SEPTEMBER 24 25 FRI 7 PM, SAT 3:30 PM
GUILD THEATRE
FANNY & ALEXANDER SWEDEN 1982
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN In what he called at the time his last film, Bergman also made his most autobiographical work, a dreamlike family chronicle viewed through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander. It is Christmas, 1907, in the happy home of the Ekdahls. Alexander and Sister Fanny are filled with delight as their well-to-do family comes together and we are witnesses to one of the cinema’s most marvelous holiday celebrations. But soon after, their theater-manager father dies and their actress mother marries the stern bishop, transforming their world of joy to one of gothic terror. This tale of two families—one theatrical, warm and pleasure seeking, the other cold, mean-spirited and self-righteous —comes alive in dazzling period recreation highlighted by Sven Nykvist's sumptuous photography and is essential Bergman. Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film, Cinematography, Art Direction and Costumes, and nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay. “Bergman’s career summation [is] the kind of rich, timeless, cautionless magnum opus we can only receive, like benedictions, from artists who’ve paid their generation's dues of sweat, risk, tears, and honesty . . .”—Michael Atkinson, THE VILLAGE VOICE. (188 mins.)

SEPTEMBER 26 27 SUN 4 PM, MON 6 PM
GUILD THEATRE
SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE
SWEDEN 1973
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Produced as a six-part series for Swedish television, SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE dissects the lives of a couple who have traded their activist passions for the comforts of bourgeois comfort. Scientist Johan (Erland Josephson) and lawyer Marianne’s (Liv Ullmann) life slowly unravels in fury as their desperate loneliness come starkly into relief. Peter (Jan Malmsjo) and Katarina (Bibi Andersson) provide a counterpoint to the beleaguered couple, seemingly more at ease with their mutual resentment and disgust. Bergman attempts to co-opt the television medium as a way to present domestic drama worthy of Strindberg or Ibsen, tapping into the concerns and neuroses of contemporary marriage while inserting his own observations on domestic bliss and failure."Bergman has never before made such an exhilarating film about grownup love, with all its twists, rituals, and benedictions"—Penelope Gilliatt, THE NEW YORKER. (283 mins.) Screened with an intermission.

OCT 1 2 FRI 7 PM SAT 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT SWEDEN 1955
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Bergman’s most successful foray into comedy, SMILES is an erotic, nostalgic jab at upper class sexual repression and marital dysfunction. “The plot is an Ophulsian ronde of love affairs and intrigues revolving around a middle-aged lawyer (Gunnar Björnstrand); his young wife who remains a virgin; his former mistress, a sophisticated stage actress (Eva Dahlbeck); her lover, and his wife. They gather for a weekend at the country estate of the actress's elderly mother, who works a kind of magic on this ménage of infinite possibilities. A true parody of the ridiculous male, this is a comic working-out of the idea that men are a species of beast that turn to women to save them from being totally humiliated. Not always a smart moves. Woody Allen brilliantly reworked SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT in A MIDSUMMER NIGHHT’S SEX COMEDY, and the film also inspired the Broadway play A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC.”—Pacific Film Archive. (108 mins.)

OCT 3 SUN 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY
SWEDEN 1961
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Bergman’s first serious foray into examining family trauma and dysfunction follows a young family to the remote Faro Islands, where Bergman would later exile himself during his own bouts of illness and depression. Family patriarch David (Gunnar Björnstrand) is an existential novelist whose emotionally fragile family’s hold on reality centers around their individual feelings of living in an empty universe. Daughter Karin (Harriet Andersson) is a schizophrenic only recently released from the hospital and now under the care of her doctor husband Martin (Max Von Sydow). Karin’s personal demons prove to be ones shared (and repressed) by her family, and the Faro Island backdrop provides a stark, ascetic stage for their spiral into madness. This landmark film solidified Bergman’s reputation as subversive provocateur, shattering sexual taboos and emotions while attempting to posit a new definition of God. Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film and nomination for Best Screenplay. (89 mins.)

OCT 8 9 FRI 7 PM SAT 7 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE SEVENTH SEAL
SWEDEN 1956
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN For many Bergman’s most iconic work, THE SEVENTH SEAL is a parable on religion and mortality. When the knight Antonius Block (Max Von Sydow) and his squire Jons (Gunner Björnstrand) return home from the Crusades, they find Death, literally, waiting at the shore. The bubonic plague-rotted landscape offers the perfect stage for what is, essentially, a secular miracle play. Man and Death exchange debate over the symbolically weighty chessboard, with only the apocalypse of the world at stake. Perhaps Bergman’s centerpiece as a philosopher of the cinema, the film provides an expressionistic, decidedly Scandinavian counterpoint to the stylized dreamscapes of Buñuel or Fellini. Special Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival. (95 mins.)

OCT 10 SUN 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
THE MAGIC FLUTE
SWEDEN 1975
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Bergman’s adaptation of Mozart’s opera provides the ultimate display of Bergman’s virtuosity as a stage and musical director. An organist and musicologist, Bergman once said that he might have been a conductor if theater and film had not taken over his life. Like SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, THE MAGIC FLUTE was commissioned for television, and was intended for a wider audience than normally expected for his austere chamber dramas. Shot on a replica of the 18th century Drottningholm Court Theater, Bergman dispenses with theatrical illusion to show the working parts of this production and the film’s vivid musical soundtrack, intensely stylized art direction and soaring voices have proven to delight both film and opera devotees. (135 mins.)

OCT 14 THU 7 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
WILD STRAWBERRIES
SWEDEN 1957
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Bergman continues his reckoning with death in WILD STRAWBERRIES. Isak Borg, an aging professor (played by Bergman’s mentor, silent film director Victor Sjöstrom) lives alone with his housekeeper in the comfortable Swedish countryside. A car trip to his university to receive award forces Borg to engage the outside world, and with it, memory and mortality. Accompanied by daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin, in her first Bergman role), about to give birth to an unwanted child, the stuffy academic’s emotional core begins to be stripped bare. Along the way a visit to his old childhood summer home, an unlikely set of hitchhikers and forceful interaction with his emotionally estranged family finally begin to surface the truth of his past vanities and the consequences of his illusions. WILD STRAWBERRIES—in Sweden a symbol of protection and safety—remains one of Bergman’s subtle masterpieces, an evenly metered trip through the landscape of memory. Golden Bear, Berlin Film Festival. (90 mins.)

OCT 16 SAT 7 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
VIRGIN SPRING
SWEDEN 1959
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Bergman returns to the medieval Sweden of THE SEVENTH SEAL in this decidedly modern parable based on a14th century religious folk-tale pitting Christian revenge against pagan magic. Tore (Max Von Sydow), a devoted father, leads a quiet, dignified family life. His love for his daughter Karin (Birgitta Petersson) is affectionate but overbearing, and his insistence upon her going to church for prayer proves tragic. When Karin is brutally raped and murdered, her predators end up boarding with the ignorantly charitable Tore and his wife Mareta (Birgitta Valberg). Once again,Von Sydow masterfully embodies the tortured Everyman forced to face the darkest corners of the human soul and the most elemental of emotions. “The religious process of symbolization in Bergman's medieval morality plays never completely obscures his characteristic agnostic questioning, because the director balances the visions against his modern psychological perception. Like Kurosawa's RASHOMON, which it strongly resembles, THE VIRGIN SPRING raises moral questions that elevate the film above the violent story.”—Tom Kemper. Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film. (88 mins.)

OCT 17 SUN 7 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
THE MAGICIAN
SWEDEN 1958
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN One of Bergman’s esoteric masterworks, THE MAGICIAN combines grifter mystery with the tone of a Grimm fairytale. When a 19th century traveling medicine show makes its way into a small Swedish town, the locals subject its performers to a battery of scientific tests to challenge their magic. Max Von Sydow plays the shadowy conjurer-hypnotist Vogler, whose identity is as transient as the gypsy caravan the troupe travels in. Ingrid Thulin shines as Manda, his wife, a coolly beautiful con artist whose cross-dressing turns challenge screen gender archetypes. Part Gothic melodrama, part myth, THE MAGICIAN is one of Bergman’s most eccentric films, a sometimes comic psychological “thinking man’s horror film” that meditates on classic Bergman themes of belief vs. agnosticism, art vs. science and truth and illusion. (107mins.)

OCT 21 24 THU 7 PM, SUN 4 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
CRIES AND WHISPERS
SWEDEN 1972
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN More than any other of Bergman’s films, CRIES AND WHISPERS blurs the line between waking and dreaming, living and dying. Harriet Andersson gives one of her greatest performances as the agonized sister Anna, tortured by illness to the brink of death. She is joined at her palatial manor home by her doctor and nurse, and by her two sisters (Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullmann), whose deathwatch is punctuated by reflections on their disappointed lives, meaningless marriages and family conflict. "A self-portrait (in composite) of the great beloved of my childhood."—Ingmar Bergman. "Reduces almost everything else you're likely to see this season to the size of a small cinder"—Vincent Canby, NEW YORK TIMES. Best Film, New York Film Critics; Academy Award for Cinematography and nominations for Best Film, Director, Screenplay and Costumes. (91 mins.)

OCT 25 MON 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
PERSONA
SWEDEN 1966
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Anna, a young nurse (Bibi Andersson) is given charge of an eminent actress Elisabeth (Liv Ullman, on whom the role is actually based) recovering from a nervous breakdown. As Elizabeth sits in silence in a lonely seaside cottage, “The actress's act, we soon learn, has two aspects: it is a wish for ethical purity, but it is also a species of sadism, a virtually impregnable position of strength from which to manipulate her nurse, who is charged with the burden of talking. By the end of the film, the two characters are engaged in a desperate Strindberg-like duel of identities, and Bergman has turned that struggle into a metaphor for the fate of language, art, and consciousness itself. —Russell Merritt. “PERSONA is to film what Ulysses is to the novel.”—John Simon. (84 mins.)

OCT 26 TUE 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
MONIKA
SWEDEN 1952
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Originally regarded as an erotic exploitation film, MONIKA enjoyed reappraisal as Bergman gained international recognition. Here he first articulates his recognizable psychological affinity with the ocean shore in a story of naïve desire and doomed romance. Shy, bourgeois Harry (Lars Ekborg) and the sultry, restless Monika (Harriet Andersson), decide to escape their dreary lives in Stockholm and take his father’s boat for a summer interlude in the islands. Young and in love there is no tomorrow. Their playful eroticism is counterpointed by a penetrating view of adolescent sexuality, angst and dreams. Bergman paints his bittersweet love story in a naturalist style, from the lyrical beauty of the midnight sun to the gritty reality awaiting when Adam and Eve return from Eden. “The most original film of the most original of directors.”—Jean-Luc Godard. (96 mins.)

OCT 29 FRI 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
WINTER LIGHT
SWEDEN 1962
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN Second in his “Faith Trilogy,” WINTER LIGHT is one of Bergman’s most austere, yet accessible films. The film chronicles a day in the life of a disillusioned village pastor (Gunnar Björnstrand) as he attempts to reconcile his beliefs in the face of “God’s silence.” Unable to comfort his mistress (Ingrid Thulin), or to console a suicidal parishioner (Max Von Sydow), his shaken faith leaves only meaningless ritual, profound emptiness and crippling self-paralysis. Bjornstrand and Von Sydow provide dueling psychological poles, while Thulin’s Marta is one of the most emotionally delicate characters in all of Bergman’s work. Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist capture the coldness of devotion and a winter light that becomes a character of its own. The Trilogy, Bergman stated, "is not concerned with God or His absence...but with the saving force of love." (80 mins.)

OCT 30 SAT 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
THE SILENCE
SWEDEN 1963
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN The third film in his “Faith Trilogy,” THE SILENCE offers a sexually frank depiction of two emotionally conjoined sisters who, while traveling in a strange European country, begin a tortured struggle of separation. “Ester (Ingrid Thulin), a lesbian intellectual, is physically attracted to her sister Anna (Gunnel Lindbloom), herself the sexually vibrant mother of a 10-year-old boy. While the carefree Anna indulges in casual sex, her son briefly falls in with a troupe of dwarves who inhabit their otherwise deserted hotel, while Ester wastes away from alcohol and tuberculosis. Bleak, dense, puzzling and heavy with symbolism, certain scenes (Thulin masturbating, a couple copulating in the cinema) were profoundly shocking at the time—all the more so, perhaps, for the unadorned frankness with which they were presented. Impeccably interpreted by two of the best actresses in Bergman’s impressive stable, this is a dark, passionate, elusive and disturbing work.”—HOLT FOREIGN FILM GUIDE. (96 mins.)

OCT 31 SUN 7 PM
GUILD THEATRE
SHAME
SWEDEN 1967
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN After having “eliminated” faith in THE SILENCE, in part three of his “Faith Trilogy,” Bergman sought new ways to interpret the pain humans face in the wake of catastrophe. Set in a 1971 Sweden plagued by civil war, Jan (Max Von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann), take refuge in a remote farmhouse hoping to escape the coming horrors. There, they face Bergman’s classic themes of personal isolation and fatalism, only here their conflicts are set in the context of political violence. Inspired by Bergman’s own feeling of helplessness and ambivalence toward Sweden’s anemic political history, SHAME finds the director trying to make sense of postwar Europe in the context of the political turmoil of the ’60s. Von Sydow and Ullmann’s powerful performances exhibit heartbreaking stillness and infinite sadness sprung directly from the soul. "It ends with one of the cinema's most awesomely apocalyptic visions. A masterpiece."—Tom Milne. "One of Bergman's greatest films"—Pauline Kael. National Society of Film Critics' Awards for Best Film, Director and Actress. (102 mins.)

NOV 4 5 THURS 7 PM, FRI 7 PM
WHITSELL AUDITORIUM
AUTUMN SONATA
SWEDEN 1978
DIRECTOR: INGMAR BERGMAN
Bergman’s first and only collaboration with Swedish film legend Ingrid Bergman, AUTUMN SONATA serves as a complimentary, yet decidedly more melancholy parallel to WILD STRAWBERRIES. Charlotte (Bergman), a professional musician, examines her life from the contemplative perch of old age. After having watched a lover die in the hospital, she is reunited with her neglected daughter, who she has not seen in many years. Eva (Liv Ullmann) has an obligatory love for her mother, but an equal trove of resentment and inadequacy. In memories, Anna (played by the real life daughter of Ullmann and director Bergman) relives her emotional traumas with a cold detachment. Colored by the music of Chopin and Beethoven, Bergman crafts a perfectly realized portrait of creative genius in the sunset of life. "The best Bergman film in years, filled with his liberating mixture of violence and tenderness that is the sign of emotional truth.”—Jack Kroll, NEWSWEEK. (92 mins.)