Image from Persona from tgnreview.com at https://tgnreview.com/2016/06/27/ingmar-bergmans-persona-cadre-cinematique/
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Image from Fanny and Alexander from theguardian.com at https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/feb/15/fanny-and-alexander-old-vic-london-ingmar-bergman-penelope-wilton
Crisis
With his very first film as a director, made under the mentorship of the silent-film maestro Victor Sjöström, Ingmar Bergman began exploring a couple of the essential themes of his early period: youth pitted against crass society and the tensions between men and women. The eighteen-year-old Nelly (Inga Landgré), who lives with her foster mother in a quiet provincial town, is shaken by the sudden arrival of her birth mother (Marianne Löfgren), who eventually takes her to Stockholm—where Nelly receives a crash course in corruption and wrenching heartbreak. Crisis proved that Bergman had an incipient gift for developing characters and evoking atmosphere on-screen.
A Ship to India
The hunchbacked sailor Johannes (Birger Malmsten) longs to escape his home on a salvage ship helmed by his cruel, drunken father (Holger Löwenadler)—and so does the captain himself, who is slowly going blind and planning to leave his wife and son for a music-hall performer named Sally (Gertrud Fridh). The family begins to unravel when the captain invites Sally to live on the ship, where she and Johannes form a tender connection. Told in flashback and inspired in part by French poetic realism, A Ship to India marks a major evolution in Ingmar Bergman’s early filmmaking, demonstrating his gifts as a conjurer of beguiling images and a dramatist of lacerating emotions.
Port of Call
Strongly influenced by the neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini, Port of Call is Ingmar Bergman’s most naturalistic work. Shot on location in the port of Göteborg by Gunnar Fischer (who would become one of the director’s key collaborators), the film focuses on the tentative relationship between Gösta (Bengt Eklund), a sincere, easygoing seaman, and Berit (Nine‑Christine Jönsson), a suicidal young woman from a broken home. As Berit reveals more about her troubled past, and the couple confront many harsh realities in the present, a meaningful bond begins to form between them. With this confident and disciplined feature, his fifth, Bergman tackled moral and social issues head-on.
Thirst
Intricately structured and technically accomplished, Thirst is an often dazzling examination of people burdened by the past and united in isolation. The principal couple, Bertil (Birger Malmsten) and Ruth (Eva Henning), travel home by train to Sweden from Switzerland, at each other’s throats the whole way. Meanwhile, in Stockholm, Bertil’s former lover, Viola (Birgit Tengroth, who also wrote the stories on which the film is based), tries to evade the predatory advances of her psychiatrist, and then of a ballet dancer who was once a friend of Ruth’s. With this dark and multilayered drama, sustained by biting dialogue, Ingmar Bergman began to reveal his profound understanding of the female psyche.
To Joy
Taking its title from Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” adapted by Beethoven for his Ninth Symphony, this tragic romance opens with a violinist, Stig (Stig Olin), learning of the sudden death of his wife, Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson). During a prolonged flashback, Stig remembers the delights and tribulations of their relationship, back to their early days in the orchestra conducted by the eminent Sönderby (Victor Sjöström), a time when Stig was riddled with self-doubt. An undeniably personal work for Ingmar Bergman, To Joy is a compelling tale of a young man’s struggle with the demons standing in the way of his happiness.
Summer Interlude
Marie is an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student. Her memories of the rocky shores of Stockholm's outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her gloomy present, most of them set in the dark backstage environs of the theater where she works.
Waiting Women
While at a summerhouse, awaiting their husbands’ return, a group of sisters-in-law recount stories from their respective marriages. Rakel (Anita Björk) tells of receiving a visit from a former lover (Jarl Kulle); Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson) of agreeing to marry a painter (Birger Malmsten) only after having his child; and Karin (Eva Dahlbeck) of being stuck with her husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) in an elevator, where they talk intimately for the first time in years. Making dexterous use of flashbacks, the engaging Waiting Women is a veritable seedbed of Bergman themes, ranging from aspiring young love to the fear of loneliness, with the finale a masterpiece of chamber comedy.
Summer with Monika
Seventeen-year-old Monika and nineteen-year-old Harry Lund meet in a cafe. They spend a happy summer together, and soon Monika discovers that she is pregnant. They marry, but Monika is bored with taking care of the baby and the responsibilities of married life. She begins an affair with a former lover and their marriage falls apart.
Sawdust and Tinsel
A relationship between a turn-of-the-century traveling circus owner and his performer girlfriend suddenly changes, when they pull into the town where the owner's wife and children live, whom he hasn't seen in three years.
A Lesson in Love
One of Ingmar Bergman’s most satisfying marital comedies, A Lesson in Love stars the droll and sparkling duo of Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand as a couple deep into their married years and seeking fresh pastures. Björnstrand’s gynecologist falls for one of his patients (Yvonne Lombard), while his wife flounces off to Copenhagen to renew her fling with a sculptor (Åke Grönberg). Deftly interspersing scenes of farce with interludes of tranquil reflection, A Lesson in Love serves as an aperitif before the full-blown comic brilliance of Smiles of a Summer Night the following year.
Dreams
Grave and witty by turns, Dreams develops into a probing study of the psychology of desire. Susanne (Eva Dahlbeck), head of a modeling agency, takes her protégée Doris (Harriet Andersson) to a fashion show in Göteborg, where Susanne makes contact with a former lover, and Doris finds herself pursued by a married dignitary (Gunnar Björnstrand). With its parallel narratives and subtle compositions, this film marked a transition between Ingmar Bergman’s early explorations of affairs of the heart and the more somber and virtuosic masterpieces to come later in the fifties.
Smiles of a Sumer Night
A sharp satire about eight Swedish aristocrats who become romantically and comically intertwined over a single weekend.
The Seventh Seal
Antonius Block is a knight, who along with his squire, are returning home from the crusades. Black Death is sweeping their country. As they approach home, Death appears to the knight and tells him it is his time. Antonius challenges Death to a chess game for his life. Antonius and Death play as the cultural turmoil envelopes the people around them as they try, in different ways, to deal with the upheaval that the plague has caused.
Wild Strawberries
An old professor dreams of his own death, and, haunted by memories of his life, determines to open himself to love.
Brink of Life
With The Magician, an engaging, brilliantly conceived tale of chicanery that doubles as a symbolic portrait of the artist as a deceiver, Ingmar Bergman proved himself to be one of cinema’s premier illusionists. Max von Sydow stars as Dr. Vogler, a nineteenth-century traveling mesmerist and peddler of potions whose magic is put to the test in Stockholm by the cruel, eminently rational royal medical adviser Dr. Vergérus (Gunnar Björnstrand). The result is a diabolically clever battle of wits that’s both frightening and funny, shot by Gunnar Fischer in rich, gorgeously gothic black and white.
The Magician
A traveling magician bringing his potions and mystical items with him is challenged by the Minister of Health, who believes the magician to be a charlatan.
The Virgin Spring
After a young girl is raped and murdered, her father plots revenge on those responsible.
The Devil's Eye
The sophisticated fantasy The Devil’s Eye—the last Ingmar Bergman film to be shot by the great Gunnar Fischer—is an engaging satire of petit bourgeois morals. The devil (Stig Järrel) suffers from an inflamed eye, which he informs Don Juan (Jarl Kulle) can be cured only if a young woman’s chastity is breached. So the legendary lover ascends from hell and sets about seducing an innocent pastor’s daughter, Britt-Marie (Bibi Andersson). Bergman’s dialogue bubbles with an irony reminiscent of his beloved Molière, and the music of Domenico Scarlatti (performed by Bergman’s fourth wife, Käbi Laretei) underscores the joy that infuses much of the film.
Through a Glass Darkly
While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family's already fragile ties are tested when Karin discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, her father, husband, and younger brother are unable to prevent Karin's harrowing descent into the abyss of mental illness.
Winter Light
In this stark depiction of spiritual crisis, small-town pastor Tomas Ericsson performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation. When he is asked to assist a troubled parishioner with his debilitating fear of nuclear annihilation, Tomas is terrified to find that he can offer nothing but his own uncertainty.
The Silence
Traveling home by train through a country seemingly on the brink of war, two sisters--the sickly, intellectual Ester and the sensual, pragmatic Anna--along with Anna's young son, Johan, are forced to disembark in an unknown city in order for Ester to rest. Attempting to cope with their alien surroundings, the sisters resort to their personal vices while vying for Johan's affection, and in so doing sabotage what little remains of their ambiguous relationship
All These Women
Conceived as an amusing diversion in the wake of Ingmar Bergman’s despairing trilogy, this comedy is the director’s first film in color, and it is an opulent visual feast. Working from a bawdy screenplay he cowrote with actor Erland Josephson, about a supercilious critic drawn into the dizzying orbit of a famous cellist, Bergman brings together buoyant comic turns by a number of his frequent collaborators, including Jarl Kulle, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, and Bibi Andersson. All These Women, in which Bergman pokes fun at the pretensions of drawing-room art, possesses a distinctly playful atmosphere and carefree cadences.
Persona
An actress has inexplicably gone mute; a young nurse cares for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference that would prove to be one of cinema₂s most influential ideas.
Hour of the Wolf
The strangest and most disturbing of the films Ingmar Bergman shot on the island of Fårö, Hour of the Wolf stars Max von Sydow as a haunted painter living in voluntary exile with his wife (Liv Ullmann). When the couple are invited to a nearby castle for dinner, things start to go wrong with a vengeance, as a coven of sinister aristocrats hastens the artist’s psychological deterioration. This gripping film is charged with a nightmarish power rare in the Bergman canon, and contains dreamlike effects that brilliantly underscore the tale’s horrific elements.
Shame
An examination of the violent legacy of World War II and a scathing response to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Two musicians live in quiet retreat on a remote island farm, until the civil war that drove them from the city catches up with them there. Amid the chaos of the military struggle, vividly evoked by pyrotechnics and by Sven Nykvist's handheld camera work, the two are faced with impossible moral choices that tear at the fabric of their relationship.
The Rite
Ingmar Bergman conceived this experimental work as a response to his controversial tenure at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. Focusing on four characters—a trio of actors charged with obscenity (Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Anders Ek), and the judge assigned to try them (Erik Hell)—The Rite alternates between criminal interrogations and interpersonal confrontations shown in flashback, leading to a final “performance” that makes for one of the most bizarre moments in Bergman’s filmography. Staged on bare sets and shot almost entirely in close-up, The Rite condenses a decade’s worth of cinematic exploration into seventy-five tense, unsettling minutes.
The Passion of Anna
This drama shot on Ingmar Bergman’s beloved Fårö island describes a mood of fear, isolation, and the longing for connection. Not long after the dissolution of his marriage and a fleeting liaison with a neighbor (Bibi Andersson), the reclusive Andreas (Max von Sydow) begins an ill-fated affair with the mysterious, beguiling Anna (Liv Ullmann), who has recently lost her own husband and son. Bergman’s first color film since All These Women, The Passion of Anna is a sequel of sorts to Shame. It incorporates documentary-style interviews with the actors, blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, lies and truth, dreams and reality, identity and anonymity.
The Touch
With his first English-language film, a critical and box-office disaster, Ingmar Bergman delivered a compelling portrait of conflicting desires. In The Touch, a chance encounter between seemingly contented housewife Karin (Bibi Andersson) and David (Elliott Gould), an intense American archaeologist scarred by his family’s past, leads to the initiation of a torrid and tempestuous affair, one that eventually threatens the stability of Karin’s marriage to a respected local surgeon (Max von Sydow). Upon its release, the filmmaker declared this emotionally complex and sensitively performed film to be his first real love story.
Cries and Whispers
A story of four women's search for spiritual peace. Agnes is dying of cancer and is visited one last time by her two sisters, Karin and Maria. These two become entangled in feelings of jealousy, manipulation and selfishness. Yet Agnes is able to transcend her sisters' pettiness to remember moments of staggering beauty as well as horror.
Scene from a Marriage
Marianne and Johan always seemed to be the perfect couple. But when Johan suddenly leaves Marianne for another woman, they are forced to confront the disintegration of their marriage. Chronicles ten years of turmoil and love that bind the couple despite their divorce and subsequent marriages. Portrays the brutal pain and uplifting peace that accompany a lifetime of loving.
The Magic Flute
A scintillating screen version of Mozart's beloved opera showcases Ingmar Bergman's deep knowledge of music and gift for expressing it cinematically. Casting some of Europe's finest soloists, the director lovingly recreated the baroque theater of Sweden's Drottningholm Palace to stage the story of the prince Tamino and his zestful sidekick Papageno, who are sent on a mission to save a beautiful princess from the clutches of evil.
The Serpent's Egg
One rainy night in Weimar Berlin, Jewish American circus performer Abel Rosenberg (David Carradine) discovers that his brother Max, his trapeze-act partner, has killed himself. What follows is one of Bergman’s darkest and most fearful visions, as the drowned-in-drink Abel and Max’s ex-wife, cabaret singer Manuela (Liv Ullmann), feel increasingly unwelcome in a menacing and destitute city, eyed by the police as well as a scientist with diabolical intentions. The director’s sole big-budget Hollywood production, for which he created a surreal and atmospheric Berlin on a Munich soundstage, The Serpent’s Egg conjures a Kafkaesque nightmare about the decaying society that gave rise to the horrors of Nazism.
Autumn Sonata
An international concert pianist visits her grown daughter after a seven-year absence. Aching with the memory of her mother's neglect, the introverted daughter explodes into a rage and the reunion turns into a shattering confrontation.
Face to face
A successful psychiatrist suffers from profound depression and mental illness. Desperately in search of an escape from her doldrums, she has an affair with fellow doctor Tomas Jacobi, but her hysteria only worsens as she struggles to maintain her grasp on sanity and reality.
From the Life of the Marionettes
Made during his self-imposed exile in Germany, Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes offers a lacerating portrait of a destructive marriage and a complex psychological analysis of a murder. Businessman Peter nurses fantasies of killing his wife, Katarina, until a prostitute becomes his surrogate prey. In the aftermath of the crime, Peter and Katarina’s psychiatrist and others attempt to explain its roots. Jumping back and forth in time, this compelling film moves seamlessly between seduction and repulsion, and the German cast is superb.
Fanny and Alexander
Told through the eyes of Alexander and his sister Fanny, we see the exuberant and colorful Ekdahl household in a Swedish town early in the twentieth century. Their parents, Oscar and Emilie, are the director and the leading lady of the local theatre company. Oscar's mother and brother are its chief patrons. After Oscar's early death, his widow marries the bishop and moves with her children to his austere and forbidding chancery. The children are immediately miserable, but befriend a local Jewish merchant whose odd household becomes the children's refuge.
After the Rehearsal
With this spare chamber piece, set in an empty theater, Ingmar Bergman returned to his perennial theme of the permeability of life and art. Lingering after a rehearsal for August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (a touchstone for the filmmaker throughout his career), eminent director Henrik (Erland Josephson) enters into a frank and flirtatious conversation with his up-and-coming star, Anna (Lena Olin), leading him to recall his affair with Anna’s late mother, the self-destructive actress Rakel (Ingrid Thulin). The sharply written and impeccably performed After the Rehearsal, originally made for television, pares away all artifice to examine both the allure and the cost of a life in the theater.
Saraband
Marianne, some thirty years after divorcing Johan, decides to visit her ex-husband at his summer home. She arrives in the middle of a family drama between Johan's son from another marriage and his granddaughter.
