bergman season at NFT: what movies do I go to see? + C/D

i am yes

sorry

Watch all of them, yes - my favourite is Cries & Whispers (its just my fave Bergman full stop)

Through a Glass Darkly also on MUBI so I'll try and watch that.

yep i have TaGD on ancient crappy video

i missed wild strawberries thru bein dumm

watching the 3-hr fanny & alexander now: so great

ewa fröling just screaming at her husband's death right now

and then the funeral, and we're thrown back into something half victorian, half-medieval

gunn wållgren as the grandmother is terrific: she was more or less the matriarch of swedish film at this point also, and died only a year after the film came out

Through a Glass Darkly was excellent though I'm still digesting it. Take him for granted, need to re-watch some more.

What an amazing streak between at least 1953 and 1982. It would be far more difficult to determine what's not worth seeing… but fwiw Bergman himself considered the comedy All These Women aka Now About These Women a relative failure. My least favorite in that period would be The Touch, the English-language one with Elliott Gould.

15 years on and we have another. Its not called the NFT anymore.

Saw Winter Light yesterday (the only one of the so-called Trilogy of Silence I hadn't seen). So so much to say - for a start Nykvist's cinematography was just something else (I mean I knew that but to encounter it on the big screen for the first time in well, 15 years, as oposed to seeing it on TV screens). Could spend a long-time just looking at those shots. Then Bergman's writing is so good - just no fat whatsoever, the editing infuses it with mystifications, the in-built subtle play with causation as the day unfolds. Then there's the acting, which is so good - although you also fear it came at a cost to all concerned. To think there was another 30 years of this, when it was all so THERE.

Ones I am going to see: The Passion of Anna, Autumn Sonata and possibly All These Women (the last one is a comedy).

This time around its spread over three months as oposed to two and the BFI are organising it in these strands - so if you want to see his films on love, well you know where to go for the heartbreak.

Went to a three hour screening of the complete TV version of Face to Face and what is it? So much of a culmniation of everything up to that moment with a look forward to the rest of it - the failure of talk to cure the ills (Persona), those inventive and yet tough dream sequences (Wild Strawberries), the aborted at birth relationships (The Passion of Anna), his obsession with the tick-tock of time and the games with death. Shades of Amour with Jenny's grandparents (sans sadism) (and Ullmann for Huppert). Its the kind of thing that makes me want to re-watch a dozen Bergman features and take note of what he is doing just here. It felt inexaustible.

And to top it off the couple behind me were divided on it - one seemed to like it, the other hated it. That's always funny to me.

In Bergman's book Images, he reveals he thinks he utterly failed with F to F, esp re dreams/reality compared to Wild Strawberries.

IB:

Dino di Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Perhaps it did present something new that had never been tried before. Now when I see Face to Face, I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. It's called The Road to Morocco (David Butler, 1942). They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing. He immediately calms down and says, 'This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.'

When I see Face to Face and Liv Ullmann's incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can't help thinking on The Road to Morocco.

(Ullmann got the second of her two Oscar nominations for the film.)

http://www.ingmarbergman.se/en/production/face-face

Yeah there was an excerpt of that part from Images in the programme notes.