The Favorites - The Virgin Spring (#22)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Virgin Spring (1960/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #22 on my original list.

What it is • Based on a famous folk ballad, The Virgin Spring may be Bergman's least complicated film about faith: without getting too specific, a Christian noble (Max von Sydow) experiences tragedy, repents after a violent reaction, and experiences a miracle. Viewed this way, it may not be surprising that Bergman was dissatisfied with the movie. While impressed by the naturalistic sun-dappled photography of characters moving through forests (this was one of his earliest ventures with cameraman Sven Nykvist, maybe his closest collaborator behind the camera) he felt his own direction of the action was too derivative. But The Virgin Spring is also one of Bergman's most unflinching explorations of depraved humanity. Despite the simplicity of its storytelling, the emotions run deep. Grief, guilt, lust, resentment, all coalesce in the (double - maybe triple) destruction of innocence, centered on one of the most brutal rape scenes of its time. This resulted in frequent censorship (including one court case between Janus Films and the town of Ft. Worth, Texas, which Ft. Worth won) and later inspired Wes Craven's revenge horror film Last House on the Left. The scene is not particularly graphic. It is psychologically rather than physically raw, terrifying because it depicts the utter helplessness of the victim. Whether or not you agree with The Virgin Spring's view of justice, vengeance, atonement, and divine will, whether you see said view as ambiguous (Bergman introduces an element of rival paganism into the mix, which - as I recall - suggests a struggle of forces rather than a world simply dominated by God's authority), the film's stark content will force you to draw your own conclusions.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - Through a Glass Darkly (#41)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Through a Glass Darkly (1961/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #41 on my original list.

What it is • Four characters - Karin (Harriet Andersson), who has just been treated for schizophrenia, her novelist father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), her husband Martin (Max von Sydow), and her naive little brother Minus (Lars Passgard) - holiday on an isolated island. Emerging from the twilit sea, their boisterous laughter flickers on the soundtrack. The water looks cold, the light in the sky is dimming, and there is a fierce beauty to this image of fragile camaraderie. The chill they flee in this opening shot will catch up to them over the approaching night and following day, effecting a full transformation from curious, nervous innocence to devastating, irrevocable knowledge: most notably for the quietest character, Minus. The first film in Bergman's "Silence of God" trilogy may, in its own way, be as iconic as The Seventh Seal. Its title, borrowed from Corinthians, has become a kind of shorthand for "serious art film" and its final twist is up there with the split faces of Persona or Death playing chess among classic Bergman images (though I'll admit when I first read about it as an over-imaginative kid, I thought they actually showed the damn spider sneaking out from behind the door, like in a monster movie...or like the oddly terrifying "god" marionette who pops out of a similar door in Bergman's much later Fanny and Alexander). The trailer for the film intones, through stodgy newspaper clippings (recommended by Bosley Crowther and the Academy Awards!) and somber, eat-your-vegetables narration, that this is A Very Serious Film for what Pauline Kael called "come dressed as the sick soul of Europe parties." But Through a Glass Darkly is as raw as it is austere. Buried in the severity of its reputation is the heartbreaking beauty of Sven Nykvist's gorgeous photography and Andersson's electric performance, a sensitive portrayal of madness. Although that's not quite correct...the film may be less about the direct experience of insanity than about the precarious nature of a moment's peace, the certainty that the drop is coming, and a vague euphoric thrill just before a precipitous descent.

Why I like it •

The Favorites - The Seventh Seal (#70)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Seventh Seal (1957/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #70 on my original list.

What it is • Like a greatest (or grisliest) hits album of medieval Europe, The Seventh Seal crosses dewy meadows, dirty village squares, isolated churches, overgrown woodlands, and dank castle walls to touch upon the Crusades, the bubonic plague, traveling minstrel shows, self-flagellating penitents, religious visions of the Virgin, witches burned at the stake and a personified figure of Death who seems to have stepped down off an allegorical church painting. At the same time, the film is very modern, gazing out at the postwar world with its existential crises of faith, Cold War tensions, and specter of atomic destruction, and recognizing a correspondence with the distress of the Middle Ages. Cutting a particularly contemporary figure is Jons (Gunnar Bjornstrand), squire to the pained Antonious Block (Max von Sydow, sixty years shy of Star Wars, yet already weathered and weary). Jons speaks with an atheistic frankness and worldly cynicism that at times makes him feel like the film's conscience. But Ingmar Bergman - crafting what may remain his most iconic feature after a lengthy, prolific career - is careful not to allow any character to simply become his mouthpiece. Not only is each intellectual, spiritual or (mostly) emotional perspective allowed expression and contradiction, there is also a sense of fluid uncertainty guiding the movie's course. Perhaps that's the most remarkable thing about this movie, that such a finely- and carefully-crafted piece of work can allow itself the freedom to test various points of view, to try on many different forms of human experience, high and low, pleasant and painful, and refuse to settle on one didactic argument about the vastness of life. Then again, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this movie is that it takes the vastness of life as its subject in the first place, and is able to do it justice by focusing on a small medieval microcosm.

Why I like it •

Come, Sweet Death: a video tribute to The Phantom Carriage & Wild Strawberries

My most recent video has gone up on Fandor Keyframe (it has since been moved to my personal channel). Here is the introduction I gave them:

In The Phantom Carriage (1921), Swedish director Victor Sjöström played a man forced by death (or, rather, Death) to confront his unhappy life. Thirty-six years later, as an old man close to death himself, Sjöström returned to this concept in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. “Come, Sweet Death” explores the macabre, poignant, disturbing images and words of these two films, sometimes side-by-side, sometimes back-to-back. Death was an important subject for both Sjöström and Bergman, not so much for its own sake, but for the ways it illuminated life itself.

The video appears after the jump:

Lost in the Pages: The books I read, July - December 2013

This is the second time I've posted a list of the last 20 books I've read, complete with snapshots of the covers and samples from the text. The last time was in June, and it covered the same number in only three months. For whatever reason, I've become a much slower reader! Since the spring, I've been reading four books at a time - fiction, nonfiction, film-related, and finally something tied into screenplay ideas I'm working on. The majority of titles below fell into that fourth category - the Kafka- and Grail-themed books, the Lowry novels, Tommyknockers, and the Marlowe novels all bore on story ideas I was working on throughout the year, with disappointing results though the work continues. In the New Year, I'm hoping to just stick to one book at a time. We'll see; my eyes are often bigger than my literary stomach.

Recommended Cinema: Hulu, Criterion & Beyond

Many of you know (and the rest of you should know) that The Criterion Collection has offered all of its content for free on HuluPlus between Valentine's and President's Day. This treasure trove of films includes many not available in their DVD catalog. With only two days left, choices must be made.

I add my voice to the cacophony of recommendations, with the proviso that I've chosen films a tad more overlooked than, say, Breathless, Modern Times, or Seventh Seal (that said, some of my picks are hardly obscure). Needless to say, I hope this guide remains useful long after the Hulu promotion has ended.

As for myself, I've flirted with the notion of a 12-hour marathon on Monday (I don't work until evening, my sad equivalent to a day off), exploring films that I haven't seen yet and live-tweeting screen-caps from each movie I view, perhaps with brief comments. Would anyone be interested in following this exercise? I have other tasks I should prioritize, but I hope you'll encourage me to be irresponsible. ;)

Anyway, on with my dozen recommendations for Hulu/Criterion bliss. I've included excerpts from previous reviews or fresh thoughts on films I haven't discussed before. It's up to you, of course, which ones you want to watch.

Except for Paris Belongs to Us.

That one's mandatory.

The Favorites - Persona (#95)

Again, scheduling conflicts send my Favorites post to a Monday. When the series resumes in January, I will probably return to Wednesday. Meanwhile stay tuned this week. I am going to be very busy with Lost in the Movies. To put it mildly...

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Persona (1966/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #95 on my original list.

What it is • Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann) is mute, by choice apparently. An actress horrified by the world around her (represented by the image of a burning monk in Vietnam) and oddly fascinated by a photo of her young son, her silence seems an alluring mystery. And it's a mystery that we sense Alma (Bibi Andersson), like us, wants to solve. Alma is normal, chatty (she more than compensates for Elisabeth's lack of conversation), and the actress' nurse, watching over her during a recuperative rest at an isolated seashore. She tells Elisabeth all about her life and, as the quiet but intense Elisabeth - taller, enigmatic, more self-possessed than Alma - slowly starts to take over the nurse's fragile mind we don't get closer to any simple answers. Somehow, though, we do feel we're getting closer to the experience, what philosophers might call the "phenomenon," of Elisabeth's withdrawal from the world. The prolific, intensely personal Ingmar Bergman made many celebrated movies, but Persona is often acclaimed as his masterpiece - the most intense, the most personal, at once an icon of 60s art-house chic and a supremely individual expression. At no point moreso than when the babbling Alma, suffering what seems to be a mental breakdown, lets loose a stream of self-doubt and incoherent anxiety. We suddenly sense - with the shock of an epiphany - that Bergman himself is letting down his guard and telling us what it's like inside his own head.

Why I like it •

Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. II

Short thoughts on: The deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni • The Wild One • The Virgin Spring • The Departed and Infernal Affairs • Bus 174 • Pan's Labyrinth and The Spirit of the Beehive • John Cassevetes and Noah Baumbach • The Stranger • Benito Mussolini's weenie

A year and a half ago, I transferred ten of my old comments from the Internet Movie Database to The Dancing Image, in a post called "Fragments of Cinephilia". This here is the follow-up: ten further memoirs of my pre-blogging days, in this case recycled from the summer of 2007 and including some great quotations from others. The topics range from heady to trivial: we start on a silent Olympus and end with a castrated dictator. Feel free to leave your own musings below - one of the pleasures of my old hunting ground (the IMDb) was the give-and-take, and I'd love to see it continue here. Enjoy.

The Seventh Seal

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

In the Valhalla of cinematic images, alongside Orson Welles grinning through one doorway and John Wayne gripping his arm in another, next to Mickey Mouse conducting a symphony of waves or King Kong hanging from the Empire State Building, there must be a spot for a black-cowled, white-faced Death leaning over a chessboard opposite a stoic Crusader, against the backdrop of a stirring dawn over a stilled, glistening sea, contemplating his next move. When recommending first Bergmans for neophyte viewers, I always lean toward Wild Strawberries, since its lush atmosphere and modern story seem, on the surface, to make it the most accessible entry point into the auteur’s oeuvre. Perhaps if I were more honest with myself, I’d select The Seventh Seal, which was my first Bergman and made a great introduction to his work.

Persona

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Here is a film that is quite different from the last one in this series. The Passion of Joan of Arc may be a film “that does the work for the viewer” – one which does not need theories or code-cracking or interpretation or (most importantly) collaboration in order to cast its spell, so potent are the images themselves. Persona is very much a “meet me there” movie, its tantalizing wisps and fragments invitations (to a masked ball, no doubt) rather than letters declaring their purpose. When I mentioned this would be a film I covered, a commentator noted that Persona is like a “Rorschach Test,” a notion that is appropriate not just to the viewer’s experience with the film but for the characters in the film itself – particularly Alma, the insecure nurse asked to look after intentionally mute actress Elisabeth in a lonely beach cottage.

What do I see in the ink blot? Appropriately enough, something a bit different each time, though the overall shape and contours remain consistent. Persona was one of the first foreign films I saw, when I was a teenager, and I cottoned to it right away. Some have noted a dreamlike quality to the film but I get there more from the similarly-themed 3 Women and Mulholland Drive; Persona has something more lucid about, something more reminiscent of heightened awareness during waking hours. Bergman can get pegged as an overly cerebral filmmaker, but I think he’s always grounded in sensuous experience – an engagement with the environment (acutely expressed through the evocative soundscapes in his movies).

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

A visual tribute to flashbacks & fantasies in Wild Strawberries (1957)

Remembering the Movies, Oct. 22 - 28

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

It's difficult to find one unifying theme this week - rather there are multiple little themes. With Halloween approaching, of course, there are a few gorefests; there are also several films dealing comically with sexuality - one both farcically and poignantly, one about as broadly as barn, and one with satiric surreality. There are two films with "seven" in the title - but there the connections end. So stroll through the years free of the need to furrow your brow and discover the thread. The bulk of these films have little in common but their alignment across time (at least to our decade-obsessed minds). As always, share your thoughts below; this week I'm particularly interested in your thoughts, recommendations or brush-offs as I've only seen two of the titles.