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:

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

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

The Wide View 1957 - 1959 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 12

The twelfth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 12: The Wide View"

The Wide View

"Are we kids here or what?" Increasingly, the answer was "No" - for better or worse. As the fifties rolled to a close, American cinema underwent its first stirrings of adolescence. Puberty would strike with full force by the mid-sixties, crippling the movies for a time with growing pains, failed attempts at worldliness, and alienated lassitude. Yet initially this onset of maturity offered many Hollywood films a valuable edge. Whether locking a steady gaze on the brutality of war, shining a harsh light on the cynical modern media, or nakedly exposing the sexual voyeurism of audience and auteur alike, today's selections show hints of the quantum leap in content and style which would seize a moribund industry in 1967.