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Showing posts with label swedish film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swedish film. Show all posts
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 •
The Favorites - Persona (#95)
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 •
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.
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections
A visual tribute to flashbacks & fantasies in Wild Strawberries (1957)
Let Them All In... Let the Right One In book/movie/remake
Let the Right One In (2008) is #95 in Best of the 21st Century?, a series in which I view, for the first time, some of the most critically acclaimed films of the previous decade. Along with this film, I will also be discussing the recent American remake, Let Me In (2010) and the book Låt den rätte komma in (2004) by John Ajvide Lindqvist, upon which both are based. There will be spoilers.
On a silent, snowy evening, a taxi pulls up to a deserted courtyard. The cold, lonely apartment blocks loom overhead, watching implacably, either unwilling to share their secrets, or without any secrets to share. But one frosted window at least has a human face in it – a little blonde boy, bare-chested, uneasily gripping a knife in one hand, the other pressed up against the glass, leaving a faint imprint, a marker to shout out impotently, “I was here!” Out of the taxi steps an older man and a young girl; though together, they still seem fundamentally alone - even that lonely boy upstairs has a warm, well-lit room behind him. On reaching their own room, the mysterious couple begin covering up their own frosted window with advertising placards, flashy but vapid come-ons ironically placed to block out the world. Down in the snow bank below, a haggard man pisses in the snow, glancing up at his peculiar neighbors and wondering, perhaps, who they think they are, closing themselves off like that. Don’t they know the world will already take care of that for them? Why seek isolation?
Because, as it turns out, there are some things worse than being alone. Such as joining together in brief, violent, frenetic couplings in which one person leeches the life out of another; or even worse, befriending and assisting this very leech, quenching your own isolation only at the expense of another’s life and happiness. These islands of humanity, floating in the impersonal sea of Blackeburg, both fear and desire human contact; they need it, but they know – or will discover – at what price this need can be fulfilled. Each of these individuals is as human as the next, but at least one is something else besides: a creature of the night, a blood-craving immortal, a murderous eunuch, a vampire. And this vampire, seemingly the most innocent of the four characters, that little girl who climbed out of the taxi, can only infiltrate your defenses if you let her enter your home – without permission, she will bleed from every orifice, so that even passivity breeds violence. Yet you must be careful before granting permission. It’s not enough to let just anyone in…
Now Playing: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo opens, investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) has just been convicted of libeling a wealthy industrialist, the reporter's muckraking exposé having itself been exposed as a fraud. Blomkvist knows he was set up, that phony sources and fabricated evidence were used to lure him into a trap, but his sense of stoic resignation is palpable: he refuses an appeal, leaves his publication, even breaks off a relationship with a colleague. And then what does he do? With six months before his sentence begins, six months to relax or reflect or maybe run away? He accepts a job in a barren, isolated region dominated by a sinister, imposing family corporation called the Vanger Group. One of the Vangers, now a very old man, has a mission for Blomkvist: find out what happened to his teenage niece who disappeared in the sixties, and whose case has remained unsolved for forty years. With only half a year before he's behind bars, Blomkvist throws himself into work once again. That's dedication, and at its very best, The Girl with the Dragoon Tattoo is immersed in this very sense of dedication.
The Sacrifice
The Sacrifice was Andrei Tarkovsky's last film, made just before he was diagnosed with cancer and released while he was dying. Having now seen a slim majority of the master's films (and all of the ones which are most often acclaimed - save Nostalghia) I wouldn't rank this as one of my favorite Tarkovskys, though it was - as always - an interesting and often rewarding viewing experience. It's somewhat different from his other films in mood and style. Though his serious, slow, at times lugubrious aesthetic was never what when one would normally describe as "youthful", there's a painfully taut romanticism and intensity to his earlier films, a kind of breathlessness of expression which make their auteur appear a brash, bold enfant terrible. But The Sacrifice is somehow more stately, more mournful, less throbbing with the expressionist anxiety of young genius. It's a film of maturity, of regret, of decline - the characters are all older than the usual Tarkovsky protagonists, the camera style is more removed (despite the usual dreamlike black-and-white Tarkovskian interludes which Lars von Trier sought to evoke in Antichrist), and the scenario - both the setting and the story - more spare, if at times apocalyptic.
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