Moderator: MichaelB
Review checkdiscs arrived today, and I can confirm that there are a couple of on-disc extras but not much - trailers for Cries and Whispers and the theatrical cut of Fanny and Alexander.
Does it come with a restoration title card at the beginning of the film or a note in the booklet, preferably with a year dating the restoration? I'm seeing conflicting info elsewhere on whether BFI & Criterion's masters differ. They both seem to come from a 35mm fine-grain master positive, but it's not clear whether the Swedish Film Institute performed a new scan or additional restoration after the Criterion BD (2010).M_A wrote: ↑Thu Aug 04, 2022 6:03 pmI just watched The Magician then compared to screenshots of the Criterion and can confirm that the BFI Blu is a big improvement. It certainly did not look like this!rapta wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 5:52 pmDid someone say The Magician was from a different master too, or am I imagining it? Slightly frustrating to have to consider double-dipping if these all turn out to have better masters than what Criterion used. Can't blame BFI for that though, they're doing an amazing job with these titles, and I own the first set since it had a few exclusives.
I think my mind was playing tricks with me at the time I wrote that, but no it is not a different restoration. I was going to delete that post, but I lost access to that account and had to make this one insteadAxeYou wrote: ↑Wed May 17, 2023 3:02 pmDoes it come with a restoration title card at the beginning of the film or a note in the booklet, preferably with a year dating the restoration? I'm seeing conflicting info elsewhere on whether BFI & Criterion's masters differ. They both seem to come from a 35mm fine-grain master positive, but it's not clear whether the Swedish Film Institute performed a new scan or additional restoration after the Criterion BD (2010).
And just wondering did you view that screenshot on B-R at 1080p? Their default is to downscale screenshots to 720p unless you toggle a setting.
https://slow.pics/c/jeChIaY7
That's great, thank you!M-A wrote: ↑Tue Nov 14, 2023 11:38 amhttps://slow.pics/c/jeChIaY7
The difference is especially noticeable on the background on the left. The BFI isn't perfect either and I suspect the Japanese blu has the best encoding (spread across 2 discs), but of course that version doesn't have english subs.
I thought the only films that the BFI has the rights to are the ones that were previously released on DVD by Tartan, so I'm not sure if they would have been able to release it.A Tempted Christ wrote: ↑Wed Nov 15, 2023 11:08 amSo we know that This Can't Happen Here (1950) was restored by SFI all the way back in 2018 but both Criterion and BFI chose to ignore it. Any reason why?
Didn’t Bergman completely disown this one? I presume there’s an unwillingness to license it outA Tempted Christ wrote: ↑Wed Nov 15, 2023 11:08 amSo we know that This Can't Happen Here (1950) was restored by SFI all the way back in 2018 but both Criterion and BFI chose to ignore it. Any reason why?
This Can’t Happen Here (Sånt händer inte här, 1950)
A spy thriller with the alternative English title High Tension sounds like an unlikely project for Ingmar Bergman to take on, and he later wholeheartedly agreed. Summer Interlude (1951), the film regarded as the first true Bergman masterpiece, was already in the can, but thanks to financial problems on the part of both Svensk Filmindustri and Bergman himself (two divorces + five children = a lot of compulsory commitments) they decided that the most sensible course of action to restore their fortunes would be to make a thoroughly commercial film in a genre with proven popular appeal that might even become a bona fide international hit – to this end, the film was shot in both Swedish and English, with a lead actress (Signe Hasso) who’d spent a decade in Hollywood.
It did achieve international distribution, but no more than that. According to the Monthly Film Bulletin, the English-language High Tension “has obviously been badly cut [to 67 minutes from 84], the continuity being, at times, quite chaotic”. And they were no kinder about the film as a whole: “This very confused production may be termed a Swedish contribution to the current ‘anti-Red’ cycle. The agents are the usual hard-faced thugs who resort to violence at every possible moment, and the story follows the familiar pattern of chases, secret plans and sudden deaths.” A critical and commercial disaster everywhere it played (in Sweden, where the names of Bergman and writer Herbert Grevenius carried considerable weight, some critics wrongly assumed that it must be a satire but then confessed that they didn’t get the joke), it was also openly loathed by its director to such an extent that he later actively colluded in its suppression (“Few of my films do I feel ashamed of or detest for various reasons. This Can't Happen Here was the first one; I completed it accompanied by violent inner opposition.”).
Despite this, Bergman was too much of a professional for this to be apparent from the film itself. Much like his previous purely bill-paying assignment, Music in Darkness (1948), This Can’t Happen Here is a perfectly competent piece of work that’s retrospectively more interesting than the average Cold War spy thriller for its treatment of local Swedish-Baltic political issues that tended to be ignored by more sweepingly generalised West-versus-East confections. Granted, you’d never guess its director without advance warning, and there are times when it seems that Bergman’s regular composer Erik Nordgren is consciously trying to liven things up (most likely with the director’s enthusiastic encouragement), but the retrospective impression that Bergman gives of having been totally detached from the creative process throughout seems to have been a tad exaggerated.
The plot goes something like this. Leading spy Atkä Natas (Ulf Palme) is attempting to defect to Sweden (and therefore the west) from his native Liquidatzia, which we can probably safely assume is a fictional Baltic state of a kind that, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, had been forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union a decade or so beforehand. This comes as decidedly unwelcome news to his wife Irmelin (Hasso), who has settled down in comfortable exile with a new boyfriend (policeman Björn Almkvist, played by Torment’s Alf Kjellin) and an important job as a forensic chemist.
Even less welcome is the discovery that, far from being a defector opposed to his government, Natas is in fact one of their agents, sent to stir up trouble between the Liquidatzian refugee community and their Swedish neighbours in the hope that something worse than the occasional harsh word might break out. This aspect of the film, sadly, has scarcely dated at all, and it seems that one of the reasons for Bergman’s antipathy was his conscience-wrestling about casting actual Baltic refugees with genuine problems vis-à-vis the USSR (not least their enforced inability to contact relatives back home) for greater “authenticity” in a film that by its very nature wasn’t authentic at all. Bergman also felt that their real-life stories were more interesting than the one that he was filming.
Swedish critics’ belief that the film was more of a satire than it actually is may have stemmed from Bergman’s uncharacteristic use of running gags. One involves interrogations (that in some cases encompass torture) being staged to incongruous background sounds, sometimes played deliberately as a drowning-out tactic (one particularly obtrusive use of a big-band jazz record attracts the attentions of an irritated neighbour), sometimes occurring incidentally, such as a crucial moment of tension between Vera and her understandably suspicious fellow refugees taking place to the squawking accompaniment of what sounds like a Donald Duck cartoon playing in an adjoining cinema. A chloroformed kidnap victim is peremptorily dismissed as a dissolute drunk, a gun changes hands with comical rapidity, Stockholm’s famous statue of Sweden’s King Charles XII is politely thanked after it inadvertently inspires a crucial brainwave on Almkvist’s part, and parts of the Liquidatzian language seem to be written backwards (“Natas” is too obvious to need translation, and the first word of the name of the pivotlal Liquidatzian ship Mrofnimok Gadyn becomes “Kominform”, while Google Translate confirms that “ny dag” is Swedish for “new day”). This, albeit absolutely nothing else, foreshadows the invented language seen in Bergman’s The Silence thirteen years later.
Sadly, the murky VHS-sourced dupe that was the only way I could get to see the film wasn’t an ideal showcase for Gunnar Fischer’s location photography, which was highly praised at the time (it was the only aspect that the MFB’s reviewer had any time for) and which I daresay is even more interesting now for its treatment of what are still highly recognisable Stockholm locations nearly 70 years on. Fischer also pulls off some great noirish lighting effects in the studio interiors with distinct (and possibly intentional) echoes of Fritz Lang. One would have to take contrarianism to extremes rejected even by the likes of Armond White to hail This Can’t Happen Here as an undiscovered masterpiece, but I’m glad I’ve had the chance to see it.
Not sure about disowning but he specifically mentions this and The Touch as two of the lowest points of his career. Both Criterion and BFI have put out The Touch on disc and even the restored version of This Can't Happen Here was presented at MoMA so nothing should hold it back licensing-wise. The reasons M-A and MichaelB provided make much more sense, although I'd argue it's still interesting enough to be included in Bergman retrospectives.
It didn't hit me until much later - The Serpent's Egg was a substantial failure. I made myself immune to the rather tepid reaction from the critics. I remained optimistic, refusing to see the film for what it was. After the film's release, my life began to calm down [1976 had been an insane year for him, what with the tax scandal and an exceptionally ambitious stage production of Strindberg's A Dream Play]; then I painfully realised the serious extent of my failure. Still, I do not regret for a moment making The Serpent's Egg; it was a healthy learning experience.
