Well no, this is a true story told to me by one of those people who had to frantically seek for the right kind of toilet in every hotel in Reykjavik.

Laterna magica is full of stories about Bergman's stomach problems and what they entailed. The one that took place in the Eiffel Tower is particularly memorable.

I think Bergman agreed with Nietzsche: "The lower abdomen is the reason man does not so easily consider himself a god."

Interestingly the composer Anton Bruckner also suffered from appalling abdominal problems, and chronic constipation. The latter condition leading some less friendly musicologists to ascribe his prolonged and seemingly endless musical denouements to his medical condition.

And there's always the Ed Woodesque cross dressing antics of Richard Wagner, another great composer of musical longeurs.

Those are all just empty labels and slogans. They can be applied to any director and sound about as persuasive:

"Ozu's first 10 films were crap, Tokyo Twilight is an ugly, trite embarrassment, and there's a lot of boring dross in between ..."

"Antonioni is bollocks. He's just a pretentious fuckwit who doesn't know how to tell a story properly, so he relies on a lot of bullshit symbolism ..."

"Mizoguchi is shite. Ugetsu and Sansho are overrated, Sisters of the Gion is crap, and all the junk he made in between is an embarrassing bore. I had to quit watching The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums halfway through out of embarrassment for the guy. Still better than Theo Angelopolous, though."

"Hitchcock's films are a waste of celluloid. The only good film he ever made was Family Plot, and that's just because Bruce Dern was basically making fun of the movie the whole time. You look in Dern's eyes in certain scenes, and you can actually see him thinking, 'This guy is a great director?' Still, Rebecca works if you read it as a parody of a certain kind of inept thriller."

"Glad to see some Welles hate creeping in here. Citizen Kane is the only halfway-decent thing he ever did, and even that is about an hour too long, and filled with embarrassing symbolism. Plus, it's widely known by those who care to do the research that his supporting actors practically directed the film themselves. I actually laughed out loud when the film revealed that Rosebud was a sled. Still, better than Touch of Evil, starring the great Mexican actor Charlton Heston. What a joke. Welles's voice work in the Transformers movie was pretty good, though."

"Francis Ford Coppola is probably the most overrated director of all time, after Carl T. Dreyer. The irony is that while his early films are still praised by middlebrows the world over, it wasn't until Jack that he began to demonstrate basic competence as a storyteller. I defy you to watch the second half of the Conversation and tell me what the fuck is going on."

"I'm glad to see that people are finally giving up the tired pretense of liking Ernst Lubitsch. There's one director who never knew what to do with sound; his early talkies are a mess, and some of his later work -- I'm thinking of Ninotchka, Heaven Can Wait, and most of The Shop Around the Corner -- is so dreadful, you have to wonder why the studios even bothered to restore it. The first half hour of Trouble in Paradise is okay, though. Too bad he lifted all of those scenes from other directors."

Wait -- this is actually sort of fun.

But can we, like, set aside another URL for this kind of stuff? I sort of value the discussions on this forum.

...as Lars Von Trier and Morton Arnfred highlighted in The Kingdom II, when Dr Stig Helmer (Ernst-Hugo Jaregard) pays repeated visits to a similar facility for - as far as I can see, since it's shot from the bowl's POV - very similar reasons.

You must be a Bergman hater if you like The Touch. I haven't yet met any Bergman fan who can stomach it.

And only "parts" of Face to Face? The original Swedish TV version is one of his greatest works.

Some of "Face to Face" is a bit awkward (the dream sequences); still a great piece. And, yes, I love "The Touch". Passionately.

It's a long time since I saw The Touch, but I remember thinking that Bergman was trying to say something about the Jews. The Elliott Gould character is a fish out of water among the dry and aseptic Nordics, a bit like the Coen brothers in Minnesota and among the inhabitants of Fargo.

I remember watching the Touch on first release completely stoned with a dear old friend (stoned not an ideal condition for viewing Ingmar.) At the time I thought the scenes of Harriett manically doing the houswork were profound and mesmerizing (not to mention the background muzak.) Years later I saw it again and realized it must have been the smoke. It IS of some interest if only for some - I think - intentionally wicked humor.

But only months ago this year re-discovered Akerman's great Jeanne Dielmann - could Harriet have been a partial inspiration? But Akermann's film is a sublime meditiation on the face of an actress (a great one) and the slow revelation of a disassociating personality - a total masterpiece.

It was Bibi, not Harriet, Andersson in "The Touch" -- I know, it must've been the ganja.

And the Jewish American guy was Woody Allen!!!

It was on the top of my tongue!

The Touch would have been SO much better had it starred Woody Allen and Diane Keaton.

I find you could apply that statement to almost any movie.

Examples: Jurassic Park, Commando, Children of Men.

The possibilities!

With Commando, presumably we're talking Keaton in the Arnie role and Woody as Rae Dawn Chong?

I've not yet seen Cries And Whispers but the cutting scene you describe sounds similar to the scene in The Piano Teacher. Is there anything in that? If it is filmed in a similar way to the Haneke film it seems that the mutilation would played more for the emotional power rather than just the repulsion of knowing exactly which part of herself the lady is cutting (even though the suggestion of that would probably add another level of discomfort for the viewer).

I was taken a little aback at the criticism of Bergman with his passing - I suppose it goes to show that being a recognised name doesn't exactly equate to having the work be well liked! Rather than feeling that Bergman didn't add anything to cinema except miserablism, I've found many of his pictures deeply felt and with a questioning of the worlds and actions of the characters he creates that often leaves me with an impression of discovering the worlds with his characters and even with Bergman himself. Even some of the later films that don't have that sense of discovery of plot and character and which leave me with the impression that I'm watching a film whose outcome has been somewhat predetermined and set in stone such as The Serpent's Egg or Fanny And Alexander have their own pleasures and perhaps were more accessible to audiences because of the feeling of being in the hands of someone telling them a (superficially) recognisable plot and setting.

I liked the sense of seeing someone wrestle with big questions, even if in wrestling with huge, indefinable vagaries of religion or love Bergman laid the films themselves open to ridicule or for parody.

I loved the way that the style of Bergman's films ranged from pastoral beauty and richly detailed period interiors to stark, bare landscapes, and isolated islands. All giving a feeling of self contained worlds for their introspective characters to talk with each other, tear each other apart, fantasise and dream. Beautiful, theatrical productions in that sense, yet they were also perfect cinema, environments informed by the characters actions and vice versa.

Probably my favourite Bergman film is Through A Glass Darkly, along with Winter Light (I wrote more on my reactions to those films on the threads for the Film Trilogy), and Wild Strawberries, with Shame and Passion Of Anna not far behind. Any filmmaker should be proud to have made even one film of such quality, and these aren't even the most celebrated of Bergman's career.

I'll never forget the long take of Marta reading her letter to Tomas in Winter Light broken after four minutes by the abrupt cut to Tomas's trembling hands rifling through the pages in anguish, crumpling some, dropping some to the floor. How emotion could be conveyed just through the movement of the hands has stayed with me.

Or the horn sounding over the landscape in Through A Glass Darkly.

Or Andreas pacing like a caged animal in a steadily tightening frame, zooming in so far it becomes static in The Passion of Anna, or the long evening conversation in the same film.

Colin the connection between the Haneke and C and W also struck me, although the incident is also recorded in the Elfriede Jelenik novel.

Yet Isabelle's act of self mutilation in the Haneke seems to genuinely arise from the character's own psychology. In the Bergman, Ingrid's gesture just seems to me like something laid on by Bergman for overemphasis, or simply punishment. But I won't go on.

That is interesting. It sounds a little like the mother in The Virgin Spring pouring the candle wax over her wrist in an act of mortification. It was used in that film however, along with the mother's head dress, to make the distinct contrast between how the mother treated herself compared to her cosseted daughter. Were there similar kinds of contrasts being made between the characters in Cries and Whispers?

(I think the answer is that I need to see the film and find out for myself!)

I wonder if Bergman gave Ingrid any explanaton for her act? Probably not.

I just read the Corliss interview with Liv Ullmann about Saraband on time.com where the question of the relationship between father and daughter comes up and Liv says: "You know, when actors do a movie with Ingmar we don't ask, "What do you mean?" or "Is there really incest?" It's up to each of us to make a choice."

There may be something to this, given the persona Ingrid Thulin took up both during and after the Bergman pictures. With the very noble exception of her tender, magnificent performance for Minnelli in Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, (in which she seems to be regrettably dubbed) she became the reigning Queen of Kink for Euro Arthouse. Personal fave roles include the wife of closet gay Ambassador hubbie in Piraeus in Games of Desire, the atrocious Salon Kitty, the Visconti natch and perhaps best of all Mai Zetterling's Night Games - the stillborn baby scene is worth the price of admission alone --Ingrid shrieks "More champagne", laughing maniacally as the dead baby is carried out of the room. It's like Brink of Life on acid.

I have always wondered how much Ingrid's immersion in this stuff arose from her association with Ingmar, or was purely the product of her own impulses. IN any case Isabelle certainly appears to have nobly inherited her mantle of Current Queen of Kink with La Pianiste, Ma Mere and other movies.

In the Assayas/Bjorkman book, Bergman hints at some very serious problem with Ingrid in After the Rehearsal which resulted in that film being 35 minutes shorter than it was meant to be.

Anyway, as regards instructions to actors, nothing beats what Fellini had to say to Terence Stamp.

(I'm new here, sorry if this is an old joke to you).

It's a great ancedote!

Stamp told it here during one of his post-Priscilla Oz sojourns on late night live TV.

Any person or artist who speaks honestly and openly is subject to ridicule. It's much easier to hide behind irony. Bergman had balls of steel and what's more the raw talent to pull it off.

Roger Ebert replies.

Yeah, the Ebert response is really puzzling - most obvious is his calling Rosenbaum "Rosenberg" a few times in the piece. But ultimately more problematic than that is he spends a couple paragraphs tearing down the exact opposite of a point Rosenbaum was making, I suppose because he misread it. Here's what Ebert says:

[quote]Who else but Rosenberg could actually believe that Bergman “lacked Dreyer and Bresson's power to entertain, which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habitsâ€