The locations for many of Ingmar Bergman’s most dramatically spare films have existed for so long in moviegoers’ minds as stark black-and-white dream states that to walk through them in living, vibrant color is truly transformative. Imagine the harsh, pebbled beaches of Persona’s summer escape (shot on the same spot where Bergman eventually built his own house) suddenly buffeted by crystal blue waves. Or the setting for Shame’s detached, ash gray apocalypse made verdant by expanses of lush farmland pasture. To be amid the splendor of Fårö, the Swedish island where Bergman lived for decades and is now buried, sheds new light (often literally) on the works of this most forbidding and visually influential of film artists. Additionally, being there for the fifth annual Bergmanveckan, or Bergman Week, the first since his death in July 2007, has made me reassess my notions of what defines a film festival. Rather than the usual community of film journalists and programmers fighting each other over screenings and proffering instantaneous responses to films once the lights came up, I was surrounded by what seemed like an equal number of local islanders and Bergman devotees who had traveled from far and wide, all of whom were enjoying being outside as much as in the darkened spaces of the theaters. Indeed, Bergman Week is as much about the setting as the artist.

Wandering Fårö’s wildly varied terrain and braving its erratic weather, one can feel and see the source of Bergman’s inspiration behind every tree, reverberating among its rocky, barren cliffs. Located on the northernmost tip of Gotland, the smaller island of Fårö, accessible only by ferry, is a remarkably wondrous place in the summer, its east side defined by acres of farmland, its west by magnificent seaside rock formations surrounded by the chilly blue depths of the Baltic Sea. Bergman first came to Fårö, reluctantly, while scouting locations for Through a Glass Darkly in 1960; he was instantly smitten, although the resulting film exploits the island for its remoteness rather than its enchantment, depicting its stony beaches as more of an interior, psychological topography than the rejuvenating landscape that appears in vibrant summertime. Eventually, Fårö would become the location for some of Bergman’s greatest films, not only the aforementioned Persona and Shame but also The Passion of Anna and some of Scenes from a Marriage, as well as the headquarters for his company, Cinematograph, founded in the late 1960s. Taking up permanent residence there during Midsummer’s Eve 1967 (although continuing to live in Stockholm off-season until recent years), Bergman became an island fixture, and his pure relationship with the locals, borne out of mutual respect, has proven a fascinating counterpoint to the somewhat complicated one he had with the Swedish film industry for decades. Whereas everywhere else he could only be Bergman the feared film master, on Fårö he felt he could be Bergman the quiet neighbor.



Naturally, then, the man was at first ambivalent, and even hostile, to the idea of a film festival celebrating him on his little island paradise. The festival’s independent programmers and organizers (a group of six women, headed by Jannike Åhlund, who receive aid from Fårö and neighboring Gotland, as well as the Göteborg International Film Festival) enjoy regaling first-time visitors with tales of how Bergman, despite his initial hesitancy, would casually show up at screenings and discussions, once even getting into a spirited argument with guest speaker Harriet Andersson during a Q&A session. Yet now with Bergman’s passing, all focus has shifted away from his possible presence to his definitive absence and, further, how to deal with his legacy. This has manifested in matters as practical as what to do with his house (the cause of much debate during the week at Fårö, and even the subject of a panel discussion, which ended up as more of a town meeting: his nine children have shown an interest in selling it, while many, including some of the festival’s organizers and those involved in the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, want to see the Swedish state declare it a landmark) and as nebulous as how to properly memorialize him in a festival setting. It was a fascinating, expansive week, bustling with screenings of films new and old, from Bergman and others; lectures by eminent film scholars; bus tours of Bergman’s on-screen haunts; live music events—all of it poignant while never overly sentimental, just as Bergman would have preferred.

The lectures set the scene, running the gamut from birth to death: formidable Swedish film scholar Birgitta Steene (whose most recent contribution to Criterion was her essay on August Strindberg for our release of Alf Sjöberg’s Miss Julie) on the representation of children in Bergman’s films and the University of Amsterdam’s Egil Törnqvist on Bergman’s favorite film, Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage, and how it influenced his similarly death-tinged films The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries together painted a clear picture of Bergman’s existential quandaries. The latter presentation also tied in with the festival’s closing-night event, The Phantom Carriage accompanied by a live performance of a splendid new score by Matti Bye, so appropriately rich and evocative of the film on-screen that one often forgot the presence of the ensemble.



Paying tribute to Bergman by showing the work of his idol seemed the perfect way to cap a week in which so many other filmmakers showed up to idolize Bergman. Jan Troell (The Emigrants) and Margarethe von Trotta (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) were lively and articulate guest speakers—less eulogists than appreciative visitors—and their robust conversations, accompanied by presentations of their own films (Troell’s newest, the lovingly detailed and empathetic turn-of-the-century period piece Maria Larsson’s Everlasting Moment, and von Trotta’s most acclaimed, The German Sisters, which Bergman named as one of his favorite films), were reminders that Bergman’s legacy will live on in films by those he influenced. But perhaps most inspiring were the showings of Bergman’s rarely screened documentaries, Fårö Document 1969 and Fårö Document 1979 (he had planned on making another in 1989, but it never came to fruition), presented in the converted barn where Bergman used to watch dailies and attended by many Fårö locals, who were not only paying tribute to their neighbor but watching images of themselves or their ancestors up on the screen. The documentaries are gorgeous, straddling the line between the ethnographic and the deeply personal, with Bergman lovingly detailing the daily ins and outs of the island, the population and season changes, and how its land is cultivated—all with the merest sliver of editorializing. Bergman lets the images speak for themselves, and no sequence better captures the sense of remoteness, survival, and casual beauty than the extended, wordless one of a fisherman cleaning, cooking, and eating the day’s catch one winter night; when Bergman ends the scene by suddenly cutting to witness the man from outside his large, dark house, his window the only illumination, I could nearly feel a winter chill rush through me. It’s appropriately elemental filmmaking, and perhaps the week’s cinematic highlight.

Between walking across sun-dappled farmland and craggy stretches of seaside beach and revisiting Bergman’s classic films (lesser-known titles like Summer Interlude, Waiting Women, and The Touch were shown alongside expected fare like Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal), it was easy to get lost in the memory of the artist rather than to consider his vital, ongoing legacy. The people I met during my week on Fårö who have the best game plan for how to enrich and extend that legacy are the folks at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation. Set up in 2002 by the Swedish Film Institute, the Royal Dramatic Theatre (whose former president Ingrid Dahlberg is the foundation’s CEO), Sveriges Television, and Svensk Filmindustri, the foundation began because Bergman, who it is said never threw away a single piece of paper, donated his archive to the SFI—forty-five large boxes filled with manuscripts, notebooks, letters, plot summaries, and sketches. While his more private material will not be made available for fifty years, most of the donated papers will be accessible for researchers in Stockholm.

In 2003, as Bergman was preparing to direct his final film, Saraband, he said in an interview, “Now I’ve left the theater, filming, and television behind me. I’m just going to make one more film this summer. Then I’m going to be a true Fårö-fella forever, and I’m going to live there all-year-round. I can’t wait to get there.” Now buried at the island’s old church, Bergman will always be remembered as a “true Fårö-fella forever,” and by situating this annual celebration on the island he loved, the programmers of Bergmanveckan have forever made Fårö-fellas of all us Bergman lovers.

Sometimes it’s pretty tough for me to divorce my inner fanboy from the (probably unrealistic) ideal of a business-only, detached producer. One such moment was when I saw that Anthony Mann’s The Furies was a part of our Paramount deal. I think the geeked-out obsessive in me pounced to work on it before the aloof “professional” part of my brain even absorbed the rest of the list.

That’s because Mann is, in my book, one of cinema history’s perfect filmmakers. That’s not to say that I think every film of his is a masterpiece. It’s rare for any director, especially one with a significant body of work, to bat a thousand and judging from comments he made, Mann would have been the first to agree. But the traits that define his work—lean characterization, immaculate and expressive cinematography, conflicted protagonists, hard-hitting action, and Olympian personal drama—pretty much define what I enjoy when I watch a movie.

The Furies has all of these trademark Mann motifs. It’s been, I think, kind of wrongly sidelined in relation to his more famous and rightfully canonized westerns with James Stewart (The Naked Spur, Bend of the River, Winchester ’73 ), so the chance to put it back on the map, so to speak, was a terrific opportunity. It’s a genuinely unique movie, one that blends melodrama, film noir, the western, and even screwball comedy into a single genre-defying work, and did so way before terms like deconstruction and revisionism became everyday catchphrases.

Mann passed away in 1967, but I was excited to see in my research that one of his daughters, actress Nina Mann, had introduced a screening of Winchester ’73 in Los Angeles some years ago. That led me to believe it’d be a pretty safe bet that she’d be happy to talk about her father’s work, and have some solid thoughts about it too. With some excellent leads and help (shout-outs to Jake Perlin, Jim Healy, and Jon Zelazny), I got in touch with Ms. Mann over the phone, and was instantly blown away not only by how knowledgeable she was about her father’s films but also by how articulate her storytelling and recollection process turned out to be.

After getting the ball rolling on a possible interview date and time, I think the fanboy in me slipped out again, and I rambled about how much of an honor it was for me to talk to her, how many of my friends would be amazed that this was happening, and how totally thrilled I was that the interview was going to happen. Absolutely sincere thoughts, but I’m sure I could’ve found a better, more dignified way of mentioning them if my brain hadn’t short-circuited.

When I met Ms. Mann a bit over a month later in L.A. for the interview, things couldn’t have gone better. Her responses were genuinely enlightening, she was a very engaging speaker, and she always found ways to bring her comments back to the film at hand. Trust me, this is a major plus when it comes time to edit, because it creates a lot of nice, ready material and keeps topics focused and relevant. It was one of the most painless edits I’ve worked on.

What threw me for a loop, however, was something that I’d never really considered. I guess it was a “given” for the cinemaniac part of my brain that Ms. Mann would have always been invested somehow in her father’s films (after all, he’s only One of the Best Filmmakers Ever, right?), that she would have seen every single one as it was finished, watched the dailies . . . I don’t know, eaten, breathed, lived Anthony Mann movies all of her life. Turned out that couldn’t have been further from the case, and that her “reconciliation” with and appreciation of his work really only happened a handful of years ago, when that aforementioned retrospective played in L.A. The fanboy in me had basically blocked out the concept of growing up in a household with a father who was constantly working (many times on remote locations), and the fact that it was, basically, those great movies that were keeping him away.

After the interview, the sound recordist, Percy, told me that he felt like he was tearing up during some of her responses, and I knew what he meant. I now consider it all the more amazing and genuinely moving that through his movies she found her way back to her father as an artist, and that she so swiftly developed a full yet ever growing appreciation of his work. It was, truly, an honor for me to meet her, and that goes for the fan and the producer sides of me.

I’m also happy to say that Ms. Mann was generous enough to shoot some short asides on various topics for possible inclusion on our website. This one is her recollection about the pure joy her father found in the simple act of storytelling.