Bergman in '57

by Cláudio Alves

Ingmar Bergman is my favorite filmmaker of all-time. That being said, I'm aware of the difficult reputation his cinema has earned over the decades. As Nick Taylor wrote in his fabulous piece about Harriet Andersson, few directors have so masterfully captured the overwhelming pain of unhappiness as Ingmar Bergman did. In his films, God is either dead or a giant stony-faced spider, a monster intent on causing suffering to everyone, making for a cinematic cosmos where agony is the most universal experience of all. It's heavy stuff which justly earns the fame of depressing art, though I'd argue that there's more to Bergman's cinema than constant unbearable ache.

Just look at his 1957 masterpieces, The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries…

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Bergman Centennial: Persona and the Problem of "Motherliness"

Team Experience will be celebrating one of the world's most acclaimed auteurs this week for the 100th anniversary of Ingmar Bergman's birth. Here's Lynn Lee

Persona has been called the Mount Everest of film critics, and no wonder.  For a film that clocks in at a lean 84 minutes and turns on a deceptively simple premise – a celebrated actress (Liv Ullmann) falls mysteriously silent and is consigned to the care of a chatty, insecure nurse (Bibi Andersson) – it contains multitudes.  In the 50-plus years since its debut, its potential meanings have been explored from almost every conceivable angle, be it existential, metaphysical, psychological, psychosexual, queer, feminist, the role of art and the artist, or just the film’s pure cinematic texture and experimental devices.  But Persona is a slippery beast: just when you think you have a theory as to what it’s “about,” it melts and reformulates into something else entirely.

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