Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
RANKED:
8. The Magician (1958)
After the phenomenal year Ingmar Bergman had with his international successes, "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries," he made a psychological drama that turned the lens around to reflect on his own artistry. The film, 1958's "The Magician," centers on a mute magician and his travelling performing troupe, known for their 'supernatural' shows. Perhaps the titular magician stands in for Bergman himself, whose performances are able to illicit such strong emotions from people, despite the notion that they are all slight of hand and psychological manipulation. "The Magician" finds Bergman reflecting on his own 'performative' artistry, while also acknowledging that his titular magician is both a genius and a fraud.
7. Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)
Centering on a band of traveling carnival performers, Ingmar Bergman's 1953 film "Sawdust and Tinsel" is brimming with regret, desperation, and sadness. All of the carnies face economic woes, relationship problems, and philosophical and existential crises. As the film progresses, these woes never get satiated and only get worse. There is no sense of relief. Rather, they must hit the road and keep going. With this notion, "Sawdust and Tinsel" becomes Bergman's frustration with life itself. The film is like a continuous existential gnawing of life's depressing continuance. But there is nothing to do with that gnawing except continue to endure it.
6. Summer Interlude (1951)
1951's "Summer Interlude" is often considered by many film scholars to be the starting point of Ingmar Bergman's auteuristic style. His poetic mediation of the environment, his Dreyer-esque close-ups, and his melancholic attitude that seeps into the film. This melancholy is mixed in so deep with joy and love in this film that the two become inseparable. As an aging ballerina reflects on a brief summer romance from her youth, she also begins to reflect on the person she is now and all the ways in which she's built up a protective wall around herself. The film meditates on youth and abandon, while also contrasting those memories with the solemnness that comes with aging and disillusionment. It's a film that starts the artistic prowess of a man who would become one of film's greatest artists.
5. Winter Light (1963)
With one of the two 1963 efforts from Ingmar Bergman, "Winter Light" depicts a pastor in crisis. In what is an unofficial second act in a trilogy of films between "Through a Glass Darkly" and "The Silence," "Winter Light" is an unshakable film full of stagnant, quiet desperation about one's faith in continuing forward with the charade of existence. Bergman and frequent collaborator, Sven Nykvist, compose stark images of unflinching white light that encompasses the picture. Although you would think the subject matter would call for a darkly light dreary visual image, "Winter Light"'s visual images are bright and white, which seem to bring forth the ice cold bleakness it emanates. It is one of Bergman's greatest achievement, which isn't saying much since Bergman's catalog is littered with masterpiece after masterpiece.
4. Wild Strawberries (1957)
Often considered one of Ingmar Bergman's most significant films, 1957's "Wild Strawberries" takes the psychology of an aging physician and places its audience directly into his psyche. Focusing on a 78-year-old grouchy, stubborn egoist, the film dissects his dreams and fantasies, filled with nostalgic wanting of youth and regrets of a wasted life. Through the renderings of a subconscious mind, we get to see our own. Our memories, our childhood hopes, our contemporary fears and troubles, etc. Bergman's film calls out to us from the future. Our future selves are looking at us currently with such nostalgia, such shame, and such regret. The film is a short, solemn affair of a troubled human spirit, one that awaits us at the end of our life.
3. Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
To call Ingmar Bergman's 1955 film "Smiles of a Summer Night" a 'sex comedy' would be too much of an oversimplification and perhaps an undermining phrase. You have to remind yourself this is Bergman we're talking about. So, of course there's got to be some existentiality and philosophical underpinnings to this 'sex comedy.' The film finds a group of early 20th century characters all involved in invisible games of seduction and foreplay during a romantic weekend retreat where four couples convene, swapping partners and pairing off in unexpected ways. "Smiles of a Summer Night" is Bergman at his most playful, as he navigates the comedy and occasional drama to examine the relationships between men and women and their equally intriguing stereotypes, personas, pretensions, and insecurities.
2. Summer with Monika (1953)
You can always tell the mark of a great filmmaker by how much they can say with such simple stories. With Ingmar Bergman, he somehow manages to fit the totality of life and human experience into small, intimate tales. In his 1953 masterwork "Summer with Monika," he meditates of our youthful desires turning into nothing but hollow, unfulfilled frustrations with the story of two young lovers running away for a summer. Their youthful abandon offers a respite to the harshness of the 'real world.' However, one must always return to reality, as the summer is only temporary. It's a film that begins hopeful and playful and ends tragic and bitter. It's a coming-of-age story, a story of disillusionment, and a meditation on how quickly time passes. In the hands of Bergman, this story of a summer romance becomes a story of youth, love, and the aggregate of our lives. Our youth and our insatiable desire for escape is only a shiny object that beckons to us, a fantasy that has slipped from our grasps.
1. The Seventh Seal (1957)
When speaking about the career of Ingmar Bergman, there are many masterpieces to choose from. However, you wouldn't be able to speak on his career without speaking about his 1957 film "The Seventh Seal." In fact, you could even go so far to say that you can't speak about the history of cinema or the artistic and cultural reaches of film without speaking about "The Seventh Seal." It is a film that muses about the nature of death. However, it is so much more. It is a film that philosophizes about Bergman's own past, Swedish culture, political burnings, and religious melancholy all poured into a series of pictures that carry a swell of contributions and contradictions so effortlessly. The deepest questions of religion and the most mysterious revelation of simply being alive are both addressed. The film muses about the utter silence of God in the face of terror and chaos. At the time of the film's release, 1957, this Nietzschean notion of the 'Death of God' could be abstractly applied to questions regarding the possibility of faith in a post-Holocaust, nuclear age. On top of this dense intellectual philosophy held within the confines of film's frame, the film itself has spurred endless parody, imitation, and cultural recognition. All of this to say, ladies and gentlemen, that "The Seventh Seal" and all its notions, questions, philosophy, faith, melancholy, and whatever other existential questions a human being ponders, is considered one of the greatest and most influential films in human history.
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