smoking a cigar and ruminating over family photographs. A distinguished (if fussy) old emeritus, he is shortly to make a journey to the southern city of Lund to be honored for his lifework in medicine."
Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Berman, 1957)
Clip in class
Dream Sequence - Click Here
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