Ingmar Bergman Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I'm of the mind that when you're a fan, it makes a lot more sense to save for the big things than throw away $20 here and there for something mediocre. For example: Would you want to spend a couple hundred bucks on some collectibles that will probably never be worth a whole heck of a lot, or spend $150 on a collection of glasses, or $100 on a chair that belonged to Ingmar Bergman.

Come on. If you're a fan or cinema, what can be cooler than that? A Swedish site called Bukowskis is auctioning off a lot of the filmmaker's stuff -- art, furniture, and movie equipment. (Unless, pray tell me Swedish speakers, this is something else, lost in translation?) Some of the items can be quite expensive, heading into thousands of Swedish kronor (approx 6,500 sek equals $1,000), but some are set under $100, which I think is beyond reasonable for something owned by the man behind Fanny and Alexander, Autumn Sonata, Wild Strawberries, and the film I keep meaning to see: Summer with Monika.

Any bidders?

[via Movie City Indie]

• Evelyn Keyes (1916-2008) - Actress - Played Scarlett O'Hara's little sister, Suellen, in Gone With the Wind. She also co-starred in The Seven Year Itch, The Jolson Story, in which she also sings, Mrs. Mike, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Union Pacific, Before I Hang, A Thousand and One Nights, The Prowler, Johnny O'Clock, Enchantment and A Return to Salem's Lot and made a cameo appearance in the 1956 version of Around the World in Eighty Days, produced by her then-boyfriend Michael Todd. Her husbands included Artie Shaw, John Huston and Charles Vidor, who directed her in The Desperadoes, The Lady in Question and Ladies in Retirement. She died of uterine cancer July 4, in Montecito, California. (Variety)

• Henry Beckman (1921-2008) - Actor - Appears in The Brood, Niagara, The Wrong Man, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Marnie, Sweet Charity, Silver Streak, I Love You to Death, Death Hunt and Kiss Me, Stupid. He died June 17 in Barcelona. (Variety)
• James "Jimbo" Breen (1955-2008) - Greensman, Carpenter, Actor - Worked on M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable and The Village, appears in Lady in the Water and can be heard in The Happening. He also worked on Beloved, In Her Shoes, Two Bits and Annapolis. He died of cancer July 3, in Pennsylvania. (Philly.com)

Okay. It's time to get down to brass tacks. I'm going to get up on my soapbox and hope that the right Academy members read the column this week, because it's time to re-do the rules of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar category. Do you know how long it has been since a great film, a truly great film, won in this category? I'm talking about a film made by a genuinely great artist of the cinema, a film for the ages, and not just a perfectly good film, or a film about one of the great world wars. Here's your answer: twenty-five years ago. Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1983) was the last great one. That leaves 25 years of pretty good, just OK, forgettable, or flat-out awful winners (mostly forgettable). This year's winner, The Counterfeiters (41 screens) had to be one of the worst movies I saw all year; at it's center is a perfectly good (true) WWII concentration camp story, but it's warped by an entirely inept director, responsible for one of the worst movies I've ever seen, All the Queen's Men (2001). How did it win? How did it get past all the truly great films of 2007?

Back in high school, I was one of those kids who wore mostly band t-shirts. Now that I'm older and more interested in movies than music, I've filled my wardrobe with movie t-shirts instead. But what if I could combine the two? Well, I kinda already have with my Un Chien Andalou shirt, which I sometimes tell people is a Pixies shirt (it only has the eyeball-cutting shot, with no title mentioned). However, I could also sport these excellent designs, made and sold by CineFile Video in Los Angeles. They combine the names of four of our favorite foreign filmmakers with the logos/fonts of heavy metal bands. There's Von Trier in the Van Halen font, Fassbinder in the Metallica font, Ingmar Bergman in the Iron Maiden font and Herzog in the Danzig font. What better way to pay homage to your favorite filmmaker while also appearing pretentiously hip?

Hopefully CineVideo will design some more, possibly utilizing non-metal logos. I don't know who would work with this, but someone has to be applied to the AC/DC font. And I know it's a bit long, but couldn't Kurosawa be done up with the Kiss logo? Here are some other ideas that I'd be interested in buying: Buñuel as Boston; Wenders as Weezer, Antonioni as Aerosmith; De Sica as Def Leppard; Ozu as Ozzy Jean-Luc Godard as Journey; Jean Renoir as Judas Priest (or the last two the other way around). Okay, some of these are stretching, and I still can't find good ones for Truffaut, Fellini, or Eisenstein. Any ideas? Unfortunately, CineFile is only selling these shirts at their store on Santa Monica Blvd. Anybody want to ship one to NYC for my birthday (ps: I like the Herzog one best).

[via Movie City Indie]

Now that Ingmar Bergman has left us, and doesn't appear to have won any chess games since, it is time for Liv Ullman to return to the cinema of Norway, her native country. Ullman grew up there and made her film debut there, but it was in Sweden that she broke out internationally when she appeared in her first Bergman picture, Persona, in 1966. After that she worked on a couple more Norwegian films, but she primarily stuck to working with non-Norwegian filmmakers, including Bergman, who cast her as the lead in nine films, two of which earned her Oscar nominations. Now it has been 38 years since the actress starred as the title character in Arne Skouen's An-Magritt, her last Norwegian film (I guess Unni Straume's Dromspel doesn't count). Why the long absence? Ullman, who currently calls New York her home, claims she actually hadn't been offered anything in Norway in all that time. But now, according to Reuters, she's finally returning, having been cast in a film titled In a Mirror, in a Riddle, which will be directed by Danish filmmaker Jesper Nielsen (Okay).

In the film, Ullman will play the grandmother of a seriously ill 13-year-old girl. It's a role the actress claims brought her out of retirement (her last appearance was in Bergman's final film, Saraband), having cried happy tears while reading the script. She told the daily Dagbladet she's very proud to be a part of the film. In a Mirror, in a Riddle is based on a novel by Jostein Gaarder, best known in America for his bestseller Sophie's World, which has previously been filmed as a Norway-Sweden co-production, and which is also currently being made into an English-language movie starring Michael Caine.

It seems that when a master filmmaker dies, suddenly his archives become of less importance. Last week it was reported that Ingmar Bergman's archives, which are even listed in the United Nations' Memory of the World register, might be doomed because of the expense to maintain them. Now Variety tells us that Michelangelo Antonioni's archives are also in trouble. These archives, which include short films, photographs, drawings, posters and books, are featured in a museum located in the filmmaker's hometown of Ferrara, Italy. The museum closed last year for refurbishing, but it may not reopen at all thanks to a shortage of funds. The city instead wants to open a film museum focused on all the directors who shot in Ferrara. The problem with that, though, is that when Antonioni's archives were donated to the city in 1995, there was a strict stipulation that they only be used for a museum solely about Antonioni.

I'm not too worried about the state of Antonioni's archives, as the film world would never let anything bad come to them. Just as Bergman's archives quickly received a $10,000 donation from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association following news of their jeopardy, Antonioni's archives will certainly be saved as well. Sure, he's not as celebrated a filmmaker as Bergman, but he is still very much loved by the film community. Aside from reports from Variety and other cinema-related media, the news of this travesty made headlines in mainstream Italian papers, such as La Republica, which ran the title "Ferrara 'evicts' Antonioni." I wouldn't be surprised if some fortunate person or organization hasn't already stepped forward. Michelangelo Antonioni, who gave the world L'Avventura and Blow Up, left us on July 30.

When I read Jonathon Rosenbaum's August 4 piece on recently deceased auteur Ingmar Bergman, I was rather stunned to see Rosenbaum, a critic I normally like and respect, slamming one of the most respected directors in the history of film. In the article, titled "Scenes from an Overrated Career," Rosenbaum made some broad-sweeping statements like this one: "The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman's films go down more easily than theirs - his fluid storytelling and deftness in handling actresses, comparable to the skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor - also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart. What we see is what we get, and what we hear, however well written or dramatic, are things we're likely to have heard elsewhere."

That last bit in particular really struck me; you could say the same of any filmmaker or any film -- any work of art, for that matter. Even Shakespeare derived from and built upon those who came before him. Everything is derivative of something else. How is that relevant to the undeniable overall influence of Bergman's work? Bergman's style of storytelling, the accessibility of his ideas, somehow makes him less relevant? The mark of a great filmmaker isn't that the ideas he or she explores have never been explored before, but that the filmmaker brings them to life through compelling characters and story -- the writing, the drama, the direction are the whole point. Even in his last film, Saraband, Bergman was taking human drama -- infidelity, communication, the peculiar evolution of intimate relationships over decades, and exploring those ideas with a depth and subtlety few younger filmmakers today could come close to.

Apaprently I'm not the only one who disagreed with Rosenbaum's take on Bergman. Roger Ebert responds to Rosenbaum thusly: "I have long known and admired the Chicago Reader's film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, but his New York TimesIngmar Bergman ("Scenes from an Overrated Career," 8/4/07) is a bizarre departure from his usual sanity." Ebert then goes on to refute Rosenbaum's arguments against Bergman's relevance, one by one.

If you haven't yet read Rosenbaum's op-ed, read it first, then pop over and read Ebert's defense of Bergman. Hey, there's nothing like a little film-critic rumble to get you over the midweek hump.

Have you been reading Cinematical Indie lately? If not, here's what you've been missing ...

COLUMNS, REVIEWS, and INTERVIEWS

• James Rocchi interviews Mike Binder, writer/director of The Search for John Gissing about the long road to getting his film distributed, and why he finally took matters into his own hands.
• Killer Bs on DVDs: Matt Bradshaw reviews a pair of Euro horror flicks, Black Candles and Evil Eye.
• James Rocchi interviews David Wain and Ken Marino of Ten Commandments comedy The Ten.
• Cinematical Indie Chats it up with Billy the Kid director Jennifer Venditti.
• Cinematical Indie Seven: A John Sayles Primer.
• James Rocchi reviews The Ten.
• Jeffrey M. Anderson's 400 Screens, 400 Blows: The Day the Movies Died
• Cinematical Indie reviews JLo and Marc Anthony's biopic of salsa king Hector Lavoe, El Cantante.
• RvB's After Images: Skammen, aka Shame (1968)
• The Rocchi Review Podcast: James Rocchi chats up Heidi MacDonald of The Beat on all things comic.

... and more right after the jump ...

It's a hot and steamy weekend here, and I'm feeling way to lazy to go outside for a power walk, so instead I thought I'd do a weekend check-in on some of my fave film sites around the web. As always, if you have a film blog (or even a film blog that you read and like, that you haven't seen me point to in a Group Hug), send me a link at kim(at)cinematical(dot)com. I'm always on the lookout for film sites to add to my already-lengthy list of daily reads ... hey, a girl just can't get too much film talk, right? Besides, the more film sites I'm forced to read, the longer I can put off that power walk ...

This one isn't particularly "indie," but it's one of the most fascinating pieces I've read all week, so I just had to include it. Over at the LA Weekly, Scott Foundas has a really interesting (and LONG -- seven pages, so read it with a fresh cup of coffee) feature piece up on Brett Ratner. What makes it such a fun read is that Foundas, whose writing I like and respect, goes way against the expected grain here, asserting of Popcorn King Ratner: "Which brings me to the other reason I've wanted to write about Ratner. It is an idea that may initially strike you as radical or preposterous, and which could jeopardize my standing in the film-criticism community. And yet, here goes: Brett Ratner is a talented filmmaker who deserves to be taken seriously."

Wow. No doubt Foundas has taken a lot of ribbing for this piece, but it's very well-written -- I can think of a few folks who write up set visits who could take a lesson from how Foundas puts you inside Ratner's set with his writing here -- and, moreover, by the end of it, I actually had kind of a newfound respect for Ratner -- at least for the work he puts into his films, if not the films themselves.

Just over a year ago, Jim Emerson started this very cool Opening Shots Project, wherein he kicked things off by writing about some of his favorite opening shots in a film, and then invited others to write about theirs. Emerson asserts that the opening shot is the most important moment in a film, that it sets the tone of the film and tells you what it's going to be about; after I started reading the Opening Shots pieces, I became even more aware of the importance of opening shots and started paying closer attention to them with every film I watch. So I was pleased to see [via a link on Daily Green Cine, who always have lots of good stuff] that there's a new Opening Shots entry up: Andy Horbal analyzes the opening shot of Army of Shadows. Check it out.

In the aftermath of the same-day deaths of directing greats Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, Movie City Indie's Ray Pride ponders, "Who are the oldest living film directors?" with a comprehensive listing of directors that starts with the current oldest, Manoel de Oliveira (born in 1908), and works its way down to Stuart Gordon (born in 1947). Great minds thinking alike, David Poland, on The Hot Blog, points over to a post on Joe Leydon's MovingPictureBlog that asks: Who are the heirs to Bergman and Antonioni? Pop on over to both sites, read what they have to say, and chime in with your own thoughts.

If you're a geek for technical details, you'll dig this post Josh Oakhurst has up answering questions from readers about just how he shot a couple of stop-mo spots, in which he explains in detail, among other things, why he didn't shoot in RAW. If you're interested in shooting stop-mo yourself -- or even if, like me, your just a sucker for all things film-geeky, you'll want to delve into this post.

Remember that game "telephone" we used to play at Girl Scouts (yeah, I was a Girl Scout -- hah!) and summer camp? You'd sit in a big circle, the first person would whisper a message to the second person, and they would pass it on, and so on, and at the end everyone would get a big laugh over how the message had changed, and you were supposed to learn an Important Lesson about the power of communication or world peace or something. Whatever. Over at Burbanked, Alan has a much more fun idea: Blogophone! It's pretty simple: he starts with a movie-related post, then tosses it to the next person in the game, who creatively changes it and tosses it to the next person, etc. The first one got pretty amusing, so he's started a second round. He tossed it to Ray over at The Rec Show, but don't let that stop you from nosing in on the fun ...

I can't think of anything more appropriate to write about today than the near-simultaneous passing of two cinema giants: Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, who oddly died on the very same day. If the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper was dubbed "the day the music died," then July 30, 2007 has to be the day that movies died. I'm sure that the web and newspapers around the world will be filled with obituaries and tributes, but I can't help feeling a little angry; where were all you people when these guys were alive?

I consider myself lucky that, as a reviewer, I was able to write about new movies from both of these masters -- all released on 400 screens or less -- notably Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds (released in 1999), his segment in Eros (2005) and Bergman's Saraband (2005), but I couldn't help noticing that my enthusiasm for these projects was a bit lonely. I wrote just a few weeks ago about how the movie industry as a general rule tends to focus on the young at the expense of the old. Over the years I've seen eight Antonioni films and fifteen Bergman films. That's not many in the grand scheme of things, but I wonder just how many have seen any at all?