Bios, Bergman, Ingmar, adapted from a theater flyer by Peter Cowie, 

Et passim

Dr. Patrick A. ODougherty

Cries and Whispers in the Context of Ingmar Bergman’s Narrative! 

Ingmar Bergman is Cinema’s mastery of tone. 

He was born on July 14, 1918 during the final year of WWI.

Sweden was suffering from food shortages, the Spanish flu.

A frail youth Ingmar Bergman suffered from hypochondria. 

His father was a prominent Lutheran minister who became a Chaplin in The Swedish royal court. He raised Ingmar Bergman with cruel severity. Ingmar sought relief in imagination. For, example, he built a nursery with a playhouse. He received a magic lantern as a gift from his brother. He was very fond of his maternal grandmother who lived in an apartment in Uppsala. He based the movie Fanny and Alexander on this beautiful apartment. He also lived in the family’s summer home in Dalarna where his father had worked to build the local railroad. Ingmar had an extended habit of daydreaming. After enrolling in college he had a fight with his father

and fled to Stockholm’s Old Town. He joined a theater group and produced one student production and then many. He learned to use lighting brilliantly. The deep colors in his film productions produce a bloodshot crimson nightmare.  Bergman’s successful screenplay film Torment  led him to produce his first film, Crisis. For moods, lyrical films as Summer with Monika which later became Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) Wild Strawberries and the Seventh Seal led him to a Time Magazine Cover 1960.  Bergman stands for Nordic austerity and emulate beauty in the traditions of Soren Kierkegaard, Carl Dreyer and Ibsen. His films like the Magician, the Virgin Spring  Winter Light, The Silence and Persona make Bergman the mastery of psychological dueling and visceral reactions. 

Alert being accused of avoiding taxes, Bergman fled to Munich in exile where he produced the Serpent’s Egg which looks at the fall of the German society during the 20’s.  He developed later in life chamber works like After the Rehersal, Scenes from a marriage and Saraband. . He moved to the Island of Faro to live and write in monastic isolation. RIP July 30, 2007.

Cut!

   Cries and Whispers film deals with grief an ironic and intense  behavior in the face of death. The beautiful often crimson clothing move the sciences in contrast and color towards the acts of death.  The movie revolves around two sisters, Karin, Ingrid Thulin, and Maria, Liv Ullman, who care for the third sister, Kari Sylwan. They

care for another in terror and stillness of approaching death. 

Ingmar Berman’s great strength is definite contrast to New Wave Cinema and British soap realism.