Farewell Ingmar
July 30, 2007 at 10:58 am
“When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”
– Ingmar Bergman (14.7.1918 - 30.7.2007)
Patty Waters - Moon, Don’t Come Up Tonite
Sing (Esp Records / 1993)
Gloria Coates - Time Frozen I
Symphonies No. 2 & 9 (Cpo / 1998)
Henri Pousseur - Mnemosyne
Musique Mixte 1966-1970 (Sub Rosa / 2006)
James Macmillan - Northern Skies: Northern Skies
Northern Skies (Deux-Elles / 2007)
Fred Neil - Everybody’s Talkin’
Fred Neil (Capitol / 1966)
Karen Dalton - Little Bit Of Rain
It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best (Capitol / 1969)
Mirror - Visiting Star
Visiting Star (Three Poplars / 2000)
Ezra Sims - Concert Piece: Still And Timeless (Nocturnal)
The Microtonal Music of Ezra Sims
photo: Bergman. svt.se
one of the 20th century true gems…
wow… that reminds me that i have to do lots of things about it this week…
Was a huge fan of his work & read about it today. Thank you for this memorial. beautiful songs. (sorry for my bad english)
This spring in France I spent some afternoons watching Bergman’s films with a friend from Spain who studied cinema; we started with Persona, then the series of “scenes from a marriage”, fanny & alexander & The seventh seal of course. (One of my favorite flicks by him is Sawdust & tinsel tho but they didnt had it at the movie library). I find all of his movies containing a refreshing simplicity missing from many art movies nowadays and some of the most complex portraits of women ever put to screen.
beautiful jazz and classical picks on the post saisai, farewell mr. Ingmar.
[...] En un intento por rescatar los mejores artículos publicados el día de hoy con motivo de su reciente fallecimiento, me he quedado corto, pero la verdad es que resulta casi imposible caer en lo repetitivo, asi que aqui les dejo un par de enlaces interesantes: el primero es un mini-homenaje a Bergman hecho por la gente de Motel de Moka; el segundo es un enlace a una muy emotiva entrevista realizada allá por 1989 en Estocolmo, Suecia por el periodista español Juan Cruz (de El Pais). Y como sabrán, no los habré de dejar ir sin música para el viaje; especialmente a ud. señor Bergman… [...]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Bergman
Technique
As a director, Bergman favored intuition over intellect, and chose to be unaggressive in dealing with actors. Bergman saw himself as having a great responsibility toward them, viewing them as collaborators often in a psychologically vulnerable position. He stated that a director must be both honest and supportive in order to allow others their best work.
His films usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, and faith; they also tend to be direct and not overtly stylized. Persona, one of Bergman’s most famous films, is unusual among Bergman’s work in being both existentialist and avant-garde.
While his themes could be cerebral, sexual desire found its way to the foreground of most of his movies, whether the setting was a medieval plague (The Seventh Seal), upper-class family life in early 20th century Uppsala (Fanny and Alexander) or contemporary alienation (The Silence). His female characters were usually more in touch with their sexuality than their men, and were not afraid to proclaim it, with the sometimes breathtaking overtness (i.e. Cries and Whispers) that defined the work of “the conjurer,” as Bergman called himself in a 1960 Time magazine cover story. In an interview with Playboy magazine in 1964, he said: “…the manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don’t want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them.” Film, Bergman said, was his demanding mistress. Some of his major actresses became his actual mistresses as his real life doubled up on his movie-making one.
Love — twisted, thwarted, unexpressed, repulsed — was the leitmotif of many of his movies, beginning, perhaps, with Winter Light, where the pastor’s barren faith is contrasted with his former mistress’ struggle, tinged with spite as it is, to help him find spiritual justification through human love.
Bergman usually wrote his own scripts, thinking about them for months or years before starting the actual process of writing, which he viewed as somewhat tedious. His earlier films are carefully structured, and are either based on his plays or written in collaboration with other authors. Bergman stated that in his later works, when on occasion his actors would want to do things differently from his own intentions, he would let them, noting that the results were often “disastrous” when he did not do so. As his career progressed, Bergman increasingly let his actors improvise their dialogue. In his latest films, he wrote just the ideas informing the scene and allowed his actors to determine exact dialogue.
Interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ehu72LK17z8
Tribute to Ingmar Bergman 1918 - 2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27QqUqUqZpI
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In addition to all else - and perhaps most important - Bergman is a great entertainer; a storyteller who never loses sight of the fact that no matter what ideas he’s chosen to communicate, films are for exciting an audience. His theatricality is inspired. Such imaginative use of old-fashioned Gothic lighting and stylish compositions. The flamboyant surrealism of the dreams and symbols. The opening montage of Persona, the dinner in Hour of the Wolf and, in The Passion of Anna, the chutzpah to stop the engrossing story at intervals and let the actors explain to the audience what they are trying to do with their portrayals, are moments of showmanship at its best.
http://daily.greencine.com/archives/004143.html
…very beautiful post! amazing!…but what about Michelangelo Antonioni???
[...] I couldn’t let the news of Ingmar Bergman’s death go by without mention. Squashed has a tribute over at Motel de Moka, including music and video interviews with Bergman and with Liv Ullmann. [...]
[...] Tagged :misc * As always don’t miss the playlists from Motel de Moka. Specifically the one after Ingmar Bergmann’s death, Moka’s Shoegazing compilation and dangerous music including artists such as Raz Mesinai, Black Stalin, Motion Trio. [...]
I love all your posts, amazing stuff.
[...] En un intento por rescatar los mejores artículos publicados el día de hoy con motivo de su reciente fallecimiento, me he quedado corto, pero la verdad es que resulta casi imposible caer en lo repetitivo, asi que aqui les dejo un par de enlaces interesantes: el primero es un mini-homenaje a Bergman hecho por la gente de Motel de Moka; el segundo es un enlace a una muy emotiva entrevista realizada allá por 1989 en Estocolmo, Suecia por el periodista español Juan Cruz (de El Pais). [...]