I’ve got that whole MGM box set, and the only films that I’ve ever watched from it are Persona(which I checked out from the library before I go the box) and Hour of the Wolf. I’ve tried to watch a few of them, but couldn’t get into it. I’ll try them again later.
So you prefer his earlier work to his later? I had a bunch of those, too, once, and I ended up getting rid of them in my purge. This was almost three years ago, and you know what, they’re still on the shelf of the local used record store I sold them to. So I might buy back Shame, Hour of the Wolf, The Serpent’s Egg. Shame was interesting if a little slow. Hour of the Wolf was freaky and not very pleasant. Persona, which I have on VHS, is a great, very purely cinematic film that I suspect is Bergman’s masterpiece. There’s a great thread on Persona which I recommend, it’s probably a few pages back, but it shows how many different levels and interpretations the film yields.
Persona is a film I saw several years ago, and need to revisit, and I will do it soon, when I finally finish off this box set. It needs to be done.
But I tend to prefer Bermgman’s earlier and later stuff, not so much the middle.
Virgin Spring
Smiles of a Summer Night
Through a Glass Darkly
The Magician
Winter Light
Scenes from a Marriage
Fanny and Alexander
those are my favorites in no particular order.
My least favorite is probably “The Silence”-terrible movie. Perhaps the worst film by a great director.
Hey, Justin! Once again, I can contribute to a thread wherein we’re in agreement!!!
I did give Serpent’s Egg a shot after buying the pricey MGM set, and after three or four false starts with it found it quite enjoyable, and even impressive. My impessions of it lie around it feeling very loose and (almost) sloppy in some ways—especially for Bergman. But Liv was very touching in it, and I thought Carradine was really creditable.
I did support this film in an earlier thread back in December, and I’ll repeat here that, while it isn’t perfect it has its moments. Given my choice between seeing this again, and having ever again to endure Liza With A Z in Cabaret, I’d give this the green light in my player or revival house; as a movie of similar milieu and notions, I recommend it to the uninitiated.
And the final scene is perhaps the most cynical offering in all of Bergman’s filmography. A harrowing thesis, this title represents.
That’s right, No T.Hanks, you reminded me of Liv’s fascinating cabaret performance in this film. Isn’t she wearing green face-paint, or am I misremembering?
I must have missed the December thread, sorry about that. But yes, it is kind of an impressionistic or “sloppy” film, kind of out of his usual style.
I thought the big flaw in the film was Carradine himself , i thought he was miscast and kind of brought the film down but i still like it very much. @ Jason you think The Silence was Bergmans worst film? I guess you havent seen All These Women or The Devils Eye. The Silence is a great film.
No I haven’t, actually. So I guess its possible for him to do worse.
@Justin; just a point of clarification in that, the thread wasn’t about SE, just my comments. (I think it was one of those Overrated/ Underrated types of things).
And while on the subject of over/ under rating, I think The Silence is one of those movies which suffers from the tendancy of both. It’s about as slow and ponderous as “Art Films” can get, and way abstract with little to no humor or excitement to carry a viewer through. Unless you’ve got a natural hunger and appreciation for the Bergman touch, that’s certainly not the one to come in on. But it is a film with genuine merits, and perfect work by Nykvist.
I think critics started coming down on Bergman’s earlier films around the time of Silence, (most especially The Seventh Seal) viewing them as pretentious and outdated, so at the time of its release, The Silence had the feel of a more subtle film on similar themes and views, (absence of God, et. al.). I think time has vindicated the earlier film, though, since they’re all now dated. SS has the stronger appeal and connectability. I don’t know any young people in their late-teens, early 20’s coming into foreign cinema that aren’t taken with Seventh Seal, some 50 years down the line of its release, and I think that says something for it.
The Silence is less a personal favorite of mine, (of that “trilogy”, my fave is Through A Glass Darkly") but to say it’s a bad film is to have missed on some genuine merits.
Quotes about The Serpent’s Egg from Images: My Life in Film by Ingmar Bergman:
“It is overstimulated, as if it had taken anabolic steroids.”
– He claims that the overstimulation in his art was natural due to overstimulation in his personal life. This film was during his tax issues with the Swedish government. It also coincides with the high of coming off some of his most internationally successful films and expectations for his next film were possibly the most intense in his entire career.
“After the film’s release, my life began to calm down; then i painfully realized the extent of my failure. Still, for a moment i do not regret making The Serpent’s Egg; it was a healthy learning experience.”
That being said i do not think his “failure” was as monumental as he thought. The film obviously reveals its magnificent cinematography, appropriate acting, and interesting plot, but this film at the end of the day reveals how auteurs can have too much influence over a film and their personal lives can negatively impact its result. This film was too concerted of an effort by Bergman to create a magnificent film and ignored all the signs and the unenthusiastic responses he received to what was essentially an unfinished script with unrealized potential.
Moderated
I want to see it again, too, and hopefully just appreciate it for what it is — an attempt to make a personal, human statement about a historic period that is frequently treated in a grand and impersonal manner.
I am glad to see not everyone hates this film. I was just in Barnes & Noble and got it for 5 bucks. It was originally 25 and it is Bergman so I thought what the hell. I will come back to say my opinion once I have seen it.
one of my favorite movies. love the atmosphere, the sets
SE is Bergman’s social-psychological study of fascist sensibility (regardless of its ideological masks) – through mobilization of intellectual and aesthetic resources of cinematic art. With a precision of a historian of culture and the daring intuition of an artist Bergman uses a number of dizzying substituting analogies, first of all, the one between Hitler’s failed Munich putsch in 1923 and full blown German Nazism (1933 – 1945), and secondly, between this realized Nazism and hypothetical American fascist future. From the conditions in Germany of early twenties where SE locates its narrative, Bergman looks ahead into the dystopian American future as if he looks at the coming of German Nazism. The film was released in 1977 – at the height of American democracy, and this adds the third Bergman’s analogy to the previous two: American democracy of late 70s precedes an intense totalitarization of US at the end of 90s–the beginning of 21st century (Bergman predicted in this film), like failed Munich putsch had preceded the coming of Nazism of 1933 – 1945.
The film addresses us, Americans of the 21st century – we today, according to Bergman’s tormenting prediction, are going through the same processes Germany was going in twenties (invention of wars, economic collapses, militarization of economy, growing aggressiveness and brutality of right-wing propaganda, contempt towards American workers, pauperization of population, conservative attacks on helping the elderly and needy, defunding public education and social security, proud proclamation of use of torture, surveillance of American citizens without a Court order, etc.) In short, SE while narrating the story of two Americans trapped in pre-Nazi Germany, paradoxically talks to the viewers about their world and their life today.
It’s of no surprise that in SE Bergman has several American movie stars – David Carradine as the main protagonist, Glynn Turman (as a man humiliated and traumatized by being put into a situation of the necessity to prove his heterosexuality) and James Whitmore (as honest and helpless priest). Liv Ullmann’s semantic control over the widest scope of emotional self-expressiveness makes her performance in SE an object for studying by future film directors and actors. The film traces in detail the destruction of human soul under the survivalist pressures and a collapsing democratic values of tolerance, compromise and mutual care.
Among the particular topics analyzed by Bergman – the fall of Christianity into official state religion, sexual humiliation as a fascist fun, growth of suspiciousness and scapegoating, the omnipresence of a mass culture of forgetfulness, militarization of entertainment, de-existentialization of thinking into a calculation, and separation of science from humanism.
Please, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com to read the article about SE (with analysis of more than thirty shots from the film), and also essays about films by Kurosawa, Godard, Resnais, Bresson, Bunuel, Antonioni, Pasolini, Cavani, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Alain Tanner and Moshe Mizrahi.
By: Victor Enyutin
Justin Biberkopf
The Serpent’s Egg (1977) seems to be commonly disparaged even by Bergman fans and I was wondering what people here thought about it. I remember being struck very vividly by certain moments: the tracking shot at the beginning that contrasts the wedding party downstairs with David Carradine’s discovery of his brother’s body upstairs; the Kubrickian long shot of the packed bar where Carradine plows through the crowd to stuff U.S. cash in the bartender’s mouth; the long intense scene with the two prostitutes and the one guy who is too scared of everything to fuck. The ending seemed like a letdown, the scenes “behind the scenes” of the clinic: not because they weren’t well-executed but because they seemed inadequate to explain the rise of Nazism, too clever maybe. So is it a bad film, a flawed masterpiece, a great film? What do people think about Bergman’s only English-speaking production?