Whole Lotta Bergman: Cries and Whispers

More like Cries and Whimpers, as this series is definitely going out with one.

Perhaps something about the milquetoast title of this 1972 film caused me to drag my feet on viewing the last film in my mini five-film Bergman series, as it took a whole month after my last movie to watch it, whereas each of the others had taken about two weeks. Whatever the reason, finally watching the movie made me realize that my foot-dragging was justified.

Put simply, with greater elaboration to follow, Cries and Whispers became the only movie in the series that I actively disliked. And I kind of actively disliked it a lot.

Which is strange, in a way, because the film is probably most closely related in theme and overall tone to The Silence, which I think of as my favorite film I watched for this series (yes, even more than Persona). Both The Silence and Cries and Whispers contain estranged sisters, one of whom is very sick, who tell each other they hate each other. And both movies rely so heavily on silence on the soundtrack that each one makes a kind of reference to it in the title.

But that's where the comparison ends.

Cries is set in a palatial mansion sometime in the 19th century. A cancer-stricken woman, Agnes (Harriet Andersson), is in the last days of her life. Her two sisters, Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin), are at her deathbed, but they have not been close to Agnes in life for many years now. Only her dutiful and devout servant, Anna (Kari Sylwan), can provide her a modicum of comfort as her physical pain becomes increasingly agonizing. While they are waiting for the inevitable to arrive, the characters indulge in remembrances of their earlier lives in this mansion, when they were younger and comparatively healthier (both physically and mentally). One recalls an affair with a handsome doctor. Another recalls her husband's possible infidelity. A third thinks fondly of her mother, now two decades dead. When Agnes finally passes, the nature of these remembrances grows more surreal, and the women appear as though they may be losing some grasp on their tenuous sanity.

I should probably highlight two crucial differences between Cries and all four of the other films I watched, all of which were made in the 1960s, and three of them within a three-year window:

1) Cries is the only film not set in or close to present day, and

2) Cries is the only film shot in color.

I suspect the second was more a problem for me than the first, considering that two of my most cherished Bergman films -- The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring -- are set in the very distant past, much longer ago than the 19th century. But the second was kind of a big problem. To make another generalization, I just don't think I like color Bergman films very much. That's a very broad statement and one that is easy to poke holes in, considering that the only other color Bergman film I've seen -- Fanny and Alexander -- was a movie I ended up liking quite a bit. Still, when I was watching Fanny and Alexander, and especially as I was struggling to get into it, I noted that it didn't feel like a Bergman film. Seeing Bergman in color was kind of like hearing Charlie Chaplin talk -- there was just something off about it. I like my Bergman in black and white, and that's all there is to it.

What's funny is that this film was actually lauded for its cinematography to the point of winning an Oscar for it. Its deeply saturated red tones were considered by 1972 audiences to be something truly sublime, whereas I found them actively displeasing to look at. But that isn't where this movie's Oscar love ended. I find it quite difficult to believe, since a movie like this wouldn't stand a chance today, but Cries and Whispers was actually nominated for best director and best picture as well. In fact, it was hurried into U.S. theaters in 1972 -- before its Swedish release date -- just to capitalize on its warm festival reception and its potential to garner the numerous Oscar nominations it ended up garnering.

I just don't see it, and it makes me wonder if I am really so out of sync with other people on Ingmar Bergman. I found this film to be a painfully protracted, even torturous exercise. It is so determinedly slow-paced that I could only watch a half-hour of it the first night before falling asleep, but then just to be sure I gave myself plenty of opportunity to fall in line with its rhythms, I watched it again from the start the next night. I didn't get into those first 30 minutes any more on a second viewing, and the movie probably only got worse from there.

Maybe Cries and Whispers was the first time I have been willing to admit to myself that Bergman really may have been the kind of arthouse director you make fun of when exaggerating the pretensions of arthouse directors. Maybe after seeing some of that in his other films, but finding plenty else to redeem them, I truly felt the accumulation overwhelm me by the time he made Cries and Whispers. I mean, even the title is almost self-parody for an arthouse film. A cry and a whisper can each be viewed as excessively dramatic methods of expression, and to intimate that this film is filled to the brim with such excessive expression is almost to point out one's own absurdity.

I've talked around what I didn't like about this movie, so perhaps I should give you a few specifics before I cut out and take an extended Bergman break. What frustrated me so much was this movie's lack of specificity. Although you would never accuse Bergman's dialogue of being purely expository, never before this movie have I found that entire passages of dialogue exist only to be completely abstruse. Bergman may have trafficked in abstractions in other films, but that was the exception rather than the rule, as each of those films have a tangible reality and a definite plot from which they may stray -- which they may come close to entirely abandoning. A movie like Persona may be more explicitly an arthouse film in numerous things about its construction, especially as it calls attention to its own status as a piece of artifice, and includes some imagery that has no textual connection to anything going on in the story. But even Persona has more of a plot than what we get in Cries and Whispers, and when it does go off the rails, it does so with conviction. Cries and Whispers, meanwhile, feels like just an amorphous collection of disconnected dysfunction, punctuated by a few superficially shocking moments and images. It just spins and spins and spins its wheels.

Perhaps the problem is that I never felt that the characters had a relationship with each other, a history that had gotten twisted up into the current version of their reality. Significant chemistry passes between the two women blending identities in Persona, or the family struggling to understand mental illness in Through a Glass Darkly, or the spiritually exhausted pastor and his flock in Winter Light, or the toxic pair of sisters and their son/nephew in The Silence. Not so here. These felt like characters in a Samuel Beckett play, butting up against each other in order to explore existential angst, displaying none of the shared history that makes us care what becomes of them.

One thing I will say about Cries and Whispers, however, is that it makes a fitting final film for this series. Back when I first started, one of my readers suggested that it was useful to consume a lot of Bergman films at once -- not only because you could clearly see the themes that straddled the movies, but because it's interesting to appreciate the troupe of actors with whom Bergman associated himself. And true enough, this movie allowed me to easily look back on the movies I'd seen and view this as kind of a reunion of those performers. Liv Ullman appeared in Persona, the first movie I watched. Harriet Anderson was the star of Through a Glass Darkly, which came next. Then Ingrid Thulin appeared in both Winter Light and The Silence, though I must say I had to go back and check because she seems to have a bit of a chamelon-like ability to alter her appearance. The fact that they all convened for a movie that disappointed me is kind of beside the point.

Okay! This has been a great education on Bergman. Just as a way of wrapping things up, I will list the films in order of my preference, and the star ratings I gave them on Letterboxd:

1. The Silence (1963) - 4 stars
2. Persona (1966) - 4 stars
3. Through a Glass Darkly (1961) - 3.5 stars
4. Winter Light (1962) - 3 stars
5. Cries and Whispers (1972) - 2 stars

Now ... who should I do next?

Whole Lotta Bergman: The Silence

As we get closer, chronologically, to Persona -- the movie that started this series, but came later in Ingmar Bergman's career than the ones I've watched -- I'm starting to see a thematic shift toward the type of preoccupations on display in that 1966 film.

The Silence is a good example of that.

It's the third of three movies that came to constitute an informal trilogy on faith, at least in terms of how Bergman thought about them in retrospect. But it is far less overtly about faith than either of the previous two, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light. In fact, The Silence dives headlong into a sexuality that would also make a significant appearance in Persona, but had only been hinted at in Glass and Winter.

Never one to be particularly heavy on plot, Bergman here offers up perhaps the flimsiest narrative of any of his films I've seen -- which is not a complaint in this case. The story is basically this: Three people -- two adult sisters and their pre-teen son/nephew -- are returning to their home via train from a trip to an unnamed foreign country. They get waylaid in a different unnamed foreign country because the boy's aunt is sick and can no longer continue travelling. While waiting for her to convalesce, the boy and his mother explore the hotel, and some small amount of the city it resides in. Gradually it is revealed that the relationship between the two sisters is toxic, and neither of them may have what you would consider a healthy relationship with the boy.

I understand that to Bergman, the title The Silence represents God's silence, and though that's definitely one available interpretation, it's not the one I find most compelling. Silence takes on many forms in this movie, not the least of which is that the soundtrack itself goes through whole patches where there is almost no noise. There is of course no music, which is not at all a surprise with Bergman, but sometimes there is such an absence of other noise in this movie that it becomes deafening, to use the old cliche.

Clearly, one other form of silence is the silence of the confessional. If I didn't know Bergman was viewing this from a faith standpoint, I mightn't have reached that conclusion on my own, but both of the women in this movie have characters who function as priests taking their confessions. As they are stuck in a country where they do not speak the language, they can barely communicate to the two other key characters in the film -- a footman who waits on the sickly sister and gets her various balms (medicinal or otherwise), and a lover the healthy sister takes. Neither character is actually mute, but they barely speak at all, and because they don't understand what the sisters are saying anyway, the sisters can confess all kinds of psychological and emotional madness to them without any repercussions.

And what a bunch of dysfunctional crap these sisters have between them. The one at death's door is a more bookish type, a translator of literature, who appears envious of what her sister has (a son, the attention of men). The healthy sister is a voluptuous type who effortlessly ensnares members of the opposite sex, who hates her sister for her sister's resentment, etc. We eventually learn that they both seem to want the other dead, and they both are oddly affectionate with the young boy, standing too close to him and petting him in ways that verge on the unseemly.

The boy is another story. He has clearly become confused by the unusual attentions of these two women, and has a kind of curiosity that cannot be sated. Much of his time is spent scampering around the hotel, seeing things he shouldn't be seeing and having little mini-adventures (like when he comes across a troupe of performing midgets). Bergman's camera in these scenes is that of a formalist, which hasn't been as evident in some of his previous work. There's a certain spookiness to these scenes that makes a person wonder if Stanley Kubrick received some inspiration for The Shining from the hotel in The Silence.

And this boy -- he's an odd duck. I think I came in with a preconceived notion of his weirdness, as Bergman uses the same actor -- Jorgen Lindstrom -- for the unshakable opening to Persona three years later.

I mentioned sex earlier. Bergman includes several scenes of highly eroticized female bodies, including two people having sex in a public cabaret and the main character Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) beating the summer heat by washing her large breasts in a sink. Anna also recounts a fictitious story of a sexual account with a man, which we will again see (to great erotic effect) in Persona. I'm not sure why I call specific attention to this, except that it kind of flies in the face of my understanding of social morays at the time, that nudity and sex were to be seen at all in a film from the early 1960s. They also seems like an odd outcome from the guy who made The Seventh Seal. However, this film (along with Persona) leaves no doubt about the modernist sensibilities of Bergman as a director.

What I love most about this film (and you can probably tell that I loved it) is just how weird it is, and how little it involves the excessive telling of characters' thoughts. Not that I viewed the tell-don't-show approach of the previous two films in the trilogy as necessarily a weakness, but I now realize I considered the dialogue in those films somewhat didactic. The Silence, perhaps appropriately given its title, is far more reliant on nuance and viewer interpretation of events, and has the courage to resemble a nightmare at numerous moments throughout. Bergman's camera focuses in on details that speak volumes, including, quite memorably, the various gnarled parts of the sister Ester's aspect while she's in the deepest throes of her sickness.

Okay, just one Bergman film left from the five I borrowed. I'll finish off this little series of mine in another couple weeks by jumping forward nine years (and finally past Persona in the chronology) to 1972's Cries and Whispers.

Whole Lotta Bergman: Winter Light

The shorter Ingmar Bergman's movies become, the more they are starting to seem like plays or cinematic exercises than full-on movies. Winter Light, at a scant 81 minutes, is a perfect example of that trend.

The last movie I watched, Through a Glass Darkly, was very much like a play in the sense that it took place in an around a single house on an island -- a play-like setting if ever there was one. But at least in that film there were a number of exterior scenes. Winter Light, the second of three films that Bergman retroactively labeled an informal trilogy exploring faith, manages to compress things even further. It does have about one outdoor scene, but the rest are interiors -- perhaps a reflection of how the characters are looking inward as they struggle with their own core beliefs.

I knew Winter Light might seem long for an 81-minute movie when it spent its opening 13 minutes on just a church service. Yes, this service does introduce the main characters, but only by showing us their faces as they either perform or receive the service. A lot is intended to be inferred from the attendance of this service (sparse) and the expression of the officiant (strained, weary). But nothing more expository occurs during those 13 minutes than the last 13 minutes of a Christian service in a small church in some small Swedish town, in winter.

We come to learn that the pastor, Tomas, is not only worn down physically, as he has a cold, but also spiritually, as he lost his wife to disease and has since come to question his whole perspective on the very existence of God. As such, this is about the most overt case of a theme that exists covertly in most of Bergman's texts -- the individual's relationship with his God. Here we have a person who is supposed to have an actual relationship with God, in the traditional interpretation of the role of a religious figure, and if the crisis in his faith is such that he is questioning whether God even exists, what hope do the rest of us have?

In another trademark Bergman approach that we see later in Persona, the film moves to a segment in which the pastor's more recent lover (Ingrid Thulin), now an ex, reads a letter she wrote to him, for unbroken minutes of film on end. With only a single cutaway, we see her "perform" the letter -- though it's actually just a visualization of Eric reading it to himself. We learn a little bit about their relationship (she also attended the service and appears "for real" in other parts of the movie) and just what kind of emotional malaise they all find themselves in. Added to this is another parishioner, played by frequent Bergman collaborator Max von Sydow, who is so despondent over nuclear tests by the Chinese that he is contemplating suicide. This very material sort of depression is contrasted with the more existential depression of the pastor himself.

There's a lot of interesting stuff going on here, but I must admit that it does feel more like bits of ideas than a complete narrative. This lack of cohesiveness was another contributing factor to the movie feeling longer than it should have felt. However, I'm starting to get the sense that this is more typically what is thought of when we talk about Bergman and his films. Those that qualify as epics in one way or another -- such as The Seventh Seal, or I would argue Wild Strawberries in a slightly different way -- are perhaps more the exceptions to his normal mode, and Winter Light may be more typical.

But the only way to know for sure is to keep on keeping on, and seeing what I get next in The Silence.

Whole Lotta Bergman: Through a Glass Darkly

As I recently told you, I have been loaned five Bergman movies by a friend who needs them back relatively quickly. He's placed no deadline on the return, but it's implied, I think, that I am going to make a good faith effort to watch them with at least a moderate level of urgency. (This is a guy who has seen over 8,000 movies, more than double what I've seen in maybe ten fewer years, so his pace is a tad different than mine, and I'm desperate to keep up.)

So I've made a commitment to watch about one every fortnight -- for you Americans, that's a British/Australian term I'm borrowing that means "two weeks" -- and then quickly include my thoughts on the film here.

First up was Persona, which I wrote about here. (Actually, Persona got the short shrift -- I had to introduce the Whole Lotta Bergman series, and spent the lion's share of that post doing that.)

Now I've made my way to Through a Glass Darkly, as I will go chronologically from here. Made in 1961, this is the earliest of the ones I have remaining.

Referred to as a "chamber piece," Darkly features just four characters on the island of Faro -- which I understand becomes a recurring setting in later Bergman films. Its contained location and small character count made it an obvious contender for the stage -- though strangely, that only happened for the first time four years ago, when the movie was nearly 50 years old.

The main character is Karin (Harriet Andersson), the daughter, brother and husband of the other three characters (Gunnar Bjornstrand, Lars Passgard and Max von Sydow, respectively). The four seem like they haven't a care in the world when the film begins with them scampering in from a quick dip in the sea, laughing and shouting to each other. Little could be further from the truth. Karin has just been released from an asylum, where she was being treated for the all-consuming effects of schizophrenia. The other characters are all naturally distressed about what has befallen the beautiful Karin, but they have very different ways of handling it. David, her father, has both run away from it (he has just returned from a long trip, and plans to make another) and been perversely drawn to it (he has been compelled to document her condition as fodder for his writing). Minus, her brother, loves his sister, but is also sexually frustrated and is especially susceptible to the teasings and provocations brought on by Karin's disease. Martin, her husband, comes closest to pure support that comes without preconditions. Over the course of 24 hours on the island, the characters must assess in their own ways whether they think there is any possibility that Karin can be cured -- a near medical impossibility, as David discovers -- and what they will do about that.

As many if not most Bergman films are, Through a Glass Darkly is a case of the auteur grappling with his feelings about God. Conscious of her own condition and eventually conscious of its inability to be cured, Karin latches hold to this idea that God is behind the wallpaper in the attic of her father's summer house on the island. She feels that if she can only hear what God is saying to her, she will be saved. I've written before, when discussing the works of Carl Theodor Dreyer, that it was clear that Bergman was influenced by his Danish predecessor, and Through a Glass Darkly seems to be one of the most direct examples of that. As Karin is rendered into a kind of simpleton through her disease, she seems to be a clear echo of the character Johannes from Dreyer's Ordet, who has also lost his sanity and believes he is Jesus Christ.

Bergman's other key obsession is, of course, mortality, as one character speaks of having attempted suicide and been saved by a kind of divine intervention. Death hangs around this movie almost as much as it (literally) hangs around The Seventh Seal, as the unspoken question surrounding Karin seems to be whether she would be better off dead than suffer through the extreme emotional turmoil of her condition. Her own actions veer toward the suicidal, and we wonder if learning that her condition is incurable hasn't unleashed a death wish that will soon be achieved -- either within the running time of the film or soon after.

Andersson is simply astonishing in the lead role, one of those meaty roles for women that any actress would want to play (the stage version was originally to have been essayed by Cate Blanchett, and Carey Mulligan has also played the role). She is truly tormented in this way that is also strangely sexualized, in what is starting to emerge as another obsession of Bergman's -- that focus also made an appearance in The Virgin Spring, and will do so five years later in Persona. Andersson's performance is both haunted and erotic in a way that is discomfiting.

As striking as this film is in many ways, it may actually be my lowest rated Bergman film at only 3.5 stars. That of course speaks to the overall strength of his filmography more than anything about Darkly in particular. Darkly may actually be a four-star movie (or higher), but it's suffering a bit from my ongoing reevaluation of which movies get which star ratings. In all probability, Bergman is the type of filmmaker whose every film deserves at least four stars.

The reason I'm inclined to rank this one "lowest," as it were, surely has something to do with the fact that I had to finish its last hour between midnight and 1 a.m., using all kinds of artificial stimulants (purely of the food and drink variety) to keep myself awake. I also think that now that I'm becoming more familiar with Bergman's themes, it's easier to recognize which films I consider major considerations of those themes, and which minor. Just because Through a Glass Darkly seems relatively minor in the grand scheme of Bergman, though, doesn't mean it's not powerful and memorable in its own right.

I've discovered that Through a Glass Darkly is the first in an informal spiritually-themed trilogy that includes Winter Light and The Silence, both of which are also borrowed from my friend. That means Winter Light is up next, which is appropriate as we get into what's supposed to be the coldest month of the Melbourne calendar.

I'll watch it ... in about a fortnight.

A whole lotta Bergman going on

Thanks to a new Australian pen pal, there's going to be a whole lot more Ingmar Bergman up in this beeyotch.

I'm being a bit intentionally whimsical with -- well, with pretty much my entire previous sentence, but specifically in terms of calling my friend a "pen pal." But the truth is, I've only met him online, so he's sort of the 21st century version of that.

And he did send me five Ingmar Bergman films to watch, the first of which I watched Wednesday night.

Let me give you some history.

I'm part of the Flickchart Facebook group, in which a whole bunch of us discuss various aspects of cinema that we think other people might want to discuss. (Or sometimes, things that no one would want to discuss, but that's another story.) I recently told the group that I'm looking for an appropriate movie to watch as my 4,000th movie, which is probably less than a month away now, as I currently stand at 3,982.

No one could suggest anything where the number 4,000 was in some way significant, and I won't tell you what I've actually chosen to mark the milestone. But one of the byproducts of this discussion was that a Flickcharter living in rural Queensland (but moving to New South Wales) sent me five Criterion discs, all directed by Bergman -- and a sixth disc that will be my 4,000th movie.

I love this.

See, I've decided that Bergman is one of my favorite directors -- this despite the fact that I've seen only four of his films (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring and Fanny and Alexander). When I chose Bergman as one of the first subjects in my Getting Acquainted series back in 2011, I had seen only The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries -- but watched Strawberries again during that series because I couldn't be sure I had actually seen it. Not only did I love Strawberries, but Virgin Spring was a big hit with me, and Fanny and Alexander turned into something really special despite its first hour seeming like an entirely different movie than the two that followed.

Strengthening my newfound love for Bergman was the fact that I watched Federico Fellini for the next entry in that series, and was not nearly so smitten with him. I then established an informal dialectic between Bergman and Fellini, deciding (without any supporting evidence whatsoever) that cinephiles would gravitate toward one of these greats or the other, but not both. I'm sure there are people who love Bergman and Fellini equally, but I decided that I was on the Bergman side of this arbitrary divide I had set up between these two great auteurs of world cinema.

But then in the three years since then -- not another Bergman film.

Time to rectify that -- in a major way.

I don't recall exactly how Bergman entered into the discussion on the day we talked about my upcoming 4,000th, but my "pen pal" made me an offer to send me Persona through the mail -- he being one of the only others in the group who lives in Australia. I let the offer grow stale for about a week, not wanting to cruelly accept a casual offer, but did ultimately accept it, and a few days later a package arrived in the mail. (I should say that this particular cinephile passed 4,000 some years ago. He's up over 8,000 -- and is ten years younger than I am. Now that's a life well spent.)

What I wasn't necessarily expecting, but what he alluded to in somewhat oblique terms, was that there would be four other Bergman films squirreled away into the Persona DVD case. They are:

Winter Light
Through a Glass Darkly
The Silence
Cries and Whispers

With my friend's help, I will have more than doubled my Bergman output by the time I'm done with this.

It will probably also be the highest concentration of films by one director I will have seen in such a short amount of time, as the Getting Acquainted series introduced me to no more than three films by any of the directors I studied (though I also studied actors, a producer, and a studio).

And it will be a pretty short amount of time, as I don't want to abuse this guy's good will by hanging on to his movies forever. I already feel guilty enough about him dropping seven bucks on shipping for a person he's never met in the flesh, and as some sort of compensation, have already told him I will send him a yet-to-be-determined cinematic artifact of some level of curiosity when I return the movies to him.

I do have a practical deadline of sorts as well. I mentioned earlier that he is moving to New South Wales. Well, this will only be for a six-month period, after which he, his wife and his newborn son are moving to ... South Korea for two years. I'm unclear on whether it was decided that I should return the movies to him before this, but I'm thinking yes. Besides, I have no idea how to mail something to South Korea.

So I think I will try to watch about one per week until they're done, which should allow me to get them back to him before the end of August. If I'm so moved, I might choose this space to share some of my thoughts.

Not this time, though -- and that may be because I'm still trying to work through exactly what I think of Persona. Parts of it are breathtakingly eerie, but parts of it verge on a parody of an art film, the kind Wayne and Garth were making when they filmed that bit with Madonna. You remember the early 1990s, don't you? The breathtakingly eerie parts win out, but perhaps not by the margin one would think. I don't know, I'm still deciding.

From here I might as well go chronologically, I guess, which would put Through a Glass Darkly up next.

And sometime before I'm finished, my movie clock will strike 4,000.

Stay tuned.

Getting acquainted with ... Ingmar Bergman

This is the second in a monthly series in which I watch three films I haven't seen previously*, which feature a star, director or other creative talent I need to get to know better. I will talk freely about the movies in question, so consider this your spoiler alert.

*-usually haven't seen, as you will see below

I kind of surprised myself when I decided to get better acquainted with Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, because I saw The Seventh Seal at a relatively young age, and that made me feel like I had a leg up on other potential Bergman viewers my age. See, The Seventh Seal is my dad's favorite movie (I was going to say my dad's favorite movie growing up, but that honor goes to The Day the Earth Stood Still), so I came to it a lot sooner than I would have otherwise. I also immediately loved it, even though I was at an age (mid-teens, probably) where that was no guarantee. So I've always thought myself to have an affinity to Bergman.

But then, I went the next however many years totally Bergman-free, leaving me eventually Bergman-deficient.

Or did I?

In only the second month of my Getting Acquainted series, I'm already cheating on the rules. But I didn't realize that until I'd already watched the first movie on this list. Read on ...

Wild Strawberries (1957, Ingmar Bergman). Watched: Saturday, March 5th

As I've told you before on this blog, I have an Excel spreadsheet that contains a supposedly complete list of every film I've ever seen. Perhaps too complete.

There are probably some films that I've seen that aren't on this list -- there would have to be, right? -- but those films are very abstract, since it's hard to spend too much time focusing on something that isn't there. The reverse, however, is very easy. If you have a movie on this list that you're not sure you've actually seen, it can eat away at you. You want to take the list's word for it, and in a way, you have to. But is the list really right?

One such movie is Barry Levinson's Tin Men, which is on my list despite the fact that I'm fairly sure I haven't seen it. I have it rented right now from Netflix, to correct that mistake. Another is Bergman's Wild Strawberries.

The confusion with Wild Strawberries came from the fact that I had certainly seen parts of it. In my senior year in high school, I took a class called Art of the Film, which surely bears a large responsibility for making me the film lover I am today. Our film teacher didn't see it fit to schedule an entire Bergman film into our viewing agenda, but he did show us clips from a couple Bergman films. I remember very clearly the famous dream sequence from Wild Strawberries, where Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjostrom) sees the carriage going along the quiet street. There are a number of memorable moments in this sequence: the man whose facial features are pursed into themselves; the carriage wheel repeatedly slamming against the post; Borg peering into a coffin and seeing himself looking back at him. In fact, it was in the context of watching this scene in film class that I was first introduced to the word "doppelganger."

But had I ever seen the whole thing?

This was the question I asked myself in 2011, looking at my list and knowing that I've been keeping it for something like 20 years. At any point during that time I could have legitimately added it after having seen it. Or, I could have added it from the start, misremembering my viewing of parts of Wild Strawberries as a complete viewing. And even thought Getting Acquainted is supposed to be about seeing movies I haven't seen before, I decided it was worth the risk -- if only to give myself an excuse to be sure I'd seen it.

(I realize this is a lot of text expended on something that doesn't have anything to do with whether I liked the movie or not, so I'll get to it.)

After watching Wild Strawberries, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I did see it -- exactly when and where, I can't remember. And I'm a bit ashamed of myself for not having been more certain, because it's quite simply a brilliant film.

What I associated most with Bergman from The Seventh Seal was a) the exquisite chiaroscuro cinematography, and b) a constant grappling with the unknowables of life, death and the spiritual world. I got both of these in spades in Wild Strawberries. Since I've already gone on and on with an endless preamble, I'll try to limit myself in talking about the particulars of this film. But let me just say that the movie is a wonderful journey -- a literal journey as Professor Borg makes a road trip to receive a prestigious award, but a concurrent emotional journey into the man's past, into his dreams, into his very subconscious. There's no real indication that this man is about to die, except for that he's in his 70s (his exact age is revealed at the beginning of the film, but I don't remember what it was). But clearly this man is feeling his own mortality as he accepts an award that serves as a summation of his entire academic career. The reflection it brings about is powerful and deep, as he looks back at himself as a child in his summer home, among other trips down "memory lane" -- though that's way too whimsical a term for what Bergman is doing here.

Perhaps as interesting as the unforgettable dream sequences and waking reveries is the events that transpire on his trip, which starts with just him and his daughter-in-law in the car. First it's revealed that his daughter-in-law resents him and might even hate him, as she blames her husband's antisocial eccentricities -- including an expressed desire to kill himself -- on his father. The dynamic of their relationship changes in beautiful ways over the course of the film. But on the trip, symbols of the issues Borg is grappling with arrive in the form of the people they meet, who become their fellow travelers, including a sort-of love triangle between two young men and a young woman, and a squabbling married couple whose car veers off the road following a near collision with Borg and his companions. The two young men provide an overt outlet for Bergman's philosophical ruminations on faith, as they carry on a fascinating debate about the existence of God.

The wonderful thing about Wild Strawberries is that even though it deals with some heavy stuff, the tone is ultimately light and joyous -- it's intensely life-affirming, even as Borg seems to be knocking on death's door in tangible ways. The film transpires over the course of one day in Borg's life, but Bergman packs in so much more than a day's worth of soul-searching and exquisite moments of grace.

The Virgin Spring (1960, Ingmar Bergman). Watched: Saturday, March 12th

If resolving the "Did I see Wild Strawberries or didn't I?" question was a happy byproduct of getting three Bergman films on my viewing schedule, The Virgin Spring was what caused me to choose Bergman in the first place.

The Virgin Spring hadn't really been on my radar until the past year or so, when it has come up on at least one other film blog I read. It came up in the context of a discussion of how seriously to take various people who claim that they love cinema. The blogger was making the point -- admitting a certain amount of snobbery in himself as he did so -- that he didn't want to have a film discussion with you if you didn't know that Last House on the Left was based on The Virgin Spring. Fortunately, I did know that at the time I read this post -- but I might not have known it only six months earlier. (It's alright, I still consider myself a good film buff.)

I'd only just seen the two versions of Last House on the Left I've seen in the last couple years, as well. The first I saw was one of the worst movies I've ever seen -- David DeFalco's 2005 film Chaos, which I guess was originally envisioned as an overt Last House on the Left remake, but was ultimately unable to secure the rights to the name. (Good thing, too -- it's probably one of the most violently misogynistic movies I've ever seen, without a single redeeming virtue.) In order to get the nasty taste of Chaos out of my mouth, I borrowed my friend's DVD copy of Wes Craven's 1972 original. This I liked much better. I still have not see the official remake of Last House on the Left, which came out in 2009, but I do have a curiosity about it, because a friend of mine was recruited to direct it but turned the job down.

Knowing how violent and depraved the two versions of the story I saw were, I was curious indeed to see how a version from 1960 would handle the same issues. The answer is: in a pretty violent and depraved way, for the time. No, no one's nipple gets cut off with a knife (that actually happens in Chaos), but the rape and murder of 15-year-old Brigitta Pettersson (Karin Tore) is fairly graphic in its own way. The primary physical violence done to her is a blow to the head with a blunt object, but what's really unsettling is the way the men toss her around like a rag doll while having their way with her. It takes a pretty good filmmaker to show essential restraint in the actions being depicted (what other choice did he have in the late 1950s?), yet still leave the viewer shocked and horrified.

Whereas Wild Strawberries has an undeniable lightness in its tone, this one returns to the bleakness of The Seventh Seal -- as well as its approximate time period in history. Not only is there the violence of the original attack, but there's also the violence of the retribution exacted by the girl's father (Max von Sydow, also the lead in Seventh Seal) against the unwitting criminals who take shelter in his house. This involves a lot of furious strangulation and the kind of realistic roughness I didn't think we were really seeing in the movies until a decade later.

The Virgin Spring may not be quite in the same league as Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, but that may be due primarily to the plot-heavy nature of the movie. (Not to say that the plot is complicated, because it isn't -- just that the narrative is perhaps more important here than its subtextual themes.) There's plenty of Bergman's signature touches, particularly the way the light falls in this movie, through openings in walls and ceilings, splashing across the character's faces. This is the Bergman I recognized from The Seventh Seal, even more so than in Strawberries. I also love the incredible subtlety in how the great director directs his actors. The scenes where Brigitta's family realizes that a) she's dead, and b) these are her killers, are handled with such delicacy that it's almost unbearable. Just the imperceptible recognition that creeps across Brigitta Valberg's face as she realizes that her houseguest is unknowingly presenting her with her daughter's blood-soaked garments, as "a gift" (and what a perverse mind to imagine such a thing as carrying intrinsic value) ... it's astonishing. In that one moment when she realizes her daughter is dead, she must contain a flood of grief that wants to escape, because she knows that she'll be killed as well if she acknowledges a relationship with the owner of these garments. Whether it would actually be possible for a human to do that or not, it's an amazing feat of acting and directing.

However, from all this death and darkness "springs" hope. I didn't know what the title meant until the very end. I knew that Brigitta was a virgin -- unlike the envious, pregnant maid who accompanies her on part of her trip and witnesses her murder. But the spring part eluded me. Did it have to do with the season of the year? Perhaps, although it snows for part of the movie. No, the spring is a water source that sprouts from underneath the body of the dead girl, when her family finally finds her. And here's where Bergman's religious soul-searching rears its head again. Upon finding his daughter's body, Herr Tore (Von Sydow) beseeches God, asking why God would turn a blind eye to both his daughter's murder and the brutal revenge he himself is guilty of. As this major crisis of faith is unfolding -- in a time in history when God was the center of everyone's world -- the water source reveals itself, flowing freely from under the body. I was not expecting this and was quite astonished by it.

Fanny & Alexander (1982, Ingmar Bergman). Watched: Saturday, March 26th

Fast forward two decades. Although Bergman continued to write for the screen after this film, he only directed one more film in his career after Fanny & Alexander, which I understand is considered by some to be his most accessible and popular film.

Well, I considered that accessibility to be highly in doubt when I saw how long the thing was. Fanny & Alexander was one of the first films my wife added to our Netflix instant queue after we got our BluRay player capable of streaming movies. In those early days I just loved scrolling through the titles, which also show the movies' running times. I couldn't quite believe my eyes when I saw that Fanny & Alexander was three hours and nine minutes long.

Consider the incredible storytelling economy of the first two films discussed here, which run 90 minutes and 88 minutes respectively, and you'll share my disbelief that Fanny & Alexander runs longer than both of those films combined. That imposing length makes it a near impossible viewing in the baby era, and I dismissed it as such for the first six months we had our BluRay player. However, once Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring each asserted their own compelling reasons to be watched this March, it seemed only logical that I should hazard a viewing of this movie that was also on the cusp of being watched in its own way, since it was already in our queue. Even if I'd have to watch it over several sittings.

Well, I did chop up my viewing of Fanny & Alexander, but not as much as I imagined I'd have to. A couple Wednesdays ago I watched the first 20 minutes. I'd been planning to watch more, since my wife was out for a couple hours and I knew I'd have an uninterrupted period to focus on it. But then I realized that this was also my opportunity to watch Survivor in real time, rather than having to shift my viewing to 11 o'clock at night when I'm falling asleep on the couch. So Fanny & Alexander got shelved for about ten days.

When I resumed last Saturday morning, I ended up finishing. Well, I got as close to finishing as I could manage, having to watch the final ten minutes in two separate sittings, comically enough. (I intended to finish after returning from a wedding that night, but watched only five of the final ten minutes before succumbing to sleep.)

I really liked Fanny & Alexander -- I mean, I liked it a ton. However, I can definitely shave an hour off that movie, and oddly enough, it's the first hour I can shave. Reading up on it now, I'm finding out why -- Bergman distilled the movie from a six-hour TV miniseries. Which is why its first hour is almost entirely a case of laying the groundwork for the two hours to follow.

The basic plot of Fanny & Alexander is that a woman remarries a domineering bishop after her husband dies, and she and her two children (the title characters) must live like prisoners in his fortress of a home. However, none of this plot begins until the movie is more than hour old. The first hour is spent on introducing us to a cross-section of characters -- some of whom will be important later on, some of whom won't -- as they interact over a joyous Christmas Eve celebration in the first decade of the 20th century. This first hour is a visual smorgasbord, as the mansion where the action occurs is sumptuously decorated, and there are songs, dances, feasts and presents. Over this hour we learn about the sometimes-scandalous relationships that exist between the various characters, an extended family both literally and figuratively, which sometimes cross several social classes to make it down to the servants on staff. It feels like Upstairs, Downstairs at a Swedish Christmas.

The thing that's really weird is that almost none of this is essential to what the rest of the movie will be about. It's merely color, so even if it's wonderful color, it's a bit deficient from a narrative perspective.

When the children's father, Oskar, dies, events start to move forward rather quickly, with their mother, Emilie (Ewa Froling), hastily marrying the nefarious bishop Edvard (Jan Malmsjo). If the words "hasty" and "marriage" ring any bells for you, it's no coincidence -- Hamlet's mother Gertrude hastily married Hamlet's uncle in Shakespeare's most famous play. And here's where Fanny & Alexander surprised me again -- it's actually kind of a version of that play, in a strangely overt way.

See, before he died, Oskar, an actor, was rehearsing the role of the ghost in a staging of Hamlet by his theater troupe. Soon after he dies, he begins appearing to young Alexander (Bertil Guve), much as Hamlet's father's ghost appeared to Hamlet. Whether this is in Alexander's imagination or not, we don't know. The dialogue repeatedly explores this, both in talking about the limitless worlds of our imagination, and in the consequences of lying -- a subject of great interest to Alexander's vindictive and abusive stepfather. The more uneasy the relationship gets between Alexander and Edvard, the more it resembles the vengeful agenda of Shakespeare's protagonist against his uncle. This story and Hamlet's story retain a structural similarity in other ways as well -- there's a portion where Alexander escapes the confines of the bishop's home, much as Hamlet is sent away from Denmark in the play, and there's also a story about how the bishop's original wife and children drowned in a river outside his home, which echoes the way Ophelia kills herself in Hamlet. Before all this had fully revealed itself, I was starting to feel pretty smart about making these connections, until Bergman reminded me how blatant he's intending these comparisons to be, through a line of dialogue. Sensing Alexander's hatred for Edvard, Emilie admonishes Alexander that he's not Hamlet, that she's not Gertrude and that Edvard is not Claudius. So much for my apparent incisiveness.

In the end I found Fanny & Alexander to be essentially two very rich, very different movies combined into one. The first part has essentially no plot; the second part has one of the most familiar plots in literature. Mashing it all together is not the most conventional choice you've ever seen, but it works, somehow. The brilliance of Bergman ties it all together. I understand the film is semi-autobiographical, so perhaps it's also his most personal film.

This was not like the other two films in the sense that I didn't recognize the same interplay between light and shadow that I consider to be the hallmark of Bergman's black and white films from the late 1950/early 1960s. That said, it did win an Academy Award for the same cinematographer (Sven Nykvist) Bergman used in The Virgin Spring, if not in the other two films I've been referencing, and it certainly looks gorgeous in all the ways a person would want it to look gorgeous. (It also won Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Art Direction and Best Costumes.) Clearly the film also demonstrates Bergman's career-long struggle with issues of religion, here presenting the primary religious figure as a dogmatic force of sheer malevolence. Interestingly, Bergman also dabbles with other forms of spiritual mysticism, including introducing a couple benevolent Jewish characters, one of whom displays his darker side by acquainting Alexander with voodoo, and helping him use it against Edvard. Not sure how that particular element played at the time, or whether it received any criticism.

Okay! Enough about Bergman. Some of you may be trying to read this quickly on your lunch hour.

And on to April. Like last month, I will keep you in suspense about whose movies I'm watching this month. Check back here around the first of May for a complete recap.