101 Cries and Whispers

[domino harvey]

I've never found this to be a top tier Bergman and revisiting it hasn't changed my mind, though it's still a strong film. Criterion's transfer is a wonderful upgrade from the DVD, nice to see all those reds with no bleed! I enjoyed the Harriet Andersson interview with Peter Cowie, which often called to mind those great impenetrable John Ford interviews-- lots of corrections and disagreements with the direction Cowie wanted to go, and Andersson comes off as quite puckish and without patience for undue solemnity (maybe too much so, as in her warped insistence that one character's suicide attempt is comical), especially concerning Bergman.

: : kogonada's video essay here is an improvement on the laughable example found on La Dolce Vita (and I do believe he bought a new mic) but it still suffers from the same inescapable pretension in presenting what is not exactly a groundbreaking or original thesis in such a pompous and self-important manner that it feels a bit like that guy in college who'd always give his "fresh takes" to the sheeple that weren't any different than what everyone else has always said. And the repeated Chelsea Girls set-ups really only serve to cheapen his thesis into simple parlour tricks. The poster on this forum who compared his "filmmaking" to a Tumblr photoset wasn't far from the mark! I think it's telling that the video essayist enjoys looking for patterns here, because he is obsessed with repetition, as though repeating something enough times makes it eventually of interest. Criterion, stop commissioning work from this guy. Criterion, stop commissioning work from this guy. Criterion, stop commissioning work from this guy. Criterion, stop commissioning work from this guy. Criterion, stop commissioning work from this guy.

[ptatler]

inescapable pretension in presenting what is not exactly a groundbreaking or original thesis in such a pompous and self-important manner

The double colon in front of his name is enough to send me gibbering into the night. HOWEVER (and this is a bit off-topic)... have you seen the essay he did on DeSica/neorealism? That's the one that put :::::::kogonada!!!! on the map and isn't bad as far as these things go. His piece on the KING OF THE HILL disc wasn't bad, either.

[domino harvey]

I have only seen the two I mentioned and I am less than eager to explore more of his work, but should the opportunity arise I will try to give them the benefit of the doubt

[Gregory]

I've watched portions of two but didn't get all the way to the end of either.
I made it about to about 7:30 in the La Dolce Vita piece before I could no longer stand seeing scene after scene turned into something hideous and irritating—sped up, repeated, run forward, backward, forward, backward, repeat ad nauseam, with dreary mood music adding another pointless layer to it all. The arrogance of it was just too much. If the piece is supposed to be about La Dolce Vita, then I think it's better to focus on it by letting the film and the style in which Fellini made it should be the focus. I like visual essays by people who say something by using clips and language plainly rather than foregrounding the style, choices, and window-dressing of the essayist. The ways the ideas were presented became far too distracting and hard for me to swallow.

The film about mirrors in Bergman is an even better example of how it's unclear to me what he's trying to do (at least in the pieces I've seen). It's really easy to fast forward through every Bergman film, pick out the scenes with mirrors and stick them into a sequence. Add musical backing and a voiceover reading of a famous poem about a mirror and you've got a film, but a rather easy one to make and one that doesn't elaborate anything about Bergman's films. Yes, there are lots of mirrors in Bergman films, and that's the beginning premise of the piece, but then it also ends up being the only point there is, unless the point is not really about Bergman but about :: kogonada and poetry and mood. If he's being tapped so often for supplements about directors like Fellini, Bergman, and Truffaut, then shouldn't there be some really compelling things in those supplements about works by some of the most-written-about and talked-about directors of all time?

When asked why he prefers to remain largely anonymous, he replied that he likes "Chris Marker’s idea about your work being your work." But choosing to be shadowy and anonymous and have a name with punctuation marks and no capital letters calls attention to the mysterious identity and the name, not the work. If the focus is supposed to be the work and not an image or identity, then do I keep looking at the same logo of four dots on his social media profiles, a logo that is then incorporated into the writing of his name? Pushing the envelope with name, image, and identity is not focusing on the work.

I'm not attempting an attack here, just a dissenting tentative view of someone whose films ("sushi"?) have become amazingly popular for reasons I don't understand — popular foremost with Becker, apparently. Like domino, should the opportunity arise, I'll try to give more of these pieces a shot and try to keep an open mind, but then there are so many other supplements that I never have enough time to watch that what makes the cut is inevitably a matter of strict personal priorities.

[domino harvey]

To be fair, he's not just pointing out mirrors and is arguing that the component parts of the film when considered as movements reflect the passage of the characters through the film, with different actions finding "mirrors" within the narrative to further and tether their respective progressions. Again, not exactly groundbreaking, and a weak idea strongly diluted by the carny tactics used in composing the video essay, but credit where it's due &c

[Gregory]

Hmm. Is that really articulated? In this video/sushi?
http://vimeo.com/119452347
Just making sure we're talking about the same thing. If so, and that's what was intended, then I really didn't get the meaning. I didn't see it as arguing anything, but I did get that it wasn't just a random montage of Bergman mirror scenes, though, because the word "candles" in the poem lines up with a mirror shot that has candles in it, "tears" with a scene with tears, "hands" with a scene with hands on the face. Still, for me at least, that says nothing much about Bergman's films. It's just a clever matching game, but I'm not sure the candles in the Plath poem tell us anything about the candles in the corresponding shot. Or, again, I really didn't get it.

[domino harvey]

Just making sure we're talking about the same thing.

Ah, no, we're not! I didn't realize he'd done another Bergman video essay, as the one you've linked to above doesn't appear on the Cries and Whispers disc. The one on the Criterion release is called On Solace and runs something like twelve minutes, but since it concerns mirroring, I thought you were talking about it

[Gregory]

I thought that might be what was going on. I haven't upgraded Cries and Whispers and may not do so. I'm with you in not finding it to be top-tier Bergman. From that era of his career, I'd get far more excited about a Criterion edition of The Passion of Anna.

[Newsnayr]

While I haven't seen the kogonada video essays in Criterion editions, I must say that some of the video essays that he has done for Sight and Sound, particularly the ones focused on Linklater and Koreeda, are well worth checking out.

[zedz]

inescapable pretension in presenting what is not exactly a groundbreaking or original thesis in such a pompous and self-important manner

The double colon in front of his name is enough to send me gibbering into the night.

This is surely the time to repurpose a Veep bon mot: "He's so full of shit he's got two colons in his name."

[hearthesilence]

I was struck by one comment Cowie makes during the on-set footage extra - with the exception of his earliest (and possibly least known) work and Fanny & Alexander (which had been hyped as his last film), Bergman's films were never popular in Sweden. I think Bergman gave a filmed interview where he mentioned that he never thought about box office when he did his films, partly because they were inexpensive and partly because the Swedish film industry was supposedly set up in a way that made those concerns a much lower priority. With all this in mind, it's astounding he had the career he had, not just in stature and relative freedom but also the sheer number of films he made. No art house filmmaker in the U.S. comes close - really says something about the support he got over the years, and it wasn't all public funds.

[MichaelB]

But they were very popular internationally (at least compared with any other Swedish or indeed Scandinavian directors) and didn't cost very much to make. So from Svensk Filmindustri's perception he was a very safe bet indeed.

You see similar processes at work with Eastern European films by domestically controversial directors - Tarkovsky and Wajda may have been thorns in the side of the political establishment, but their films brought in valuable hard currency.

Even the late Jan Nemec was a beneficiary of this process - thanks to some bizarrely Byzantine accounting involving entire blocks of films, Diamonds of the Night was registered as an international hit (it really wasn't!), and so The Party and the Guests was greenlit. Nemec may have had a pretty dreadful experience in his native Czechoslovakia, but when he moved to the US in the 1970s and 80s he found it impossible to make feature films at all - at least according to his own uncompromising standards.

[domino harvey]

For those who ever wanted to hear Burt Reynolds talk about Ingmar Bergman, good news

[therewillbeblus]

I'm always down to hear Reynolds test drive his comic chops during his peak era as dark-horse master comedian