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Jan Troell’s EVERLASTING MOMENTS Opens in the US

Mike Hale interviews Jan Troell in the New York Times:
"At the age of 77 the Swedish director Jan Troell ­ after a four-decade career that includes a best picture prize at the Berlin Film Festival, a Golden Palm nomination at Cannes and a best picture Oscar nomination ­ is among the world’s most distinguished filmmakers. He is also practically invisible in the United States.
"Only two of his films, the well-regarded 1996 Hamsun, about the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, and Hurricane, a misfire from his brief sojourn in Hollywood in the late 1970s, are available here on DVD. His masterpieces ­ The Emigrants, The New Land, The Flight of the Eagle ­ have not been in print since the days of [...]

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN d: Tomas Alfredson

Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In (2008)
Direction: Tomas Alfredson. Screenplay: John Ajvide Lindqvist, from his novel. Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist.
 

Directed by Tomas Alfredson from a screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In is not only a satisfying horror film from beginning to end — one of the best entries in the vampire genre since Blade, Interview with a Vampire, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula — but it’s also a subtle love story, which happens to add an intricate ingredient to the film’s memorability.
Where 30 Days of Night was more concerned with setting up [...]

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Trailer

 
Directed by Tomas Alfredson and adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel, the horror-romance Swedish production Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In follows a bullied boy (Kåre Hedebrant) who falls in love with a weird girl (Lina Leandersson) who happens to be a vampire. Together, they set out to draw bully blood — but then the boy starts wondering about the ethics of it all. How far will his love for the girl go?
Also in the Let the Right One In cast: Per Ragnar, Henrik Dahl, Karin Bergquist, and Peter Carlberg.
Let the Right One In, which won the best narrative film award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival and the best film [...]

Ingmar Bergman Salute in Hollywood

Ingmar Bergman (right) will be the subject of a weekend-long salute — with the screening of five of his Academy Award-nominated and winning films — beginning Friday, April 4, at 7 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’s Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood.
The opening night of "An Academy Salute to Ingmar Bergman" will feature a screening of the haunting Fanny & Alexander (1982), Bergman’s official cinematic swan song. Also included in the evening package is the premiere viewing of the touring installation "The Man Who Asked Hard Questions." Additionally, actor Börje Ahlstedt (who plays Carl Ekdahl in the film) and documentarian Marie Nyrerod, Bergman’s friend and the director of Bergman Island, will take part in a pre-screening [...]

A PASSION by Ingmar Bergman

En Passion / A Passion / The Passion of Anna (1969)
Direction and screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell
 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Ingmar Bergman’s 1969 drama En Passion / A Passion (in the U.S., mistitled as The Passion of Anna) is a great film — in fact, it may be the best of Bergman’s mid-to-late-1960s efforts dealing with human relationships and the Self — e.g., Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame.
A Passion stars many of Bergman’s retinue of actors: Max von Sydow as Andreas Winkelman, Liv Ullmann as Anna Fromm, Bibi Andersson as Eva Vergerus, and Erland Josephson as Elis Vergerus. The plot revolves around Andreas, an ex-convict recovering from his wife’s [...]

ARN THE KNIGHT TEMPLAR’s Budgetary Controversy

Via Nordisk Film & TV Fond:
The Knight Templars are at it again. First, the brouhaha was about heresy (remember that The Da Vinci Code was banned in several countries); now it’s about the more mundane matter of money — or lack thereof.
Budgeted at more than US$ 30 million, Arn the Knight Templar is the most expensive production ever made in Scandinavia. The European mega-production has been mired in controversy since last Monday, when Swedish public broadcaster SVT announced that it was withdrawing its support from the project, which is currently in the editing phase. (Money came from about a half dozen countries, though Sweden’s Svensk Filmindustri is the chief producer.)
Directed by Danish filmmaker Peter Flinth, Arn the Knight Templar is [...]

Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman

Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman in "The Man Who Asked Hard Questions" in the New York Times:
"I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of The Seventh Seal. And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.
"I have joked about art being the [...]

Defending Bergman and Antonioni

Derek Malcolm in The Evening Standard (via This Is London):
"The time when crowds rushed off to the Academy or the Paris Pullman art houses to mull over the latest masterpieces from Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni seem like an age ago. Now they are both dead, and within 24 hours of each other, too. The shock waves, at least for cinephiles, are considerable.
"These two men, one Swedish and one Italian, commanded the European film scene, with a whole bevy of others such as [Federico] Fellini and [Luchino] Visconti, like colossi. They were regarded as directly opposed to Hollywood and its determined commercialism, even though they actually admired Hollywood as much as Hollywood, albeit reluctantly, admired them.
"Now the mood appears to [...]

Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni NEW YORK TIMES Article

A.O. Scott discusses Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman in the New York Times:
"By the time I entered my own phase of undergraduate cinephilia … [in the mid-1980s], Mr. Bergman’s greatness was beyond dispute, and Mr. Antonioni’s reputation was only slightly less secure. The two of them — along with the other masters whose work had defined, from the mid-’50s through the late ’60s, a golden age of high-brow movie love — were pillars in the pantheon, canonical figures toward whom the only acceptable posture was one of veneration. They were discussed in seminar rooms, dissected in honors theses and ritualistically projected in darkened dining halls by the more serious of the campus film societies.
"This was truer of Mr. Bergman than [...]

Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential and respected filmmakers of the 20th century, died today, July 30, at his home in Faro, Sweden. He was 89.
During his four-decade film career, Bergman created some of the most complex, most adult films ever made. Some of those were simply mind boggling, others were emotionally stirring, others yet were both. And just about all of them were thematically daring and — courtesy of collaborators such as Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist — visually stunning.
Bergman’s films were also powerfully acted. Among the performers he either discovered or helped develop — mostly women — are Liv Ullmann (with whom the director had a long-term relationship), Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson, Maj-Britt Nilsson, [...]

PERSONA and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH: Movies on the Mind Screenings

Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 psychological drama Persona and Spike Jonze’s 1999 psychobizarro comedy Being John Malkovich will screen as a double feature on Friday, July 20, at 7 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.
The psycho-double feature is being presented in conjunction with the ongoing exhibition "Movies on the Mind: Psychology and Film since Sigmund Freud" in the Academy’s Fourth Floor Gallery.
The evening will begin with Persona, a dark, moody piece about a nurse (Bibi Andersson) who cares for an actress (Liv Ullmann) who has inexplicably lost her voice. In time, the nurse feels her whole self being taken over by the actress. A closeup of a face — half Ullmann’s, half [...]

San Francisco Film Festival Silents

Also at the 50th San Francisco International Film Festival, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival organizers will screen three silent films:

A restored print of The Iron Mask (April 28), Allan Dwan’s 1929 Three Musketeers swashbuckler, notable as Douglas Fairbanks‘ last silent film;

Victor Sjöström’s (aka Victor Seastrom) 1921 classic Körkarlen / The Phantom Carriage (April 27), with accompaniment by Jonathan Richman;

and Guy Maddin’s 2006 drama Brand Upon the Brain!, which will be accompanied by “a 13-piece ensemble, foley artists, a benshi-like narrator and a castrato.” All three silent-film screenings will be held at the Castro Theatre.
The Iron Mask screening will follow a q&a with silent film historian Kevin Brownlow, who will be the recipient of the Mel Novikoff Award. (”Named in [...]

HOUR OF THE WOLF by Ingmar Bergman

Vargtimmen / Hour of the Wolf(1968)
Direction and Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin
 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Vargtimmen / Hour of the Wolf, a 1968 film by Ingmar Bergman, proves the nostrum that even lesser work by a great artist surpasses the better work of lesser artists, for Bergman can get more from the prosaic than just about any other director.
Hour of the Wolf is comprised of a series of small moments — incomplete scenes that fade out and some blackout sketches, often framed by weird angles and compositions; almost all the creepiness that a viewer feels watching it comes from sequences that in other circumstances would be at best banal, at worst dull. [...]

2006 Golden Beetle Award Winners

Writer-director Lena Einhorn’s Ninas resa / Nina’s Journey (right) was the surprise best film and best screenplay winner at Sweden’s 2006 Golden Beetle Awards, that country’s equivalent to the Oscars.
Shot on DV, the low-budget, World War II-set drama follows a young Jewish woman as she moves from Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto to a new life in Sweden. Nina’s Journey, which stars Agnieszka Grochowska, was based on Einhorn’s own book, which in turn was taken from her mother’s life story.
Björn Runge’s Mun mot mun / Mouth to Mouth (right), which received seven nods, including best film, best director, and best actor (Peter Andersson), ended up winning only one Golden Beetle: for best supporting actor Magnus Krepper.
Mouth to Mouth depicts the plight [...]

Golden Beetle Awards 2006

2006 Golden Beetle Awards
2006 Swedish Film Institute’s Golden Beetle (Guldbagge aka Golden Bug) award winners: January 30, 2006
("*" denotes the winner in each category)
 

Agnieszka Grochowska in Nina’s Journey by Lena Einhorn
 

Best Film:
Mun mot mun / Mouth to Mouth Prod: Clas Gunnarsson
* Ninas resa / Nina’s Journey Prod: Kaska Krosny
Zozo Prod: Anna Anthony
Best Foreign Language Film:
* L’Enfant / The Child Dirs: Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne / Belgium
Dare mo shiranai / Nobody Knows Dir: Hirokazu Koreeda / Japan
Caché / Hidden Dir: Michael Haneke / Austria
Best Documentary:
Brunnen / The Well Dir: Kristian Petri
Kinchen / The Kinch Dir: Måns Månsson
* Prostitution bakom slöjan / Prostitution Behind the Veil Dir: Nahid Persson
Best Director:
Josef Fares, for Zozo
* Ulf Malmros, for Tjenare Kungen [...]

Ingmar Bergman in Santa Monica

Between May 26-July 7, 2005, the American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, Calif., will be presenting a series of films by Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman.
Among the scheduled films — in new 35mm prints — are Autumn Sonata (1978, May 26), a harrowing tale of mother-daughter lovelessness that boasts excellent performances from Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman; Trollflöjten / The Magic Flute (1975, May 29), a filmed play from Mozart’s opera; and Viskningar och rop / Cries and Whispers (1972, July 7), another harrowing — and beautifully shot — drama starring Ullmann, plus Ingrid Thulin, Kari Sylwan, and an outstanding Harriet Andersson.
The Cinematheque will also present a special sneak preview of Bergman’s latest film, Saraband (June 30), the [...]

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