Bergmans röst
Sweden,
1997, 87 min
Shown in 1998
CREDITS
- dir
-
Gunnar Bergdahl
- prod
-
Gunnar Bergdahl, Bengt Toll
- cam
-
Ralph Evers, Stefan Hencz
- editor
-
Robert Stengard
- source
-
Swedish Film Institute, Box 27126, 10252 Stockholm, Sweden. FAX: 46-8-661-1820. EMAIL: gunnor.almer@sfi.se
OTHER
As a little boy, Ingmar Bergman would steal money from his father’s coat pockets to go to the movies. At 78, the Swedish master is still bewitched by the cinema. Although retired from feature film production since his 1983 Fanny and Alexander, he remains active as a scriptwriter, director of television films and avid cineaste who screens a film a day in the converted dairy of his century-old farmhouse. Gunnar Bergdahl, director of the Göteborg Film Festival, gets right to the heart of Bergman’s fascination with the medium. Shot in one day and edited into eight “acts,” Bergdahl’s first documentary is a filmed conversation in which the camera takes the place of the viewer. The powerful simplicity and sober understatement of the setup, free from clips, music or commentary, lends an unexpected intimacy and immediacy to the film, making it a cinephile’s feast. Bergman, framed in a fixed closeup, is contagiously enthusiastic about the creative process, emotions in film, his fascination with the closeup and his favorite films, ranging from Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev to the “dazzling” Independence Day. He draws analogies between film and music, hypnosis and gambling, yet insists that above anything else, cinema has given him a sense of “wild, irrational, constant joy” that remains ultimately undefinable: “If you really love, you can’t say why you love.”
—Petra Hammerl
FACTOID #1
The Festival has screened many debuts, both short- and feature-length, by some of cinema’s most influential artists including Juan Antonio Bardem, Jane Campion, Roman Polanski, Melvin Van Peebles and Lina Wertmüller.
