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Ingmar Bergman: Moving the giant’s finger and other tales of filmmaking
02.09.2015
05:42 pm
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001ingberg.jpg
 
Once upon a time there was a little boy called Ingmar who lived with his father a clergyman and his mother a nurse in a snow-capped land in the north of Europe.

When he was five, Ingmar would hide under the dinner table and listen to his parents and their friends talk to each other as they ate their food. It was warm under the table and he dreamed about the conversations he overheard.

Having a pastor as a father taught Ingmar to look behind “the scenes of life and death.” He listened to his sermons and made the acquaintance of the devil. The devil was everywhere—“palpable and elusive”—in his father’s sermons and the fairy stories his mother read him a night, and “on the flowered wallpaper of the nursery.”

Ingmar was an imaginative little boy and he dreamt up adventure stories about his life to tell his friends. But his friends did not believe his stories and that hurt Ingmar. So, he withdrew from the world and kept his dreams to himself, only sometimes he would act out his stories with toys, and sometimes he would put them on in a little toy theater to amuse himself and his parents.

When Ingmar grew up he turned his memories of childhood into films, plays and stories.
 

 
More on Bergman and the rest of the interview, after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.09.2015
05:42 pm
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‘The Dove (De Düva)’: Hilarious Ingmar Bergman parody with a young Madeline Kahn
06.25.2014
11:58 am
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The Dove (De Düva) is an Academy Award-nominated short parody of Ingmar Bergman’s films, made in 1968. They used to show this a lot in the early days of HBO and it’s been screened at Bergman festivals to unsuspecting audiences. The short lampoons elements of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, The Silence and Smiles of a Summer Night.

Professor Viktor Sundqvist (co-director George Coe, seen often on SNL‘s early years) is being chauffeured to a lecture at a university, when a dove shits on the car’s windshield. He decides to make a visit to his childhood home ala Wild Strawberries.

In a flashback, Viktor and his sister challenge Death (screenwriter Sid Davis) to a game of badminton in exchange for Death sparing her life. A dove shits on Death and he loses the game.

The ridiculous fake Swedish is a mix of English, Yiddish and adding “ska” to certain words, as in “It will take a momentska” or “sooner or lateska.”

The Dove (De Düva) is notable for being the first appearance of the late, great comedienne Madeline Kahn.
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.25.2014
11:58 am
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Ingmar Bergman’s soap commercials
12.09.2013
05:28 pm
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Ingmar Bergman for Bris
 
In 1951 the Swedish film industry went on strike to protest high taxes in the entertainment sector, and Ingmar Bergman, who at 33 had already directed a handful of movies and had also overseen the Gothenburg city theater for three years, signed on to do a series of commercials for Bris soap, in part to support his already teeming brood (two ex-wives and five children, with a sixth on the way). The commercials are playful, fascinating, and utterly Bergmanesque—in the best possible way.
 
Ingmar Bergman for Bris
 
What I don’t mean by “Bergmanesque” is that they’re brooding or depressing or austere—as Bergman’s popular image would dictate. No, they are loose and original and supremely confident in the form of cinema. Bergman has had the misfortune to be identified with a couple of not overly representative movies—Persona (1966) and above all, The Seventh Seal (1957)—and his true nature as a restless and protean prober of human nature somehow got a little lost in the mix. Bergman was nothing if not a relentlessly theatrical director, and few were more confident in exploring the limits of narrative in the medium. The parodies don’t quite suffice to encapsulate the director of the masterpieces Fanny and Alexander or Scenes from a Marriage.

Dana Stevens of Slate does a good job of pointing out some of Bergman’s trademark tropes in the video at the bottom of this page. She helpfully notes that the only limitation imposed on Bergman by the soap company was that one of two clunky phrases about soap and bacteria had to be included at some point. There are eight of the Bris commercials, they are all black-and-white, and the visual quality leaves something to be desired by the standards of 2013, but to Bergman’s credit, they are all wildly different and memorable and convey some succinct point about the nature of cinema as well as delivering the promised virtues of the soap.
 
Ingmar Bergman for Bris
 
One of the advertisements makes fun of the 3-D trend that Bergman had elsewhere disparaged; one of them is essentially a rebus (and is, apparently, so titled), which presents the same lengthy mix of images twice in succession; two of them feature an unmistakable battle between “good” Bris and “evil” bakterier, or bacteria (the first of those is certainly reminiscent of The Seventh Seal, as Stevens points out). Two of them feature characters from the distant, courtly past dressed in foppish wigs and ... giving off the general visual appearance of hankering after a snootful of snuff, or the like. One of the ads is “meta” insofar as we see a spokeswoman tout the soap’s advantages reflected in a camera lens, after which director and actress engage in a lengthy bit of what is apparently romantic dialogue. There’s a vitality of editing and montage here; a few of the ads use Georges Meliès-type effects, and the phrase “magic lantern show,” already strongly associated with Bergman (his autobiography, for instance), may waft into your head at various junctures.

To a surprising extent, the commercials showcase “Bergman in microcosm,” if such a thing is even thinkable, and they also may have provided a necessary experimental interlude just four scant years before his breakthrough, Smiles of a Summer Night, made him an international superstar.

Viewers will also learn that the traditional Swedish way of signaling the end of a narrative—“The End”—is, amusingly, “Slut.”
 
Ingmar Bergman for Bris
 
“Jabón Bris 1”

 
After the jump, seven more of Bergman’s delightful Bris commercials as well as an informative video by Slate’s Dana Stevens…..

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.09.2013
05:28 pm
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The Dove (De Düva): Brilliant Ingmar Bergman parody, 1968
11.10.2011
05:16 pm
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The Dove (De Düva) is an Academy Award-nominated short parody of Ingmar Bergman’s films, made in 1968. They used to show this a lot in the early days of HBO. The short lampoons elements of Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, The Silence and Smiles of a Summer Night.

Professor Viktor Sundqvist (co-director George Coe) is being chauffeured to a lecture at a university, when a dove shits on the car’s windshield. He decides to make a visit to his childhood home ala Wild Strawberries .

In a flashback, Viktor and his sister challenge Death (screenwriter Sid Davis) to a game of badminton in exchange for Death sparing her life. A dove shits on Death and he loses the game.

The ridiculous fake Swedish is a mix of English, Yiddish and adding “ska” to certain words, as in “It will take a momentska” or “sooner or lateska.”

The Dove (De Düva) is notable for being the first appearance of the great comedienne Madeline Kahn. 
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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11.10.2011
05:16 pm
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Kubrick’s letter of praise to Bergman, 1960
07.11.2011
12:42 am
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February 9, 1960

Dear Mr. Bergman,

You have most certainly received enough acclaim and success throughout the world to make this note quite unnecessary. But for whatever it’s worth, I should like to add my praise and gratitude as a fellow director for the unearthly and brilliant contribution you have made to the world by your films (I have never been in Sweden and have therefore never had the pleasure of seeing your theater work). Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today. Beyond that, allow me to say you are unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfulness and completeness of characterization. To this one must also add everything else that goes into the making of a film. I believe you are blessed with wonderful actors. Max von Sydow and Ingrid Thulin live vividly in my memory, and there are many others in your acting company whose names escape me. I wish you and all of them the very best of luck, and I shall look forward with eagerness to each of your films.

Best Regards,
Stanley Kubrick
 
Via Open Culture

Posted by Marc Campbell
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07.11.2011
12:42 am
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Inside The Private World Of Ingmar Bergman
10.27.2009
08:14 pm
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Fascinating story in this month’s W about the late filmmaker Ingmar Bergman‘s private retreat on the Swedish island of