Bergman Trilogy

THE FLICKS: If one is ever hard pressed to prove the legitamacy of film as art, the works of Ingmar Bergman make the case beautifully. Intensely personal, technically flawless, and emotionally raw, the director’s own obsessions are reflected throughout his career in the cinema. And although many European auteurs followed in his footsteps (Godard, Truffaut, and Fellini among them), none could explore the same psychological depths with a storyteller’s gift for tortured, yet unflinchingly honest, characters. The “Trilogy” is made up of three films that mark Bergman’s move away from the expressionistic style of “The Seventh Seal” toward a more intimate, and often painful, study of the human heart and mind. Bound together by the common thread of “God’s Silence,” Bergman finally addresses the theological questions he had danced about in previous films. A minister’s son who resented the hypocrisy of the modern church, the director had never before faced so many of his own personal demons in such a public display. “Through A Glass Darkly” (Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Film 1954) is the first of these so called “chamber films,” composed like a string quartet with a minimum of players interacting in an isolated setting. Vacationing on a cold windswept island, novelist patriarch (Gunnar Bjornstrand) hosts a family retreat that reveals the dysfunctional secret of his schizophrenic daughter, Karin. Bergman says much of his own creative suffering and guilt in the character of ?, a man so desperate for critical acclaim he is tempted to use his daughter’s illness for inspiration. While the other characters represent the director’s wildly varying views of a higher power. Karin’s schizophrenic vision of a “spider god” is the first step in Bergman’s deconstruction of a higher power as a protective force. “Winter Light,” the most cohesive film of the trilogy (and Bergman’s career), is an undisguised attack against organized religion and the tenets of faith. Although still, the director finds seeds of hope in the character of Anna (), a self-loathing schoolmarm who dedicates her life to Tomas, (Bjornstrand, again), a cowardly small town minister who has lost the strength of his convictions. Shifting between the barren emotional landscape and beautifully sterile photography of Sven Nykvist, “Winter Light” tracks one man’s spiritual and personal downward spiral – and does so under a magnifying glass of intense performances and equally intense close-up (none more so than ?’s six minute monologue directly into the camera). With “The Silence” Bergman has completely crossed over into the warped psyche of his characters. Gone are the questions about God, his presence, his usefulness. In the world of “The Silence,” God does not exist...or if he does, he’s stopped listening. Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindlom star as sisters Anna and Ester, on a cross-country journey through a strange country on the verge of war. Taking up residence in a grand, but nearly empty hotel, the two women wage their own psychological war against each other, with Anna’s 10 year old son, Johan, caught in the middle. Often surreal and sexually provocative, “The Silence” is both a precursor to Bergman’s later work and the final closure on his theological obsessions. It finds the director experimenting with new storytelling techniques (although he rarely worked with children before, most of the movie is told through the eyes of young Johan) and allowing Nykvist to perform more elaborate and subjective camera moves, to the point where the hotel itself with its wide, empty corridors becomes a character in the film. THE FEATURES: Each disc in the collection includes a 10 minute video discussion with Bergman biographer Peter Cowie, along with a theatrical trailer and well-written liner notes. Cowie’s segments are nicely condensed, passing along facts that are both insightful (“Winter Light’s” original title, “The Comminucants,” was much more suggestive of the film’s theme of interpersonal relationships) and a tad gossipy (“The Silence” was Bergman best attended picture due to the controversy surrounding its sex scenes). But the choice extra is a fourth DVD entitled “Ingmar Bergman Makes A Movie,” a Swedish television documentary that captures the director as work in all phases of the production of “Winter Light.” The documentary is broken up by Script, Filming, Editing and Premiere, with behind the scenes footage interspered betweeen lengthy interviews with Bergman by director Vilgot Sjoman. The “how-to-make-a-movie” elements are extraneous, but the insight into Bergman, the man and the moviemaker, are simply priceless. Although how much is real and how much is an illusion is still debatable. The notes explain Bergman re-staged several rehearsal scenes for the cameras and even made Sjoman re-shoot the final interview because he wasn’t satisfied with his comments. Still, the interviews provide moments of off-the-cuff insights, like Bergman’s take on his strengths (“I guess I’m a pretty good director”) his weaknessness (“I need to be in control of people”) and his critics (“they’re just jealous”). FINAL SCORE: A master of the close-up, the Criterion Collection has finally provided us with a close-up of Bergman himself. Not only does each film in the trilogy looks phenomenal, with the almost completely nick and pop free hi-def transfers we’ve come to expect from Criterion, but the fourth disc is a fantastic document of the master at work. This is cinematic art that will look brilliant hanging from the plasma screen on your wall.