The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

The Silence (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Cast: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Jörgen Lindström, Håkan Jahnberg, Birger Malmsten. Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography: Sven Nykvist. Production design: P.A. Lundgren. Film editing: Ulla Ryghe. Music: Ivan Renliden.

All These Women (Ingmar Bergman, 1964)

Jarl Kulle in All These Women

Cornelius: Jarl Kulle
Humlan (Bumblebee): Bibi Andersson
Isolde: Harriet Andersson
Adelaide: Eva Dahlbeck
Madame Tussaud: Karin Kavli
Traviata: Gertrud Fridh
Cecilia: Mona Malm
Beatrica: Barbro Hiort af Ornäs
Jillker: Allan Edwall
Tristan: Georg Funkquist
The Young Man: Carl Billquist

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Erland Josephson, Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editing: Ulla Ryghe

Roger Ebert called Ingmar Bergman's All These Women "the worst film he has ever made," and I don't think it's because the butt of so many of the jokes in the movie was a critic. It's an arch, highly stylized comedy, supposedly inspired by Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), though apart from the zings at critics and the gathering together of the various women in an artist's life, there's not much that Bergman's film has in common with Fellini's. Bergman's artist, a cellist named Felix, has just died, and the film opens at his funeral through which a number of his "widows" parade to view the corpse. The funeral is presided over by Cornelius, Felix's supposed biographer, actually a music critic who was trying to persuade Felix to perform one of his compositions: "A Fish's Dream, Abstraction #4." The film flashes back to the days before Felix's death when Cornelius arrived at the cellist's estate and encountered his wife, Adelaide; his mistress, called "Bumblebee"; and several other women who had various connections, presumably sexual, to Felix. What follows is much running about, some slapstick, some misfired attempts by Cornelius to bed Bumblebee while trying to gather information about Felix's private life, and much tiresome and unfunny ado set to music cues ranging from Bach to "Yes, We Have No Bananas." All These Women was Bergman's first film in color, but the print shown on Turner Classic Movies is sadly faded, with captions that are hard to read. I also sampled the print on the Criterion Channel; it's better, but still rather washed-out looking. The cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, is a celebrated master, so the color flaws may be that of the aging Eastmancolor negative. Only the fact that the film is a lesser work of the director who gave us The Seventh Seal (1957), Persona (1966), and Fanny and Alexander (1982) really argues for restoring it, however.

Winter Light (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

Tomas Ericsson: Gunnar Björnstrand
Märta Lundberg: Ingrid Thulin
Karin Persson: Gunnel Lindblom
Jonas Persson: Max von Sydow
Algot Frövik: Allan Edwall
Fredrik Blom: Olof Thunberg

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editing: Ulla Ryghe

I have to admit that I was seduced into nostalgia by the opening of Winter Light, as the liturgy and communion service brought back memories of my Methodist childhood. But the mood vanished swiftly as the chill reality of the film took hold: The church is cold and nearly empty, most of its congregants brought there by necessity or duty. The pastor is a hypocrite with a head cold, unable to muster enough enthusiasm for his faith to keep a man who comes to him for counseling from blowing his head off with a shotgun or even to console his widow. His former mistress, the local schoolteacher, is as comfortable in her atheism as he is uneasy in his attempts to believe. It's Bergman at his bleakest, though paradoxically filled with a kind of existential affirmation. The message boils down to: Don't sweat the big stuff. That is, don't let theology get in the way of going on with your life. You can respond to this kind of message in three ways: With stubborn denial, with an exhilarated sense of liberation, or with a painful feeling of loss. Winter Light is a talky film, one that sometimes seems more fit for the stage than for the movies, but its characters are alive and complex, its performances uniformly superb, and its images -- supplied by the great Sven Nykvist -- sometimes even more articulate than its dialogue.

Shame (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow in Shame

Eva Rosenberg: Liv Ullmann
Jan Rosenberg: Max von Sydow
Jacobi: Gunnar Björnstrand
Mrs. Jacobi: Brigitta Valberg
Filip: Sigge Fürst
Lobelius: Hans Alfredson

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Production design: P.A. Lundgren
Film editor: Ulla Ryghe

One of Ingmar Bergman's bleakest and best films, Shame is unencumbered by the theological agon that makes many of his films tiresome (not to say irrelevant) for some of us. It's a fable about a couple, Eva and Jan, two musicians seeking to escape from a devastating war by exiling themselves to an island. At the start of the film their life is almost idyllic: Their radio and telephone don't work, so they remain in blissful ignorance of the problems of the world outside. He's a bit scattered and idle; she's practical and businesslike. They quarrel a little over their temperamental differences, but they have developed a self-sustaining life, raising chickens and cultivating vegetables in their greenhouse. But needless to say, no couple is an island: The war comes to them. When they take the ferry into town, selling crates of berries and stopping to drink wine with a friend who has just been drafted, they begin to be aware that the larger conflict will not remain at a distance for long. There will be no retreat for them into the simple life. Under the pressure of war, their relationship changes: Eva becomes more careless, Jan loses his passivity. In the end, desperate to flee the despoiled island, they join a group on a fishing boat heading for the mainland only to wind up in a dead calm -- a literal one, for they are stuck in a sea filled with corpses, an image that, because so much of the film is straightforward in narrative and imagery, manages to avoid the heavy-handedness that often afflicts Bergman's films. There is also, for Bergman, a surprising lack of specificity about the war in the film: There are no direct allusions to particular wars, such as World War II, the one that raged in his childhood, or to the war of the day in Vietnam -- there are no images of burning monks as in Persona (1966). The war of the film is generic -- soldiers, planes, trucks, and tanks lack insignia and the names and nationalities of the two sides are never mentioned. It's as if war is an ongoing condition of the human race.