After exploring his disillusionment with religion in his previous films, Ingmar Bergman adopted a humanistic approach for this classic study in isolationism. Legendary Scandinavian director Victor Sjöström stars as Isak Borg, an aging medical professor who reassesses his life while journeying to his former university to receive an honorary degree. ...
Persona is difficult to characterize in simple terms, but it may be helpful to describe this complex film as being an exploration of identity that combines elements of drama, visual poetry, and modern psychology. The central story revolves around a young nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson) and her patient, a well-known actress named Elisabet Vogler ...
Cries and Whispers stars Liv Ullman and Ingrid Thulin as the sisters of dying cancer patient Harriet Andersson. Both sisters have already had brushes with death: Ullman has had an affair which prompted her husband's suicide, while Thulin has long wanted to do away with herself, at one point mutilating her own vagina out of self-hatred. As for ...
Endlessly imitated and parodied, Ingmar Bergman's landmark art movie The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet) retains its ability to hold an audience spellbound. Bergman regular Max von Sydow stars as a 14th century knight named Antonius Block, wearily heading home after ten years' worth of combat. Disillusioned by unending war, plague, and misery ...
Though he made allusions to his own life in all of his films, Fanny and Alexander was the first overtly autobiographical film by Ingmar Bergman. Taking his time throughout (188 minutes to be exact), Bergman recreates several episodes from his youth, using as conduits the fictional Ekdahl family. Alexander, the director's alter ego, is first seen ...
A longtime pet project of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera The Magic Flute was finally brought to the screen in 1973. While the opera itself is offered in a highly stylized and theatrical fashion, the fluidity of the camerawork turns the affair into a purely cinematic experience. Sung in Swedish, the libretto ...
Much better known in the U.S. as The Magician, this award-winning, surreal, evocative drama stars Max von Sydow as the title character and features several of Sweden's top performers. Set in the 1840s in Stockholm, the mystery and enigma of life and death itself are embodied in Vogler, the magician who runs "Vogler's Magnetic Health Theater." When ...
Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish expatriate who became one of Hollywood's greatest stars, and Ingmar Bergman, one of the world's most acclaimed filmmakers and Sweden's most honored director, worked together for the first and only time in this intensely personal drama about the troubled relationship between a mother and daughter. Charlotte (Ingrid ...
The Hour of the Wolf (original Swedish title: Vargtimmen) is Ingmar Bergman's spin on the demons that plague his fellow creative artists. Max von Sydow plays a painter who, while spending a summer in seclusion with his pregnant wife Liv Ullmann, is visited by bizarre and disturbing visions. Before long, Ullmann is also experiencing her husband's ...
Liv Ullmann plays the widowed, crippled Anna Fromm, who while traveling on a remote island calls upon reclusive ex-convict Andreas (Max von Sydow) in order to use his telephone. After Anna leaves, Andreas discovers she's left her purse behind; he opens it, hoping to find some identification. A letter in the purse details Anna's unhappy marriage ...
The Serpent's Egg, or Das Schlangenei is director Ingmar Bergman's second English language production (The Touch was his first). It is, however, his first completely non-Swedish production, made after his voluntary self-exile from Sweden over taxation issues. Set in Berlin in the early 1920s, it explores the fear and despair the city evokes in ...
Shame demonstrates the futility of escaping the consequences of war. In 1971, the Rosenbergs, Jan (Max von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann), have retreated to an island off the coast of their unnamed country, which is embroiled in a civil conflict. Trained and employed as classical violinists, they make a modest living raising and selling ...
As the final masterwork of Ingmar Bergman, the world's most revered cinematic craftsperson, Saraband (2003) embodies the sequel to the director's 5-hour Scenes from a Marriage, produced and directed 30 years after that original epic. Here, Bergman revisits the two characters from that film, divorcees Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv ...
Inspired by a medieval Swedish ballad, Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukallan) begins with a scene of unspeakable brutality and ends with an image of uncommon beauty. 15-year-old Birgitta Peterson, on her way to church to light candles for the Virgin Mary, is raped and murdered by two older men. The men look for shelter at the home of ...
The Ritual is an alternate English-language title for Ingmar Bergman's The Rite (Riten). Made for Swedish television in 1969, this short film was Bergman's revenge against those who opposed his management of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. The storyline involves three actors whose recent production has been judged obscene by the powers-that-be. ...
A couple's relationship begin to unravel during a rail trip through Europe in this drama, an early work from legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Rut (Eva Henning) is a former ballet dancer whose career has been sidelined due to an injured knee, while her husband Bertil (Birger Malmsten) is a slightly prickly academic. Rut and Bertil are ...
Ingmar Bergman won his second Best Foreign Film Oscar for the moody family drama Through a Glass Darkly. It is the first of what came to be called his "chamber dramas," which positioned four characters in one place where they could interact like a string quartet. It has also been referred to as the first of his trilogy of faith, followed by Winter ...
En Lektion i Kärlek constitutes one of Ingmar Bergman's more overtly entertaining films. In this highly engaging comedy, Bergman reunites Gunnar Bjornstrand and Eva Dahlbeck, who had already teamed to great effect in the final, comic episode of Secrets of Women (1952), and he once again casts them as an amusingly antagonistic husband and wife. ...
Acceding to the literal interpretation of the folk-saying "A virgin is a sty in the devil's eye," Satan employs a reincarnated Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) to seduce Britt-Marie, the young daughter (Bibi Andersson) of a country parson. Poor Don Juan falls in love with the girl, however, while his servant Pablo (Sture Lagerwall) attempts to do the same ...
Not even Ingmar Bergman was prone to discuss his obscure 1955 production Dreams. While on vacation, photo agency owner Susanne (Eva Dahlbeck) hopes to rendezvous with her married lover. The man's wife puts the kibosh on this, whereupon Susanne enters into an affair with diplomat Sanderby Gunnar Bjornstrand. This liaison ends unhappily, leaving her ...
In this melancholy romance, a not-so-young ballerina recalls an earlier, tragic love affair. The heroine, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilsson), spends a summer with her possessive Uncle Erland (Georg Funkquist), who lives with his cancerous wife on an island near Stockholm. While staying with her uncle, who may have intimidated her into a sexual relationship ...
Bergman's comic masterpiece opens with middle-aged lawyer Frederik Egerman (Gunnar Bjornstrand) again failing to consummate his marriage with the much younger Anne (Ulla Jacobsson). While visiting a former lover, actress Desiree Armfeldt (Eva Dahlbeck), he crosses swords with her current lover, Count Malcolm (Jarl Kulle), after both men learn that ...
The Winter Light is the second in a trilogy of dramas by acclaimed Swedish director Ingmar Bergman that explores religious faith and doubts in a visceral, visual, and provocative manner. The first, Through a Glass Darkly, was an international success and heralded this new phase in the director's career. This compelling drama is set within a three ...
Ingmar Bergman's After the Rehearsal stars Erland Josephson as a theater director named Henrik Volger. He is in the midst of mounting a production of a Strindberg play when he is visited by Anna Egerman (Lena Olin), an actress whom he has cast in the play. Volger was involved with Anna's mother, Rakel (Ingrid Thulin), an alcoholic has-been actress ...
This rich, powerful Ingmar Bergman film charts the frustrations and humiliations of several circus performers. The circus's portly owner, Albert (Ake Gronberg), recalls a humiliating incident involving the company's clown, Frost (Anders Ek), who discovered his wife, Alma (Gudrun Brost), swimming nude before a band of cheering soldiers. Having ...
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