Sky Room Talk Hosted by Philip Harwood
INGMAR BERGMAN: DEEP INTO THE TWILIGHT OF THE SOUL
Tuesday, September 4 at 7:30 pm | Members $11 | Public $16
The Sky Room Cafe will be closing at 5 PM the day of this event.
This year, we are celebrating the centennial of one of 20th Century’s most influential Film Directors, Ingmar Bergman. He directed, wrote, and produced over sixty films. Bergman once said, “Film has dream, film has music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.” In this Sky Room Talk, Film Historian Philip Harwood puts Ingmar Bergman, one of Sweden’s greatest Directors in perspective. Through film clips from such films as Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Silence, Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Fanny and Alexander, and others, We will learn more about Ingmar Bergman, a man who always wanted to tell the truth about the human condition through his films.
Don't Miss:
INGMAR BERGMAN:
A CENTENNIAL RETROSPECTIVE
Opens Friday, September 21 – See website for showtimes
Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) stands as one of the giants of world cinema and perhaps the father of the flowering of art house movement in America during the 1960s and ’70s. This selection of some of his greatest works feature new digital restorations courtesy of Janus Films and the Swedish Film Institute.
FANNY AND ALEXANDER
The grand summation of Ingmar Bergman’s career, this epic family drama drew on the director’s own
childhood experiences in early 20th century Sweden.
Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, and it is the director’s warmest and most autobiographical film, an Academy Award–winning triumph that combines his trademark melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joy and sensuality. Bergman described Fanny and Alexander as “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.” And in this, the full-length version of his triumphant valediction, his vision is expressed at its fullest. (Sweden, 1982, 188 min., R, Swedish with English subtitles| Dir. Ingmar Bergman)
THE SEVENTH SEAL
An epic historical fantasy in which A man seeks answers about life, death, and the existence of God as he plays chess against the Grim Reaper during the Black Plague.
Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly finds himself face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death, and challenges him to a game of chess. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and a work of stark visual poetry. (Sweden, 1957, 96 min., NR, Swedish with English subtitles| Dir. Ingmar Bergman)
WILD STRAWBERRIES Smultronstället
An aging professor’s day trip to accept an award becomes an unforgettable journey of self-discovery that seamlessly blends dreams, memories, and revelations.
Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg—masterfully played by director Victor Sjöström—is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, dreams and nightmares, Wild Strawberries dramatizes one man’s remarkable voyage of self-discovery. This richly humane masterpiece, full of iconic imagery, is a treasure from the golden age of art-house cinema and one of Bergman’s most widely acclaimed and influential films. (Sweden, 1957, 92 min., NR, Swedish with English subtitles| Dir. Ingmar Bergman)
PERSONA
In this psychological drama, a nurse is put in charge of a mute actress and finds that their personas are melding together.
By the mid 60s, Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth. (Sweden, 1966, 83 min., NR, Swedish with English subtitles| Dir. Ingmar Bergman)
THE MAGIC FLUTE Trollflojten
Ingmar Bergman's 1975 film version of Mozart's opera Die Zauberflöte. Intended as a television production and first shown on Swedish television 1975, but was followed by a cinema release later that year. Widely viewed as one of the most successful films of an opera ever, and an unusual item in the director's oeuvre.
This scintillating screen version of Mozart’s beloved opera showed Bergman’s deep knowledge of music and his gift for expressing it in filmic terms. Casting some of Europe’s finest soloists—among them Josef Köstlinger, Ulrik Cold, and Håkan Hagegård—the director lovingly recreated the baroque theater of the Drottningholm Palace in Stockholm to stage the story of the prince Tamino (Köstlinger) and his zestful sidekick Papageno (Hagegård), who seek to save a princess (Irma Urrila) from the clutches of evil. A celebration of love, forgiveness, and the brotherhood of man, Flute is considered by many to be the most exquisite opera film ever made. (Sweden, 1975, 135 min., G, Swedish with English subtitles| Dir. Ingmar Bergman)
SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT Sommarnattens leende
In Sweden at the turn of the century, members of the upper class and their servants find themselves in a
romantic tangle that they try to work out amidst jealousy and heartbreak.
After fifteen films that received mostly local acclaim, the 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night at last ushered in an international audience for Bergman. In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four men and four women attempt to navigate the laws of attraction. During a weekend in the country, the women collude to force the men’s hands in matters of the heart, exposing their pretensions and insecurities along the way. Chock-full of flirtatious propositions and sharp witticisms delivered by such Swedish screen legends as Gunnar Björnstrand and Harriet Andersson, Smiles of a Summer Night is one of the cinema’s great erotic comedies. (Sweden, 1955, 108 min., NR, Swedish with English subtitles| Dir. Ingmar Bergman)
CRIES AND WHISPERS Viskningar och rop
When a woman dying of cancer in early twentieth-century Sweden is visited by her two sisters, longrepressed feelings between the siblings rise to the surface.
This existential wail of a drama concerns two sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (Liv Ullmann), keeping vigil for a third, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is dying of cancer and can find solace only in the arms of a beatific servant (Kari Sylwan). An intensely felt film that is one of Bergman’s most striking formal experiments, Cries and Whispers (which won an Oscar for the extraordinary color photography by Sven Nykvist) is a powerful depiction of human behavior in the face of death, positioned on the borders between reality and nightmare, tranquility and terror. (Sweden, 1972, 91 min., R, Swedish with English subtitles| Dir. Ingmar Bergman)