“The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman” at SIFF Cinema: Feb 25 - Apr 30

It is not without reason that Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, "The Master Filmmaker, Who Found Bleakness and Despair, as well as Comedy and Hope", in his indelible explorations of the human condition, appears on every significant critical assessment of 20th century cinema. Look no further than The British Film Institutes' Greatest Films of All Time Poll for evidence. This spring, Greg Olson productions, in collaboration with Stina Cowan, Cultural Director of the Swedish Club presents a series of ten films, restored by Svensk Filmindustri and the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, as “The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman”. This retrospective follows on Olson's highly successful Italian cinema, film noir, Fellini, and Powell and Pressburger series hosted by SIFF Cinema, after Olson's departure from Seattle Art Museum and the discontinuation of their film program. In The New Yorker's "The Immortal World of Ingmar Bergman", Anthony Lane characterized the power of his first significant films from the mid-to-late 1950s as having the grip of a thriller and the elegance of a waltz. During those years Bergman was at the height of his prowess, thanks initially to a string of films spanning "Summer with Monika", "Wild Strawberries", "Smiles on a Summer Night", "The Magician", and "The Seventh Seal", all made in rapid succession in under six years. These were not born out of the ether, but instead the product of an extraordinarily long artistic development. "Summer with Monika", wasn't Bergman's first film, but his tenth. That this body of work stood apart in contrast to the Neorealist school which dominated post-War arthouse cinema at the time, was one of its defining and popular strengths.

Employing an analytic precision to the intellectual and existential disquiet that seemed fiercely at odds with the hedonistic nature of the times, Bergman's cinema centers around a grim obsession with an unflinching micro-examination of emotional confrontation. In-part made possible by his collaborations with two great cinematographers (Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer), and his team of skilled performers. Bergman astonished audiences with the degree to which he was willing to interrogate cruelty, death, and above all the torment of doubt. He used cinema to strip bare these central concerns of life, few directors integrating their personal turmoil into their body of work to the extent that Bergman did. An autobiographical cinema, not simply in the details of the drama drawn from experience, but also in the sense of its spiritual and artistic response to the complexities of marriage, the relation of the sexes, duplicity, illness (both physical and mental), death and the church. His time in the theatre in Sweden as the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, brought to his film work a crucially interrelated set of technique and skill, and with it a devoted body of actors. These would form a locus around repeated roles from Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow, and Liv Ullmann. This body of actors was central to the successful stretch of films following on the notoriety of his initial breakthrough trio of the 1950s. His star continued to shine through the following decade with an Academy Award for "The Virgin Spring", which was echoed the following year when "Through A Glass Darkly" received the Best Foreign Film award at the Oscars. What are arguably his greatest works followed in this period spanning the mid-to-late 1960s, encompassing "Hour of the Wolf", "Winter Light", "The Silence", "Persona" and concluding with "Cries and Whispers" in 1971.

With multiple series of restorations, and repertory representations, the largest body of which thanks to the work of Criterion Collection and Janus Films, Bergman's cinema has been examined and re-examined through the lens of decades. Spanning sixty years and thirty nine films, The Cinema of Ingmar Bergman, was released by The Criterion Collection in celebration of the director's centennial as an astounding testament, housed in a lavish assembly of physical media, essays, printing and binding. Glenn Kenny's review for the New York Times, "Viewing Ingmar Bergman Through a Glass Less Darkly", plumbs the depths of this extravagant set and the riches to be found in its abundance. Criterion's assembly of essays around these central films make for essential reading, beginning with what many consider to be his first true film, "Summer with Monika: Summer Dreaming", to "Wild Strawberries: “Where Is the Friend I Seek?”, "The Seventh Seal: There Go the Clowns", and later, "The Virgin Spring: Bergman in Transition". These essays also documenting the mid-career string of masterpieces, including, "Through a Glass Darkly: Patron Saint of Angst", "Winter Light: Chamber Cinema", "The Silence", and "The Persistence of Persona". At the time of Janus Films' touring, "Ingmar Bergman's Cinema: A Centennial Retrospective", Peter Bradshaw wrote on the repertory theatrical revival of one of his fiercest, sensually brilliant, and unclassifiable pictures in the pages of The Guardian, "Persona: Bergman's Enigmatic Masterpiece Still Captivates".