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Masters of Cinema
爻蹖賳賲丕诏乇丕賳 亘夭乇诏: 丕蹖賳诏賲丕乇 亘乇诏賲丕賳
Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, 1918-2007) is, in the world of cinema, a giant whose stature is comparable to that of Beethoven or Dostoyevsky. He made around fifty feature films that caught the spirit of his times, while endlessly reworking his private obsessions and anguish in the face of a silent God. In Summer with Monika (1953), Harriet Andersson plays a scandalously unconventional and sensual young woman, a breath of freedom epitomizing a new modernity in film. The 1960s saw Bergman in experimental mode with Persona (1966), one of the most powerful depictions of the ambiguity of evil. Later, in Scenes from a Marriage (1973) he offers a lucid examination of a couple whose mutual attraction turns to destruction, while Fanny and Alexander (1982) is a joyful and nostalgic evocation of childhood memories. Bergman鈥檚 last film, Saraband (2003), is a spare masterpiece, at once an object lesson in how to make a film and an existential exploration.
114 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 23, 2019
This is the fourth of this "Masters of Cinema" series I've read and by far the worst. You can't trust these cute series - there's a BFI Film Classics series and in music there's the tiny but perfectly formed 33 1/3 series. You get so you want to collect them all, so you can have a bookshelf that looks like this
but alas and alack, the authors of the individual volumes CANNOT BE TRUSTED to be as tiptop as each other, so you go from the crisp no nonsense excellence of this series' Martin Scorsese to the stodgy professorial ineffabilities of this series' Ingmar Bergman.
Typical sentence :
More than an avatar of his theatrical experience, Bergman's famous frontality is fully revealed here for what it is : an image that suggests the ontological separation of individuals, even when they are present in the same space and time.
So ignorant am I that I was completely unaware of Bergman's famous frontality. Actually, between you and me and the radiator, I don't know what a frontality is. Do you think they mean his nose? He did have quite a big hooter.
but alas and alack, the authors of the individual volumes CANNOT BE TRUSTED to be as tiptop as each other, so you go from the crisp no nonsense excellence of this series' Martin Scorsese to the stodgy professorial ineffabilities of this series' Ingmar Bergman.
Typical sentence :
More than an avatar of his theatrical experience, Bergman's famous frontality is fully revealed here for what it is : an image that suggests the ontological separation of individuals, even when they are present in the same space and time.
So ignorant am I that I was completely unaware of Bergman's famous frontality. Actually, between you and me and the radiator, I don't know what a frontality is. Do you think they mean his nose? He did have quite a big hooter.
August 28, 2014
This is an introductory book in the same series as the one on Fellini which I read and a few weeks ago, so many of the same points apply.
But here, I've only written my review after seeing several more of the films, not straight after finishing the book. Whilst I had seen a few Bergmans before reading, I felt I knew very little about the man or his approaches except the usual generalisations about death and gloom and his influence on Woody Allen (of whom I was a big fan in my twenties but have since mostly gone off).
It was useful to have an idea about themes and background before watching the films, more so than usual for complex films as I was entirely unprepared for the agonising emotional disembowelling of watching some of them. It just so happened that many of Bergman's characters have traits, behaviours and attachment styles I know from myself or my relationships or family members or friends. And of course he has an utterly candid psychological verisimilitude which leaves nothing out (allowing the same characters to be shown at their best, their worst and points in between, as we see people we know) - whilst still making it all look much more like art than do those who would just stick a camcorder in front of a family row. Though many Bergman characters are very middle-class and articulate so to watch some of these is more like sitting in on a therapy session than overhearing things kicking off in a pub.
But people go around intellectualising about all this?
That was the weirdest thing about the whole experience. I quite often have these personal, emotional responses to what are supposed to be "highbrow" pictures but it was with Bergman that I found the greatest disconnection between the way other people wrote about these films, - at least wrote publicly, with such analytical detachment - and my own haunted experience of them. Which in certain cases (no more so than Winter Light or Persona) is the sort of thing I would really only want to share in detail with a few dozen friends, rather than the whole world.
The book, I suppose, gave me a stronger reminder of how to look at what others might see and provided greater detachment than I may otherwise have been able to have when watching some of these films.
Its most striking insight was into a film which was only slightly personal, not overwhelming. Summer With Monika - along with Fanny & Alexander the most straightforwardly enjoyable Bergman film for me. How Godard and the other Cahiers du Cinema guys re-discovered the film a few years following its release, and the huge influence it came to have on the Nouvelle Vague. I love this film and it contains the best essence of British and French New Wave, something else elegantly Scandinavian, and a reminder of my own attitude to settling down in my early twenties.
I now want to re-read this after watching more of the films, but really I want to know more. Especially about Bergman's family life and relationships which inspired so many of the films.
But here, I've only written my review after seeing several more of the films, not straight after finishing the book. Whilst I had seen a few Bergmans before reading, I felt I knew very little about the man or his approaches except the usual generalisations about death and gloom and his influence on Woody Allen (of whom I was a big fan in my twenties but have since mostly gone off).
It was useful to have an idea about themes and background before watching the films, more so than usual for complex films as I was entirely unprepared for the agonising emotional disembowelling of watching some of them. It just so happened that many of Bergman's characters have traits, behaviours and attachment styles I know from myself or my relationships or family members or friends. And of course he has an utterly candid psychological verisimilitude which leaves nothing out (allowing the same characters to be shown at their best, their worst and points in between, as we see people we know) - whilst still making it all look much more like art than do those who would just stick a camcorder in front of a family row. Though many Bergman characters are very middle-class and articulate so to watch some of these is more like sitting in on a therapy session than overhearing things kicking off in a pub.
But people go around intellectualising about all this?
That was the weirdest thing about the whole experience. I quite often have these personal, emotional responses to what are supposed to be "highbrow" pictures but it was with Bergman that I found the greatest disconnection between the way other people wrote about these films, - at least wrote publicly, with such analytical detachment - and my own haunted experience of them. Which in certain cases (no more so than Winter Light or Persona) is the sort of thing I would really only want to share in detail with a few dozen friends, rather than the whole world.
The book, I suppose, gave me a stronger reminder of how to look at what others might see and provided greater detachment than I may otherwise have been able to have when watching some of these films.
Its most striking insight was into a film which was only slightly personal, not overwhelming. Summer With Monika - along with Fanny & Alexander the most straightforwardly enjoyable Bergman film for me. How Godard and the other Cahiers du Cinema guys re-discovered the film a few years following its release, and the huge influence it came to have on the Nouvelle Vague. I love this film and it contains the best essence of British and French New Wave, something else elegantly Scandinavian, and a reminder of my own attitude to settling down in my early twenties.
I now want to re-read this after watching more of the films, but really I want to know more. Especially about Bergman's family life and relationships which inspired so many of the films.
June 6, 2019
If you love Bergman's films this is well worth a read.
February 6, 2013
Shallow and filled with factual errors. AVOID. There are so many better books to read on Bergman.
November 6, 2013
Persona is the second name of cinema.... WOW..
Read
June 3, 2016Un po' troppi complimenti e diversi refusi, ma considerando il prezzo, il fine e le immagini all'interno 猫 ok.
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