Cries & Whispers (1972)

Viskningar och rop, Sweden, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Siv Lundgren

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Arlin, Ingrid Bergman

Cries & Whispers is the first movie I saw by director and writer Ingmar Bergman, largely on the strength of its Oscar win—I still believed in the Academy Awards then, even if this one was only for cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who deserved the accolades, of course). I was still a teenager, but aware of Bergman’s outsize reputation for art films. I didn’t like this one much. The heavy-handed extremes felt forced or showy and in general it was way too slow. I tried it a couple more times over the years but have never warmed to it much even as I fell in love with a bunch of Bergman’s other stuff: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes From a Marriage, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, etc.

So I was prepared for something like an hour and a half of tedium, a study in formal miserablism, when I sat down to look at it again. It’s heavy on the red. Red furniture. Red wallpaper. Red drapes. Fade to red. Blood, of course, but that comes later. The story involves three 30something middle-class sisters, one of whom is dying. That’s Agnes (Harriet Andersson), attended by her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). Maybe I finally grew up enough, but for the first time this death of Agnes and all her suffering and agonies that precede it finally reached me and I started preparing myself to backtrack and praise the movie. Harriet Andersson is stunningly good.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Det sjunde inseglet, Sweden, 96 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Gunnar Fischer
Music: Erik Nordgren
Editor: Lennart Wallen
Cast: Max von Sydow, Bengt Ekerot, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Nils Poppe, Bibi Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom

In spite of The Seventh Seal being so ripe for parody—and only more so as the years pass—I have never tired of sitting down for another look at it. From the powerful opening sound and images to the final resolution, director and writer Ingmar Bergman's robust and portentous contemplation of death is actually much more lively, varied, and interesting than the heavy-handed metaphors for which it is famous, e.g., especially, the game of chess between a knight returned to Sweden from Crusades-related activity versus Death personified, a kind of Uncle Fester figure in pasty make-up and form-concealing black drapery. Even the game of chess itself is more interesting than you would expect.

But the only notes I made when I looked at it again recently are as follows: "Fear of death." An old friend of mine died last month. Not anyone so close now, but a good friend in the past. More recently he and I seemed part of a broader phenomenon of reconnections made via social media. Many describe a similar arc. Several years ago, after tracing the webs of mutual friends and friending (that exciting gerund) this new way on Facebook, we had a few conversations on the phone and felt good about being in touch again. Not long after that, we started getting on one another's nerves again. So it goes. We weren't on the best terms when word got to me that he was gone.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Smultronstället, Sweden, 91 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Gunnar Fischer
Music: Erik Nordgren, Gute Loven
Editor: Oscar Rosander
Cast: Victor Sjostrom, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Bibi Andersson, Naima Wifstrand, Jullan Kindahl, Gertrud Fridh, Gunnel Brostrom, Gunnar Sjoberg

Wild Strawberries was one of the first art films I saw and thus remains one I still like, as it has many impressive tricks and stunts for the novice. Truthfully, since then, I have been around the block a couple of times about it. The bold, high-contrast black and white simplicity of the look, the general dour cast of mind, and the overbearing symbolism in the dream sequences were exciting as signifiers of high A - R - T. Later they seemed pretentious and trite for the same reasons. Now it all has a nostalgic glow—quaint, out of touch, overdone, perhaps, but very charming in places and often searing in its insights. And if it seems hackneyed, well, that might just be an indication of its influence.

Even if you've never seen it, it probably feels familiar within minutes. It has been parodied nearly as much as director and screenwriter Ingmar Bergman's other film of that year, The Seventh Seal. Victor Sjostrom plays Isak Borg, an accomplished doctor and researcher who has reached the age of 78. The film mostly takes place on a single day, a June 1—a day of long light in Sweden, as spring slips into summer—when Isak is scheduled to receive an honorary degree from a prestigious university for his life's work. The night before, he can't sleep. He has a dream that looks to us now like an epitome of art film dream clichés—clocks with no hands, his own body spilling out of a coffin, etc. But it sets a mood, almost first thing in the movie, and begins to soften us for the strange, deliberate, Brechtian way that fantasies, dreams, and memories mix and comingle in this picture, existing side by side across time and space. See also Woody Allen's Another Woman, which lifts the stream of consciousness device whole and recontextualizes it nicely.

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

Fanny och Alexander, Sweden/France/West Germany, 312 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Sven Nykvist
Music: Daniel Bell
Editor: Sylvia Ingemarsson
Cast: Pernilla Allwin, Bertil Guve, Gunn Wallgren, Allan Edwall, Jarl Kulle, Borje Ahlstedt, Ewa Froling, Christina Schollin, Mona Malm, Jan Malmsjo, Erland Josephson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Kerstin Tidelius, Emelie Werko, Marianne Aminoff, Lena Olin, Pernilla August, Harriet Andersson

Ingmar Bergman's announced final film—he would actually make many more movies for Swedish television, including Saraband in 2003—is a colossal formal banquet of a movie, with many courses and a fine table. The long version (the one to see) rambles at its ease between the church, streets, theater, and homes of Uppsala, a small but growing Swedish city in 1907. Across winter and summer holidays, Bergman's deeply complex stories and film penetrate the tormented and banal lives it observes easily and naturally. Riffing on the profile of a bourgeois extended northern European family, much in the vein of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks for an earlier era, it is plainly the work of a master, a clinic in how to turn many sharply observed small elements into a fine movie.

Interestingly, it's not even the first time Bergman released a very good long picture theatrically, with a far superior and even longer version in the wings just behind it (in the U.S., at any rate). The first was Scenes From a Marriage, from 1973, which I think is even better than Fanny and Alexander. But Fanny and Alexander is the one that gets pride of place in surveys such as the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, where it presently sits at #57 (compared with #360 for Scenes). I suspect this is because Fanny and Alexander is more overtly and even self-consciously literary in its ambitions, applying itself equally to sumptuous Christmas celebrations, familiar rotting church-inflected corruptions of the soul, and plain old ghost stories, Henry James style. Potential spoilers ahead.

Scenes From a Marriage (1973)

#2: Scenes From a Marriage (Ingmar Bergman, 1973)

In many ways I grew up with this movie; on an emotional level, I mean that literally. Properly speaking, it's more of a television mini-series—and something of an event at that when it ran on Swedish television in the spring of 1973. Stories are that the entire country stopped to watch each weekly episode (one per week on the same day and time is still a good way to look at it). The first version that I saw in the mid-'70s was the chopped-down cut made for a U.S. theatrical release, which reduced it from its six-part 300 minutes to a still-long 167 minutes and also dubbed all the dialogue into English. I was 19 or 20, and mostly just bored.

But some 15 years later, working my way through the thickets of a divorce, I saw that same version again on a VHS tape from the library and it all but did me in then and there. I have since seen the theatrical version without the dubbing, and eventually, when Criterion did it right as they do so much right, the entire mini-series, which of course I would now recommend without hesitation as the version to see. But I can say from experience that even the bowdlerized, dubbed version is worth a look, and I wouldn't hesitate if it was my only option.

Persona (1966)

Sweden, 85 minutes
Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Sven Nykvist
Music: Lars Johan Werle
Editor: Ulla Ryghe
Cast: Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook

From its earliest images to its tidy, perfunctory ending, a span of a mere 85 minutes, Persona is determinedly difficult and modern, dense and stark. The music by Lars Johan Werle is harsh and discordant. Director and writer Ingmar Bergman borrows from the immediacy of the documentary newsreel with footage of a self-immolating Buddhist monk in Vietnam. There is an erect penis, medical photography, a live dissection, religious symbology. There are images that go by so fast we can't be sure what they are. There is footage of earliest cinema and crude animation. There are white screens and black screens.

Bergman even almost taunts us at points, I think, daring us for example to question his audaciously unbelievable premise: a famous actress of stage and screen endures an existential crisis and stops speaking. That's it. It's as patently silly in its way as the image of Jean-Paul Belmondo running across a field in his ridiculous suit after he has killed a policeman in Breathless.

Yet the minute it starts, every time, I find it impossible to take my eyes off Persona.

Scenes from a Marriage (1973)

Scener ur ett äktenskap, Sweden, 299 minutes, TV

Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman
Photography: Sven Nykvist
Cast: Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson

Ingmar Bergman's amazing take on marriage and middle-class complacency, with brilliant performances from Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, is fine even in the first version I saw as a teen and found interminably boring—the dubbed, bowdlerized, U.S. theatrical release of the original five-hour television series. Seeing it again in my mid-30s shortly after a divorce was a stunning body blow of an experience. More recently, I finally saw the complete and uncut original television episodes side by side with a subtitled version of the theatrical release. There's virtually no comparison. The TV episodes have more of everything and not too much of anything. I didn't have to blow my nose this time, but I did feel myself transported to another place, a place outside of time, familiar and painful and comforting all at once. This really is my favorite Bergman running away. Nothing else comes close, and there's much of his that I like and much more that I admire and respect. But this is something special, with a uniquely throbbing, complex, expansive, and generous humanity at its core and just enough cerebration to keep it real. Even the last episode, a fantasy but one that tore my heart out once, remains pitch-perfect.