Ingmar Bergman, a hundred years of history suspended between philosophy, existentialism and fantasy – Cinema – Show

Born 100 years ago, Ingmar Bergman : 14 July 1918. For the occasion, among others, a useful volume of Roberto Chiesi, Ingmar Bergman (Gremese ) and Sky Arte today broadcasts the documentary Bergman 100. The life, the secrets, the genius of Jane Magnusson (Bim distribuzione), which inevitably only partially accounts for the greatness of the director. scene. Moreover, his biography has not offered many calls, and his cinema is not easy to explain. But not because you are dealing with difficult topics. On the contrary: because these themes are likely to make the most of the true soul of his cinema.

Ingmar Bergman

Bergman is one of the directors who have had more than 39 influence to make the film a "serious subject", by a generation of Europeans and not just by those who looked at the society of well-being. His films dazzled the directors of the new wave, in the sixties he took her seriously for the philosophical problems that he evoked, making a kind of Lutheran existentialist. But Bergman was at first a prodigiously balanced director of prose style and sudden jumps of fantasy.

Today, his cinema surprises a certain taste for comedy ( Smiles from a night in the summer The Eye of the Devil, About All These … ladies ), but above all the tactile luminosity, both in the claustrophobic scarlet interiors of Whispers and cries and in the open-air filming of A summer of love or The Seventh Seal (seeing him again in Piazza Maggiore this summer made us discover how much light there was in this medieval macabre dance). It is still striking for its particular taste of bringing down the fantastic in everyday life, the nightmare in the evocation of childhood, which unites it in an unpredictable way to our Fellini . After all, the slum of Rimini was not so far from the Hermit of Fårö: the one Protestant, the other Catholic, but the two great observers of the female characters (Bergman of 39, a more problematic and identified way, Fellini turning them around him in search of "acquittal"; perhaps a relative of Strindberg and the other of Jacovitti, but still great showmen, public fascists and producers, creators of the modern figure of the star-director. And after watching the documentary Magnusson, he wants to draw up a list of titles to begin, in a word, Bergman for dummies .

'Fanny and Alexander & # 39;

1) Fanny and Alexander (1982). Start at the end, from the televised summary of his themes, the magic lantern and astonishment. If desired, it can be pbaded as an ancestor of the author's television series. And still in the scripted genre (as we have already said), we can continue with Scenes from a marriage atrociously definitive work on the couple.

'The seventh seal'

2) The Seventh Seal (1957) . To be able to quote him with the knowledge of facts (once it was a movie to be known) and to understand where most of the cinematographic images of the Middle Ages come from. The most beautiful, however, prefer The face (1958), lighter and more illusory.

"The place of strawberries"

3) The place of strawberries (1957) . Bbad, it is to Bergman as Fellini to 8 and 1/2 . But today, the real thing that strikes the viewer, is the incredible face of the protagonist Victor Sjöström, who was one of the great directors of Swedish cinema and not only.

"A summer of love"

4) A summer of love (1951) [19659005]

'Monica and Desire'

5) Monica and the desire (1953).
may have been seen before the age of twenty, to truly grasp the sense of fleeting time, the beauty and melancholy of the moment. "A film by Ingmar Bergman is, so to speak, a twenty-fourth of a second that transforms and develops for an hour and a half.This is the world between two blisters, the sadness between two beats of heart, the joy of living between two helping hands ": thus, on these films, Jean-Luc Godard, twenty-eight years old, criticism on the point of becoming a director, was delighted to deceive.