Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

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Rayon Vert
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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#101 Post by Rayon Vert » Fri May 05, 2017 10:50 pm

That was a terrific run on your part, movielocke.

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domino harvey
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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#102 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 06, 2017 9:42 am

Voting closed, results soon

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#103 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 06, 2017 10:14 am

Image

THE INGMAR BERGMAN LIST

01 Persona (1966) 22 (3)
02 Fanny and Alexander (1982) 19 (5)
03 the Seventh Seal (1957) 19 (2)
04 Winter Light (1963) 18 (1)
05 Scenes from a Marriage (1973) 18 (3)

06 Wild Strawberries (1957) 17 (1)
07 the Virgin Spring (1960) 14 (3)
08 Shame (1968) 14
09 Cries and Whispers (1972) 14 (1)
10 Through a Glass Darkly (1961) 13 (1)

11 Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) 13 (1)
12 Autumn Sonata (1978) 12
13 the Magician (1958) 12 (1)
14 the Silence (1963) 11
15 Hour of the Wolf (1968) 9

16 Summer With Monika (1953) 8
17 Summer Interlude (1951) 6
18 the Passion of Anna (1969) 6
19 Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) 5
20 Saraband (2003) 5

21 A Lesson in Love (1954) 3
22 To Joy (1950) 3
23 After the Rehearsal (1984) 2
24 the Devil’s Eye (1960) 2
24 Prison (1949) 2


ALSO RANS

From the Life of the Marionettes, Waiting Women


ORPHANS

All These Women, Brink of Life, Dreams, Eva, Face to Face, Faithless, Last Pair Out, the Magic Flute, Port of Call, Thirst


KEY First number following feature is the total number of lists (out of 22 submitted) the film appeared on. The number in parenthesis is the number of lists with the film ranked Number One

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domino harvey
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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#104 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 06, 2017 10:36 am

My list, with orphan highlighted

01 the Virgin Spring
02 Winter Light
03 Shame
04 Persona
05 Wild Strawberries
06 Through a Glass, Darkly
07 Fanny and Alexander
08 Scenes from a Marriage
09 the Passion of Anna
10 After the Rehearsal
11 A Lesson in Love
12 Eva
13 Prison
14 Cries and Whispers
15 Waiting Women

domino harvey wrote:Two truths and a lie:

A. The top four films span four different decades
False -- the top four when this was written included both Persona and Winter Light, and still does
B. All but one of the films in the top ten were released by Criterion True, all but Shame
C. The film that appeared on every list is also the number one film True, and Persona continued its streak. This is I believe the first film since Out of the Past in the initial Noir List to appear on every ballot in a List Project

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#105 Post by swo17 » Sat May 06, 2017 12:13 pm

Nice work, domino! Note that the top 6 synch up exactly with the results of the all-time project, with the exception of Winter Light which didn't fare well enough in the '60s list to be eligible.

12 Persona
74 Fanny and Alexander
113 The Seventh Seal
138 Scenes from a Marriage
182 Wild Strawberries

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Mr Sausage
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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#106 Post by Mr Sausage » Sat May 06, 2017 12:39 pm

My list:

1. Cries and Whispers
2. Winter Light
3. Persona
4. The Seventh Seal
5. Wild Strawberries
6. Shame
7. The Silence
8. Scenes from a Marriage
9. The Passion of Anna
10. Autumn Sonata
11. Fanny and Alexander
12. The Virgin Spring
13. Hour of the Wolf
14. Saraband
15. Smiles of a Summer Night

I didn't get to participate due to life stuff, but I managed to sneak in two viewings right at the end, both of which made my list.

Hmm. Domino and I seem to agree exactly on Wild Strawberries and The Passion of Anna.

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#107 Post by swo17 » Sat May 06, 2017 1:03 pm

Mine:

01. The Seventh Seal
02. Scenes from a Marriage
03. Winter Light
04. Persona
05. Carnie's Twilight
06. Fanny and Alexander
07. Shame
08. Hour of the Wolf
09. Prison
10. The Virgin Spring
11. The Magician
12. Wild Strawberries
13. Summer Interlude
14. A Lesson in Love
15. Cries and Whispers

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Rayon Vert
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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#108 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat May 06, 2017 1:14 pm

Thanks again domino.

1. The Virgin Spring
2. Through a Glass Darkly
3. Summer Interlude
4. The Seventh Seal
5. Shame
6. A Passion/The Passion of Anna
7. Persona
8. Winter Light
9. Fanny and Alexander
10. Hour of the Wolf
11. Summer with Monika
12. Smiles of a Summer Night
13. To Joy

14. From the Life of the Marionettes
15. Port of Call


The 60s films seem to have done very well. The spider god trilogy films all made the top 15, the Faro quadrilogy all made the top 20 (and I see they all made my list and Mr. Sausage's). The Virgin Spring is no 7 and even The Devil's Eye made the list.

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domino harvey
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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#109 Post by domino harvey » Sat May 06, 2017 3:00 pm

Mr Sausage wrote:Hmm. Domino and I seem to agree exactly on Wild Strawberries and The Passion of Anna.
And Winter Light and Scenes From a Marriage! Even stranger was that the first four ballots I tallied all had Through a Glass Darkly in the same number six spot-- truly great minds at work on this forum!

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#110 Post by knives » Sun May 07, 2017 12:51 am

Thanks Domino. I expected two of the orphans, but I'm surprised that no one else voted for Face to Face. Is it that it is still obscure despite the Olive release or is it considered another ugly duckling? I feel the only major Bergman I am missing is Summer with Monica, but there's about a total of fourteen from the main list for me to go.

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#111 Post by movielocke » Sun May 07, 2017 5:56 am

My list:
1. Seventh Seal
2. Smiles of a Summer Night
3. Wild Strawberries
4. Virgin Spring
5. Fanny & Alexander
6. Persona
7. Shame
8. Scenes from a Marriage
9. Devil's Eye, The
10. Summer Interlude
11. Winter Light
12. Magician, The
13. Secrets of Women
14. To Joy
15. Sawdust and Tinsel

I found the fifteenth spot hardest, I had Autumn Sonata there, then put in Port of Call, but finally Sawdust and Tinsel seemed the right fit, so those two were my runners up. I figure on rewatching Cries and Whispers after finishing the other filmstruck films, to see if I'm still lukewarm on it.

Watched Faro Document 1979 tonight, Much more interesting than Making of Fanny and Alexander. It's filled with the sorts of things I find fascinating, rural daily life tasks like my father grew up performing. In many ways, it reminded me of God's Country, though not quite as impactful as that film. Here bergman follows Faro chronologically throughout the year, starting off with some flashbacks to kids on the bus from the first faro document, and then following up with them, the first major movement of the film is a fascinating cross cutting of two stories of an old man who now writes poetry and a woman who wasn't allowed to become a teacher because she had astigmatism. This is followed by a marvelous sequence of thatching a roof, discussion of the reeds of the roof. Summer covers the tourists, with a rock and roll music cue, and a glorious pan shot of the rainbow collage of bright candy colored cars on a ferry that feels like it was composed for Young Girls of Rochefort, and we end summer now on the bus with today's children, asking them the same questions as they return from summer holiday to school. The autumn movement takes us to harvest time, sheep loaded onto a truck, a hog butchered, and onto a fishing boat plying depleted waters, and winter and the film is concluded with an old man, alone at home, preparing himself dinner.

It's a very pleasant film, and fascinating from end to end.

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#112 Post by movielocke » Mon May 08, 2017 10:56 pm

Passion of Anna had me continually marveling at just how beautiful the cinematography was. the use of color and "natural" light throughout is pretty much perfection. I found it far more impressive than Cries and Whispers or Autumn Sonata, and Fanny and Alexander is lit differently from those two. In a way, the film pairs beautifully with the faro documentary I watched last night, as the color, the stone walls, the various bits of the film with sheep, fishing nets, hermits etc all feels of a piece with that work (but the documentary came a decade later), I sort of have suspect that I liked this film a little bit more because I had the context of the documentary to situate me within the community of faro. The american title "passion of anna" is relatively inappropriate, it both sidelines Eva and Andreas, and the film is not just about Anna's passions. The odd little self reflexive bits are strange, but work reasonably well. the climactic black background reverse shots were painfully pretentious, and naturally dive into stereotypically Bergman indulging his worst rhetorical ticks of dialog, so my brain sort of didn't process much of the detail of their same-old-same-old we're breaking up now dialogue. The closing scenes with the horse and then the car were much more interesting, and more of a piece with the rest of the film, and I loved the slow zoom on the final shot, very evocative and effective use of both an in camera zoom and an optical blow up to make the subject appear closer only to become less and less visually defined as the grain is magnified. Very nice.

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#113 Post by Rayon Vert » Tue May 09, 2017 12:42 am

Happy to see another Passion fan, and nice review. Curious: would it have made your list?

Btw, "passion" points to suffering (as in Christ's passion), and as I've said earlier in this thread, the American title is misleading. We're really following Andreas' passion. In this way, though this film feels a bit like a companion to Shame, the central character here is Von Sydow's (others suffer, but we really follow Andreas' disintegration), whereas in Shame (and to some extent Hour of the Wolf) it's the Ullmann-Von Sydow couple.

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Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#114 Post by movielocke » Tue May 09, 2017 1:00 am

It would have been at the bottom if it made it, I did a lot of rotating in the last few spots, so hard to say. When I saw on IMDb that the article was indefinite in the original title, I immediately connected to christs passion, not a hard jump to make given lambs and sparrows imagery. It does feel like a companion to shame, to the point that some of the black and white shots feel like outtakes from shame!

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#115 Post by Rayon Vert » Tue May 09, 2017 1:06 am

movielocke wrote:It does feel like a companion to shame, to the point that some of the black and white shots feel like outtakes from shame!
Yeah I really get the impression they are, from that last scene in Shame.

I really hope if Criterion releases Shame, that it puts together with A Passion - unless they'll do a trilogy with Wolf, which would be awesome. It needs it because the MGM Passion of Anna DVD, for some reason, doesn't fit the whole screen on my 46" TV, just a rectangle in the middle. If I use the different viewing options, it either gets stretched or sections of the images are taken out of the frame.

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#116 Post by domino harvey » Tue May 09, 2017 1:15 am

Pretty sure that's because it's 1.66 non-anamorphic

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Re: Auteur List: Ingmar Bergman - Discussion and Defenses

#117 Post by movielocke » Wed May 10, 2017 3:24 am

A Lesson in Love is rather half-baked, it has a cracker opening (asking for the key, kicking it away), and then a great central idea with the couple on the train, and the flashback to the birthday party is truly an excellent sequence (and the bit with the trans daughter is pretty good too), but with flashbacks upon flashbacks upon flashbacks the whole thing collapses, especially as the central conceit is that she just needs a good dose of chauvinism delivered with alacrity in the right mileau to cause her to realize what she's missing. It winds up being a lesson in misogyny and one of Bergman's poorer efforts.

From the LIfe of the Marionettes has a typical late Bergman arteeste conceit in that it is carefully structured out of order with cutesy title cards as narrative orientation points. but more than many other Bergman films this one feels Exceptionally atonal when viewed today. It's hardly as offensive as notorious films "it's a creature of its time" we say, in order to make viewing toxic ideology palatable, and that appelation needs to be applied to this film.
SpoilerShow
as the film "reveals" that Peter became a murderer because he was a homosexual and had a domineering mother and wife. So totally not his fault that he brutally murdered a prostitute and afterward anally raped her corpse, that's just the sorts of things that the gays get up to when they've got "bad" mothers. and the only other gay character in the film set him up with the prostitute in the hopes of damaging his marriage so that the gay character could then make a play for him, as he was naturally in love with him. :-/

There's no saints here. Another charming piece of repulsivity is after he confesses to wanting to murder his wife to a friend psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist views this as an invitation to invite the wife over for a "private" conference where the psychiatrist misleads the wife about her husband with the intent of fucking her.
If it weren't for All these Women, this would be a nadir point for Bergman, and all the fancy bullshit of restructuring the narrative is just lipstick on a pig.

It's interesting, these being the last couple Bergmans I watcherd, that both of them could be supplements on a future bluray of Scenes from a Marriage. A Lesson in Love is literally a series of Scenes from a Marriage, and I imagine much of the dialog is often near the same during the spousal arguments, as the arguments never ever change in Bergman films. And allegedly From the Life of the Marionettes is a pseduo sequel, I'm guessing the main couple in this film are the couple in episode one that are at the dinner party from hell? It has far less to do with Scenes from a Marriage than a Lesson in Love, but I find it slightly disappointing this isn't a sequel as it is easy to imagine Johan from Scenes from a Marriage doing the opening scene murder, seems totally within his character.

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