The Touch (Ingmar Bergman, 1971)

Bibi Andersson and Elliott Gould in The Touch

Cast: Bibi Andersson, Elliott Gould, Max von Sydow, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: Ann-Christin Lobråten, P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren. Music: Carl Michael Bellman, Peter Covent, Jan Johansson. 

I didn't believe a minute of The Touch, and not just because Elliott Gould was so terribly miscast as the male lead in a romantic drama. The film struck me as formulaic in so many predictable ways, particularly the heavy-handed contrast of the milieu from which Karin Vergerus (Bibi Andersson) comes -- pristine, middle-class, Nordic -- and the one from which her lover, David Kovac (Gould), comes -- sloppy, intellectual, Jewish. There's also a thudding use of symbols, like the long-immured statue of the Virgin and Child that's infested with a species of beetles that has lain dormant until David, an archaeologist, uncovers it. It's a film with nothing new to tell us, or at least nothing that Ingmar Bergman hasn't told us in better films about troubled marriages and destructive love affairs. It was heavily panned on release and a box office failure, but it has since been revived by admirers who find it carefully crafted and subtly unsettling. I admire the craft, including Sven Nykvist's always evocative photography and Andersson's dedicated performance, but it still seems to me a flawed and obvious story.  

The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, 1969)

Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell, Sigge Fürst. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Siv Lundgren.

Sometimes linked with Hour of the Wolf (1968) and Shame (1968) as a third element of a trilogy set on Fårö island, Ingmar Bergman's The Passion of Anna is a characteristically intense working out of themes of grief and guilt, involving two couples whose lives intersect against a backdrop of mysterious instances of cruelty toward animals. I find it one of Bergman's more forgettable films, but it has strong admirers. 

The Magic Flute (Ingmar Bergman, 1975)

Tamino: Josef Köstlinger
Pamina: Irma Urrila
Papageno: Håkan Hagegård
Sarastro: Ulrik Cold
The Queen of the Night: Birgit Nordin
Monastatos: Ragnar Ulfung
First Lady: Britt-Marie Aruhn
Second Lady: Kirsten Vaupel
Third Lady: Birgitta Smiding
The Speaker: Erik Sædén

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Based on an opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder translated by Alf Henrikson
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: Henny Noremark
Film editing: Siv Lundgren
Costume design: Karin Erskine, Henny Noremark

For me, Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is a kind of linguistic palimpsest, with the English subtitles* superimposed on the Swedish translation of the German original. Not that I know Swedish,  but I've picked up enough of the sound of the language from watching movies that I can recognize a word or two. And I do know the German libretto fairly well from following along on recordings, so that when a singer begins a familiar aria, I hear the German in my mind's ear along with the Swedish being sung and then refracted through the words on screen. You'd think this would be distracting, but it isn't -- in fact, it only helps me appreciate the care Bergman took in making the film. Opera is not designed for the movies: It has moments of tightly choreographed action after which people stand still to sing, and you want more out of a movie than starts and stops. But what Bergman does so brilliantly is to supply close-ups and cuts that give the film an energy, often following the rhythms of Mozart's music. We don't get close-ups in the opera house -- thank god, because singing opera does unfortunate things to the singers' faces -- but Bergman has wisely chosen good-looking singers and had them speak-sing along with a previously recorded version, so there's little facial distortion. The Magic Flute is a problematic opera: Emanuel Schikaneder's libretto is a mess that never quite resolves the relationship between Sarastro, the Queen of the Night, and Pamina. Bergman solves this by creating one: In his version, Pamina is the daughter of Sarastro and the Queen, and he has abducted the girl because he doesn't trust his ex to raise her right. There's no justification for this in Schikaneder's text, and even Bergman hasn't quite resolved the problem of why Sarastro lets Pamina be guarded by Monastatos, whose chief aim seems to be to sleep with the young woman. Nor has Bergman solved the misogyny and racism of Schikaneder's libretto. Women come in for a good deal of disapproval in the opera, and Bergman hasn't eliminated that. Monastatos is tormented by the fact that he's black -- a Moor -- although he is given a kind of Shylockian moment of self-justification, and even Papageno, who is the pragmatic, commonsense type, reflects that there are black birds, so why not black people. (I'm not entirely sure that line of Papageno's even makes it into the Bergman film.) Most productions today gloss over these antique prejudices as best they can, however, turning The Magic Flute into a kind of fairy tale for the kids, with colorful sets and cute forest animals dancing to Tamino's flute. Bergman is no exception in this regard: The film is set in the theater, and he opens with a close-up of a lovely young girl** with a kind of Mona Lisa smile, and follows her eye line as she gazes at the images painted on the curtain, then scans the other faces in the audience, old and young and of various ethnicities. The film, which like his other childhood-centered classic, Fanny and Alexander (1982), was made originally for television,  is certainly one of Bergman's warmest.

*I don't know who did the English version, but it's a very good singing translation, not just a literal prose version of the original.
**She has been identified as Helene Friberg, who had bit parts in other Bergman films.