Ingmar Bergman (October)

"Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God."

Ingmar Bergman reminds me a bit of Werner Herzog in that they would both be dismissed as caricatures if their works weren't so damn earnest and great. Bergman's films (and through them, his views) concerning religion, faith, death, and family are immediately recognizable. They carry his dark signature and for that he is rightly known as one of the greatest auteur filmmakers of all time. They are all in Swedish and mostly in black and white. Having already seen The Seventh Seal, for this project I chose Fanny and Alexander, Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, Wild Strawberries, Persona, and The Virgin Spring. If this weren't already so ambitious I would've added Cries and Whispers as well as Hour of the Wolf. Luckily these movies mostly run short, so I was able to cruise through the six I chose fairly easily.

I started with the only color film of the bunch, Fanny and Alexander. Netflix sent me the 3.5 hour version and it was only afterwards through Wikipedia that I discovered a 5+ hour version existed. I decided to be happy with the version I saw. Fanny and Alexander is a very good family drama, filled with lively characters (the sexually over-active uncle is my favorite) and monumental performances, especially considering that a few of those performances come from children. It is often depressing, but manages not to get bogged down in hopelessness. Next I watched Through A Glass Darkly and I was surprised at how mature and explicit the story was. A psychologically disturbed girl seduces her brother, for example, and that's just a sub-plot. After that came Winter's Light, which again examined the themes of faith, love, loyalty, and family in a bleak Swedish setting. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this one, seeing as it would probably work even better as a play than a film.

Then I came to Persona. Wow. A lot of Bergman films have horrific elements, but this was the first straight-up horror movie I had seen, and boy did he knock it out of the park. The movie is about a nurse who takes a mute actress to an isolated home to help treat her. Their relationship is extremely complex, tangled up with elements of love, hate, guilt, jealousy, resentment and more. The movie is both shocking and very sad. I loved it and don't know why more horror junkies don't talk about it. It's about due for a remake, methinks. After this I watched Wild Strawberries and about a quarter of the way through realized I had seen it before but finished it anyways. It's an interesting tale of nostalgia and regret. Lastly I watched The Virgin Spring, which also surprised me with its X-ratedness. They show a virgin getting raped and murdered in a 1960 film. Intense. Also, I didn't know until afterwards that The Last House on the Left was a remake of this movie!

All in all, I think Bergman totally deserves his accolades. The movies are tough but generally enjoyable. They're a bit like Haneke's oeuvre- unsettling stories, thoughtful scripts, compelling imagery, A+ performances. It's probably time for me to watch The Seventh Seal again.

• Wild Strawberries (1957) - 7.5
• The Virgin Spring (1960) - 7
• Through A Glass Darkly (1961) - 7.5
• Winter Light (1963) - 7
• Persona (1966) - 9
• Fanny and Alexander (1982) - 8

And then we came to the end: Roman Polanski is the last director of this challenge. Wow.