Ingmar Bergman: Light and Shadow

December 6, 2007 - December 20, 2007

Through a Glass Darkly, December 13

“When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” Ingmar Bergman once said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.” When Bergman died this past July at age eighty-nine, it was something to make a fuss about. A defining figure in the art-house cinema of the fifties and sixties, Bergman shaped our ideas about what films could be. He saw the cinema, he said, as “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul,” one that could speak of the big questions: faith, mortality, the nature of human connections. In the luminous images of cinematographers Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer and the performances of an extraordinary company of actors—Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, and especially Liv Ullmann—Bergman’s cinematic language, as sensual as it was metaphysical, found its eloquent expression.

Our selection of Bergman’s films offers a chance to remember and rediscover—or discover for the first time—this marvelous director. On the big screen, Bergman’s light still shines.

Thursday, December 6, 2007
7:30 p.m. Wild Strawberries
The film that cemented Bergman’s international reputation deftly interweaves memory, reality, and dream. As an elderly professor recollecting his life’s failures, “Victor Sjöström gives one of the greatest performances of cinema.”—NFT, London

Saturday, December 8, 2007
6:30 p.m. Saraband
Bergman’s final film, revisiting Scenes from a Marriage, is “a work of scathing vitality.”—N.Y. Film Festival

Saturday, December 8, 2007
8:40 p.m. Persona
Exploring the strange symbiosis between a speechless actress and her nurse companion, this is “Bergman at his most brilliant.”—Time Out

Thursday, December 13, 2007
7:00 p.m. Through a Glass Darkly
Bergman’s still-provocative portrait of a young woman sinking into insanity while both family and God fail to save her.

Thursday, December 13, 2007
8:50 p.m. The Silence
Two sisters play out dramas of lust and fear in a foreign land where war looms, an emotional landscape forsaken by God. A work of “staggering integrity.”—Chicago Reader

Saturday, December 15, 2007
6:30 p.m. The Seventh Seal
A medieval knight challenges Death to a game of chess in Bergman’s iconic work of cinematic philosophy. “A magically powerful film.”—Pauline Kael

Saturday, December 15, 2007
8:30 p.m. Shame
“Bergman’s simple, masterly vision of normal war and what it does to survivors. Set a tiny step into the future, the film has the inevitability of a common dream. . . . One of Bergman's greatest films, this is one of the least known.”—Pauline Kael

Sunday, December 16, 2007
2:00 p.m. The Magic Flute
This witty, loving adaptation of Mozart’s exuberant opera revels in its own theatricality, revealing the joy and wonder in Bergman’s metaphysics. “A blissful present, sensuous, luxuriant.”—New Yorker

Thursday, December 20, 2007
7:30 p.m. Fanny and Alexander
This chronicle of an early-20th-century theatrical family, told from the perspective of a young brother and sister, is comic and tragic, opulent and intellectual, mystical and autobiographical. Bergman called it “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”

Series curated by Susan Oxtoby.

PFA wishes to thank the following individuals and institutions for their assistance with this series: Brian Belovarac, Janus Films; Michael Piaker, Sony Pictures Classics; Linda Duchin, New Yorker Films; and Chris Chouinard, MGM.