00:14And on the surface it's the story of a terminally ill woman being cared for by her sisters.
00:18But the truth is, really what the movie's about is the terribly brutal and strained relations between the sisters.
00:26And all through this movie, if you'll note, you see the color red.
00:31There are red walls and red curtains and red carpets.
00:34In fact, the scenes don't fade to black, they actually fade to red.
00:40And this is because Ingmar Bergman, the director, felt always that the soul, the human soul,
00:47which is really the terrain that this picture takes place within, was a red membrane in the body.
00:53That's how he conceived it.
00:54When you're watching the movie, you're not aware of this,
00:57but you are aware that some unusually dramatic and poetic story is unfolding in front of you,
01:04and Bergman is just brilliant at that.
01:07He's able to use that personal feeling of his to evoke a feeling in the viewer.
01:15He's a great genius who makes the audience feel exactly what he feels.
01:19I really locked in on Bergman films, I would say, in the late 1950s.
01:27And although I just love so many of his movies, my favorite one is probably The Seventh Seal.
01:33This is a film that takes place in medieval Sweden.
01:37And, you know, people are dying left and right from the plague, and death is all around.
01:41The film explores the conflict between faith and reason, and there's, you know, some Danish and German philosophical concepts that he, you know, kind of evokes and dramatizes.
01:52There's a character in the film that represents death, with a black cloak and a white face who goes around claiming all the victims.
02:02And you would think that this is not a good time in the movies.
02:05It sounds like such a grim theme and such work.
02:08But the brilliance of Bergman is that he makes it very exciting.
02:12The movie is just suspenseful from the first frames on.
02:15And you're just gripped.
02:16It's like a brilliant and sinister fairy tale.
02:20Vem är du?
02:22Jag är döden.
02:24Kommer du för att hämta mig?
02:26Jag har redan länge gått vid din sida.
02:29Det vet jag.
02:30It's true that Bergman movies are very serious.
02:40In fact, they're every bit at their best, as serious and substantial as many of the great works of European literature.
02:47But Bergman, you know, understands the fundamental principle, which is that movies have got to be entertaining.
02:55And he takes on that responsibility.
02:58You go in as a customer and you sit down and he does entertain you.
03:02When he first started, Ingmar Bergman made very solid conventional films.
03:07And gradually he became more and more poetic and took more and more risks.
03:12He dabbled more in dreams and fantasies with an enormous skill.
03:16And in a picture like Wild Strawberries, you know, the entire film, this old man's journey right back through his life, is a piece of poetry on celluloid.
03:26Jag vet inte hur det inträffade, men dagens klara verklighet gled över i minnets ännu klarare bilder som steg framför mitt öga med styrkan av ett verkligt skeende.
03:56In the 1960s and the 70s, you know, a Bergman premiere was always a big event for me.
04:04Everyone I knew went to the little art cinemas in Manhattan and you could always see, you know, Bergman films or Kurosawa or Fellini Truffaut films.
04:12But of all the foreign filmmakers, Bergman for me was always the best because he had the deepest intellectual content and he was consistently the most innovative one.
04:22A film like Persona, for example, the film is two women.
04:29One of them never speaks in the movie and they're thrown together in this beach house, kind of locked together.
04:35And for most filmmakers, that would be very difficult to make incredibly entertaining for an hour and a half.
04:41But in Bergman's hands, he manages to turn it into a major work of art.
04:52Bergman's contribution, among many others, his big contribution, was that he developed a vocabulary to work on the interiors of people.
05:19He would choose these great and gifted actors and he would guide them so they could project these inner states of extreme emotional intensity.
05:31He would just use close-ups and keep those close-ups going longer and longer and he never let up.
05:38Gradually, the psychological feelings of the character the actor was portraying just sort of show up on the screen.
05:53He was so unsparing with the camera.
05:56Finally, you start to see the wars that are raging inside the characters, these psychological wars and emotional wars.
06:07And it's no less visual in the end than the movements of armies.
06:11All this is about Bergman and he's basically, you know, I've had the privilege of meeting him and spending a tiny bit of time with him.
06:27And, you know, he's a perfectly regular, he's not a, in person, not a formidable, dark, Swedish, intimidating genius.
06:37He's just a regular guy who's trying to make good films that people enjoy.
06:44To make one great film is an enormous achievement, but he's made so many that one could consider great.
06:51I do think he's a genius.
06:52I think he's a substantial intellectual.
06:55He's a revolutionary in many ways.
06:57And I believe he's probably, all things considered, pound for pound, the greatest film artist since the invention of the motion picture camera.
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