This and That

Sep 30, 2013 — The author describes his interactions with the great Polish filmmaker.

Sep 16, 2013 — Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.

Dec 22, 2011 — Performances Ingmar Bergman had originally envisioned Ingrid Bergman in the role of Helena Ekdahl, the matriarch who presides over Fanny and Alexander (1982) like a benevolent, gloriously red-swathed empress. The actress, however, who had already been ailing while shooting the...

Nov 8, 2011 — Aflurry of publicity around Fanny and Alexander began well before the start of production. Ingmar Bergman said it would be his final film, and he allowed unusual media access to the set, even welcoming a pair of journalists who kept...

Nov 8, 2011 — Upon its release in the U.S. in 1983, the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander generated a wealth of controversy. Bergman has always seemed to breed conflict among cineastes (Phillip Lopate, for example, has written recently about the...

Oct 25, 2011 — It’s not a movie about how things were; it’s a movie about how things are remembered.

Aug 9, 2011 — Gillo Pontecorvo’s incendiary epic commemorates the popular uprising that had succeeded in ousting the French from Algeria in July 1962.

Oct 19, 2010 — With Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa set out to debunk some of the more inflated myths that had attached themselves to the samurai.

Nov 19, 2007 — Ingmar Bergman made some outstanding films before Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). But that film, released in America under the meretricious title The Naked Night—and known in Sweden as The Clown’s Evening—was the first that no other director could have made....

Jul 9, 2007 — The names Hiroshi Teshigahara, Kobo Abe, and Toru Takemitsu loom large among Japanese intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Each in his own right was an artist of peculiar genius, each resisting easy classification in conventional categories: Teshigahara as filmmaker,...