Spotlight on Ingmar Bergman at Teater Utan Kayu
JAKARTA (JP): A number of qualified films by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman will be screened at Teater Utan Kayu, East Jakarta, this weekend.
The three-day event is organized following the theater's success in showing films noirs last month. Previous fests have included works by Woody Allen, Zhang Yimou, Walt Disney animated movies and other alternative films mostly unavailable at mainstream movie theaters.
The schedule for this weekend is The Seventh Seal (Friday, 4:30 p.m.), A Lesson in Love (Friday, 7:30 p.m.), Wild Strawberries (Saturday, 4:30 p.m.), Smiles of a Summer Night (Saturday, 7:30 p.m.), Cries and Whispers (Sunday, 2 p.m.), and Scenes from a Marriage (Sunday, 4:30 p.m.).
Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918), the son of a Lutheran pastor to the royal court of Sweden, was trained in Swedish theater and opera. Between 1945 and 1955 Bergman wrote and directed 13 somber films that explored the themes of loneliness, alienation and the sheer difficulty of being alive.
Then came A Lesson in Love (1954), one of Berman's best comedies. It is a witty look at marriage and adultery, igniting a fascinating battle of the sexes between David, a middle-aged gynecologist, and Marianne, his wife of 15 years. When David has an affair with a patient, Marianne returns to a former lover, his best friend. The doctor becomes desperate to win his wife back, as much out of love for her as his fear of being alone.
It was, however, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) that brought Bergman to worldwide attention, although few critics recognized beneath the surface of this sophisticated farce (a Swedish version on Jean Renoir's La Rhgle du jeu, 1939).
The Seventh Seal (1956) is a story about a tormented knight returning from the Crusades in search of God, but confronted instead by the black-robed figure of Death. This film is a poetic allegory of a medieval knight caught up in a long chess game with Death. Bergman brilliantly evokes the Middle Ages and poses the first of a series of metaphysical questions about the relationship of man to God (a theme that was to occupy him for a decade).
While The Seventh Seal established Bergman as an important artist, Wild Strawberries (1957) was clearly his greatest work of the 1950s. This visually rich dramatic film follows an aged doctor's journey through a compelling landscape of dream and memory as he travels to receive an honorary degree. Haunting flashbacks and incidents along the way force him to confront his life and its failings.
His other important film was Cries and Whispers (1972), which was hailed as a masterpiece. Here, in a highly stylized film about the nature of death and dying, is a work of excruciating beauty in which reality, memory and fantasy become one. It concerns the interrelationship of four women who are brought together by death in a manor house at the turn of the century. One is a spinster, dying slowly and painfully of cancer; two others are her wealthy married sisters, who have returned to their former home to attend her death; and the fourth is the peasant servant, Anna, the only true "sister" of the dying woman because she can minister to her failing spirit with a warm, fleshy love. This film is constructed like a Strindberg dream play, but it is also quintessential Bergman (a brilliant distillation of his stylistic and thematic obsessions).
The last film being shown is Scenes from a Marriage (1974), originally made as six 50-minute installments for Swedish television but cut to two hours and 50 minutes for theatrical release. The cinema version retains Bergman's original episodic structure: six scenes from a middle-class marriage spanning a decade. In this 10 years, the relationship slowly disintegrates and ends in divorce, but the two individuals become progressively stronger in separation, and by the end of the film, both are married to other people. As usual, Bergman relies heavily on close-ups to convey anguish, but his characteristic psychological realism is pursued with uncharacteristic verisimilitude in this film, without fantasy, memory and metaphor.
Scenes from a Marriage is actually structured like a soap opera but possesses a depth of feeling and intelligence usually alien to the form.
Teater Utan Kayu's film curator, Rayya Makarim, said: "It was very difficult to select which Bergman films to screen because they all seem to be a masterpiece in one way or another.
"There were requests left, right and center, even complaints after I made my choices. However, I felt that it was as important to show the great classics like Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, as the lesser known ones like A Lesson in Love and The Devil's Eye (eventually beaten by Cries and Whispers).
"It was also important to show some comedies because I cannot imagine a whole weekend of heavy movies. Scenes from a Marriage was chosen because of the television style. It will be a break among the heavily stylized other films."