| Author | Message | ||
     Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.107.13 |
Got to mention how great this was. I'm not a critic or great analyst of film but it really worked for me. Thing is, I could see the 'flaws' Bergman felt existed when writing his notes on it, but like all things you sort of take the greatness from it. Is it me or does the supernatural bear heavily on his work? I hear talk of his aetheism but it seems to me he still feels the effects of a richer and stranger universe and can't ignore them. He felt the end tagged on, and while the last line was a little heavy I loved the exchange here, about the boy saying he had stood too closely to a crack in the universe, and that he didn't like the world he was left in. I adored that line. And for collectors; there is the scene from The Haunting in all its glory, the steady zoom up to the whispering wallpaper (this follows on from the glass in another film of his (I forget!  ) quivering at the approach of a tank - a scene lifted wholesale for Jurassic Park.). | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
I keep telling people that Bergman made intellectual ghost stories. This is one of his best, IMHO: I reviewd it on here a couple of years ago. The ending is electric; one of the best sequences of film I have ever experienced. It actually inspired what I think is the best short story I've ever written (which is appearing in Strange Tales III from tartarus this month). | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
The other film you mention is The Silence - which must have inspired Kubrick's The Shining. I refuse to believe it didn't. Another masterpiece. Also, you have to see Cries and Whispers... | ||
| Kate (Kathleen) Username: Kathleen Registered: 09-2009 Posted From: 93.96.181.75 |
HOUR OF THE WOLF is pure horror in my opinion. The use of shadows on faces is brilliant and disturbing. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.107.13 |
I want to see the lot, Zed! I had the daft idea Glass Darkly was his Lovecraft piece...the most subtle Lovecraft film ever made. It's odd, but this film has a lot of parallels with the book I'm trying to write. It helped me watching it; made me realise I wasn't being daft in what I've done so far, that the supernatural can be as subtle as smoke in a piece of work and neither insult nor detract from it but rather enrich. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.107.13 |
That sounds patronising - sorry folks. | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
HOUR OF THE WOLF inspired David Lynch's entire career, IMHO. Bergman's body of work is untouchable, as far as I'm concerned. I only discovered him about 5 years ago, but have been continually amazed by what he achieved. Tony - Persona is another good one. Fight Club simply wouldn't exist without it. He must have influenced all these modern directors, but he rarely gets name-checked by them in interviews. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.107.13 |
A reason I went off Empire magazine. It closes off the world of cinema into something quite narrow and way too modern. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Bergman is a contender for the greatest film director of the 20th Century and is certainly the most mystical. The supernatural/miraculous/religious or whatever you want to call it suffuses every one of his films some of them more overtly than others. 'Hour Of The Wolf' is one of the greatest horror films I have ever seen. It truly distills the quality of pure nightmare into stream of consciousness visuals like nothing that went before [with the possible exception of 'Vampyr'] and not only inspired David Lynch (I completely agree) but every surrealist filmmaker since as well as being the template for Stephen King's greatest horror novel 'The Shining' - think about it. I wonder if Kubrick ever watched 'Hour Of The Wolf'??? | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.219.8.243 |
>>I wonder if Kubrick ever watched 'Hour Of The Wolf'???<< Isn't that just about what I said above? "The Silence" is almost a template for Kubrick's "The Shining" | ||
| Allybird (Allybird) Username: Allybird Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 80.47.125.246 |
I have his book Images: My Life in Film. A treasured birthday present. He says about THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY that it was going to be called THE WALLPAPER. 'What I wanted, most deeply, was to depict a case of religious hysteria or, if you will, a schizophrenic individual with heavily reigious tendencies' and 'the borderline she crosses is the bizarre pattern on the wallpaper.' Pretty reminiscent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story, THE YELLOW WALLPAPER. | ||
| Huw (Huw) Username: Huw Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 218.168.186.226 |
Bergman is one of my all-time favourite directors. I'm glad I bought the 30-disc collection of his films a couple of years ago (I still haven't watched them all). It seems almost impossible to find now: http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/1120208/The-Ingmar-Bergman-Collection/Product.htm l | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.93.21.74 |
I agree with just about everything everyone's said here. I think the trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence) can be viewed as a kind of interrogation of the religious faith that The Virgin Spring embraces at the end (significantly, a film based on someone else's screenplay, though no lesser for it). | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 193.89.189.24 |
Has anyone seen the 2 hour Bergam documentary that came out last year I think. It was made by a Danish journalist just before his death- it has him mostly in his home by the sea, talking about his career. | ||
| Karim Ghahwagi (Karim) Username: Karim Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 193.89.189.24 |
This one I think http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjGw9p--t7A | ||
| Simon Strantzas (Nomis) Username: Nomis Registered: 09-2008 Posted From: 99.227.90.149 |
My favourite Bergman film will always remain "Casablanca". | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 213.122.107.13 |
Huw - it's £549 at amazon. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Zed, I hadn't read your post and the similarity between 'Hour Of The Wolf' and 'The Shining' is something I've been going on about for years! Both concern a couple getting away from it all to complete isolation so the husband can work on his Art in peace. Both concern the husband (who has problems controlling his temper) being dragged into hallucinatory madness by what might be ghosts connected to a large building with a dark history. And both show the wife gradually coming to share her partner's madness to the point where she also starts having the same hallucinations. There is also even an innocent boy figure introduced in the most haunting and baffling scene of Bergman's film!! Incidentally I have yet to see 'The Silence'. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
And let us not forget 'Burnt Offerings' by Robert Marasco. If anything it's even closer to 'The Shining' - both the books and the films. |