Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema: A Centennial Celebration

“No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.” – Ingmar Bergman
100 years after the birth of one of film’s greatest artists, Cinestudio presents fourteen of Ingmar Bergman’s most memorable movies, restored by the Swedish Film Institute.

This wide selection of Bergman’s work belies his reputation as director solely obsessed with death and angst: in fact, they show one man’s quest to engage with every facet of the human experience: love, family, music, comedy, spirituality, magic, war, dreams, and sex. Above all, Bergman created a a world where God is silent and humans are flawed, but where there is beauty in the close-up of a woman’s face, in a transcendent piece of music, and in an embittered elderly man who finds joy in memories of his youth, gathering strawberries.

All films are written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, and made in Sweden.


Bergman shot into international fame with the release of a film quite unlike any seen before. Returning from the Crusades to medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight finds himself face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death. He challenges Death to a game of chess, hoping to delay his demise until he performs ‘one meaningful act’. One of the most influential films of the 20th century, and a work of stark visual poetry.



Max von Sydow stars as Dr. Vogler, a 19th-century traveling mesmerist whose magic is challenged in Stockholm by the cruel, eminently rational royal medical adviser Dr. Vergerus. The result is a diabolically clever battle of wits that’s both frightening and funny.



Traveling to accept an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg
– masterfully played by director Victor Sjöström – is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and make peace with the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks, fantasies, and dreams, Wild Strawberries dramatizes one man’s remarkable voyage from bitterness to acceptance.



Two sisters – the sickly, intellectual Ester and the sensual, pragmatic Anna – travel by train with Anna’s young son Johan to a foreign country on the brink of war. Freed of their usual constraints, the sisters indulge themselves while vying for Johan’s affection. One of the most sexually provocative films of its day, The Silence offers a vision of emotional isolation in a spiritual void.



For the second year in a row, Bergman won the Academy Award® for Best Foreign-Language Film, for an intense family drama set in modern times. While vacationing on a remote island, a family’s ties are tested when daughter Karin (an astonishing Harriet Andersson) discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means.



Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign-Language Film, The Virgin Spring is a gripping tale of revenge in medieval Sweden. When the virginal Karin is raped and murdered, her father seeks vengeance, even though it violates his Christian beliefs. An unblinking depiction of a chaotic world teetering between paganism and Christianity. The Virgin Spring is the first (of 14) of Bergman’s films shot by Academy Award winner Sven Nyquist.



‘God, why did you desert me?’ Bergman – who was the son of a
strict Lutheran pastor – directly grapples with a universe without God, in the person of small-town minister Tomas Ericsson who performs his duties mechanically before a dwindling congregation. When he is asked to help a troubled parishioner with his debilitating fear of nuclear annihilation and is terrified to find that he can provide nothing but his own uncertainty.



A celebration of love, forgiveness, and universal harmony, Bergman’s Magic Flute is considered by many to be the most exquisite opera film ever made. In fact, it positively glows with the director’s love of the music, the performers, the collaborative art of opera (and film).



Autumn Sonata was the only collaboration between cinema’s two great Bergmans: Ingmar and Ingrid, the monumental star of Casablanca – and the final feature film that either would make for the big screen. The grande dame, playing an icy concert pianist, is matched beat for beat in ferocity by Liv Ullmann, as her neglected eldest daughter. A cathartic pas de deux with two great actors, and the glorious music of Frédéric Chopin.



The fifth movie that Bergman shot on his beloved island of Fårö is made with his familiar troupe of actors, allowing the director to capture deeply intimate and vulnerable performances. In a faux-documentary style using interviews with the actors, The Passion of Anna looks at a man’s troubles with fidelity to women.



The most technically experimental of Bergman’s films won Sven Nykvist an Academy Award® for Best Cinematographer. The drama swirls around three sisters: Agnes, who is dying of cancer, and Karin and Maria, who have come to keep vigil and offer solace. An intensely felt film that is a powerful depiction
of women coming apart and falling together.



Ingmar Bergman believed that the hour of the wolf, between night and dawn, “is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their deepest fear, when ghosts and demons are most powerful.” The most terrifying of the films Bergman shot near his home on the island of Fårö is a psychological horror story about a haunted artist living in voluntary exile with his pregnant wife.



In Bergman’s scathing response to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, two musicians are living on a remote island farm, to escape a civil war that drove them from the city. As the chaos of the military struggle catches up to them, they are faced with uncomfortable moral choices. A direct answer to the question of all artists’ responsibility to respond – or not – to a world of pain it is impossible to ignore.



With a new poetic intensity, Bergman shocked audiences (and inspired filmmakers) with a penetrating work about the radical mysteries of humanity. In the first of many legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a famous stage actor who suddenly goes mute. Bibi Andersson plays the young nurse caring for her on a remote island, who takes the actress’ silence as a cue for her confessions – and unrequited love.




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