Another box-set from the BFI full of Bergman treasures, from core catalogue classics such as Fanny and Alexander (1982), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973) to less well-known films such as After the Rehearsal (1984) and From the Lives of Marionettes (1980).
The release of each box-set in the BFI’s Blu-ray four-volume collection of Ingmar Bergman films is a delight. Volume 3 provides some of the Swedish master’s essential works.
In my teens, I was one of the budding cinephiles who ran the Film Club at my boarding school. Once a month, we’d rent an arthouse movie. The films would be projected on the Saturday night.
A work of genius isn't sacred, copyrighted territory. A great film may become a play, a novel a film; the adaptation shouldn't be about fidelity, as Elena Ferrante has written about the latter case, but down to to the director "to find...the language with which to get to the truth of his film from that of the book, to put them together without one ruining the other and dissipating its force".
"One talks, the other doesn’t" is about as crude a description as could be of the Swedish masterpiece, Persona. Profoundly experimental even today, Ingmar Bergman’s film was at base about the intense, vampiric encounter between a mute actress suffering a breakdown and the garrulous nurse assigned to care for her.
1957 was a busy year for a very busy director: Ingmar Bergman made two of his most famous films – The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, several TV dramas, and a number of major stage productions. All the while, he was suffering from painful stomach ulcers, juggling a number of love affairs and breaking through, after a decade of increasingly accomplished and controversial films, as one of the leading film-makers in the world.
The touch is not always light here. Swathes of clunking, cliché-ridden English dialogue threaten to make the star-crossed lovers look ridiculous, and one of them (Elliott Gould) can be a wooden actor at times.
Opera on film's most magical offering, better by some way than Joseph Losey's cinematically tricksy Don Giovanni, at last makes it to Region 2 in this BFI dual-format release.
Could an epic cinematic masterpiece be turned successfully into a three-act play? Confession first: Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander is my No. 1 film.
If you're not going to mention the imaginative genius of Stravinsky, Auden and Kallman within the covers of your programme, and the only article, by the director, is titled "Acting Naturally", then the production had better deliver.