Had it up to here with feel good stories and emotional pick-me-ups? Feeling down in the dumps and wanting a little company? Ready to scream into the infinite until even your echo vanishes? Well, do I have some movies for … Continue reading This week in Film — Existential cinema and THE STRANGER
Dr. Isak Borg is a 78-year-old professor and will be receiving an honorary degree tomorrow. We know this, because he tells us. Borg also tells us about his son, his career and the wife that died years ago. He tells us everything we need to know about him, but the most telling thing he reveals is this, “Perhaps I should add that I am an old pedant, which at times has been rather trying for myself and those around me.” Writer/director Ingmar Bergman needs only 157 words of narration to open Wild Strawberries and tells us everything necessary about Dr. … Continue reading WILD STRAWBERRIES
“I never considered myself anything more than as a craftsman, a hell of a skilled craftsman, if I may so myself, but nothing more. I create things that are meant to be useful, films or theatrical productions. I’ve never felt the need for … what’s the word? … sub specie aeternitatis. I have never created for the sake of eternity. I was only interested in producing the good work of a fine craftsman. Yes, I am proud to call myself a craftsman who makes chairs and tables that are useful to people.” “One must make each film as if it … Continue reading Born On This Day – July 14, 1918
“I’ve had to learn everything about movies by myself. For the theater, I studied with a wonderful old man in Goteborg, where I spent four years. He was a hard, difficult man, but he knew the theater- and I learned from him. For the movies, however, there was no one. Before the War, I was a schoolboy. Then, during the War, we got see no foreign films at all. By the time it was over, I was working had to support a wife and three children. Before, fortunately, I am by nature an autodidact, one who can teach himself- though … Continue reading In Their Words – Sunday, July 14, 2013
“I wrote Scenes from a Marriage just for fun and didn’t know what to do with it. It was like Winnie the Pooh. You know, Christopher Robin was ill and, every evening before sleep, A. A. Milne told him one of those little stories. Then he wrote them down and suddenly the whole world bought Winnie the Pooh. It was the same with Scenes from a Marriage. I wrote it for fun, for myself. I started with the third scene, then I wrote the fourth, then the second. The whole thing took me about four weeks. Remember, it’s called Scenes … Continue reading In Their Words – Tuesday, June 18, 2013
“No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.” –Ingmar Bergman Continue reading In Their Words – Tuesday, June 11, 2013
“The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure — the costly, exacting mistress.” –Ingmar Bergman Continue reading In Their Words – Sunday, May 19, 2013
“To me, when cinematography is at its best, it is very close to the state of dreaming. You know, in any other art you can’t create a situation that is as close to dreaming. Think only of the time gap. You can make things as long as you want, exactly as in a dream. You can make things as short as you want, exactly as in a dream. As a director, a creator of the picture, you are like a dreamer. You can make what you want. You can construct everything. I think that is one of the most fascinating … Continue reading In Their Words – Saturday, April 13, 2013
“I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is Winter Light. That is my only picture about which I feel that I have started here and ended there and that everything along the way has obeyed me. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture. I couldn’t make this picture today; it’s impossible; but I saw it a few weeks ago together with a friend and I was very satisfied.” –Ingmar Bergman Continue reading In Their Words – Thursday, March 28, 2013
