Ok, why was my weekend victorious?

1. Saw Seventh Seal which is my first ever Bergman film
2. Saw my first ever Spanish film from before the 1990 (excluding the occassional Pedro flick) which was Spirit of the Beehive by Victor Erice
3. Before its over I will see my first ever Visconti or classical (not when he left for Hollywood) Bertolucci. I only allow myself to watch these movies when I am done with my work, so I'm guessing after midnight I will be watching The Conformist or White Nights (suggestions welcomed).


I have been meaning to watch a Bergman for ages. The original reason why was because someone once said I would like him since I like Fellini. This is an interesting comparison, and I remembered it when I watched Seventh Seal. I don't think it holds true though, because Bergman had a much more severe and dramatic style. I feel like he must have done something stage related prior, just due to the lighting he used, and the costumes. I loved Seventh Seal! I can't tell if its because I'm obsessed with the Plague (did my B.A. thesis on it) and how much I love macabre imagery and the danse macabre, but I feel Bergman really understood the sort of drama and morality tales associated with medieval art work. The entire film felt so involved, you couldn't seperate the content from the style.

Although, you could seperate the dialogue, and some of the characters (particularly the bawdy smith and his wife) and the wit and entendres of the squire. This is where I most saw both in the casting and acting as being similar to Fellini. But really the comparisons end there. Maybe some of his other works are more fluid, but I felt Seventh Seal had a particularly non-moving camera. In some scenes like the flagellates the camera moved, but in general he had a way of stationing himself as a third-person viewer and watching the scene unfold from a few vantage points that he then would splice together.

I loved Seventh Seal. In its own way, and for tackling ideas of life, death, and God (or, the feeling I got was the lack thereof). Does anyone know if Bergman was religious? Because I get the distinct feeling he was, but not formally so. SPiritual, maybe is a better term? Seeking God but never finding him... But an incredibly beautiful path (as a viewer) of the quest to ease one's soul. I have to say, the danse scene Seventh Seal closes with is fresh off the walls of the Cemetary of the Holy Innocents in Paris, I swear!


Ok, and Spirit of the Beehive. I was a little less warm to this movie than I thought I would be, but I really did like it. Its just a rawly cerebral movie. Its not that great to look at, but very thought provoking afterwards. It deals with complex ideas of complicity during times of war, as a little girl slowly begins to understand her father is part of an established regime that murders rebels. We don't really meet the rebels much throughout the movie, only once when the girl goes to an abandoned house looking for Frankenstein where he is hiding. Most of the movie actually takes place in the little girl Ana's home, where her and her older sister Isobal come of age in the early 40's. The violence is not explicit in this movie, but instead we see its effects n the girls. Ana becomes an introvert and eventually runs away for a night where she meets FRankenstein (who looks, interestingly enough, like he has her father's nose...though that might just be me). Isobel becomes kind of vicious and infatuated with death. At one point she almost strangles the cat, she takes blood from her finger and uses it as lipstick, and she fakes her own death to the point where Ana freaks out. All this time, she doesn't realize her own increasingly dark and violent tendencies.

So, its really about how violence seeps into their world without them knowing. They don't 'know' because their father isn't some vicious military leader or any such thing. He self-censure's himself early on the movie (scratching out his own writing in a diary) and he picks up the watch and coat of the dead rebel (which Ana brought the rebel earlier on). So she subconsciously makes the connections between her father and the bloody back wall of the house where she usually goes and visits the rebel.

All of this has to do with Bees, and Frankenstein, and the connection between the two is unclear. Maybe it isn't there at all? And the two metaphors are supposed to each be read seperately? Maybe I was 'overreading' the movie in general because I know Spain still had censorship at the time of its production and nothing could be stated explicitly. Its clear the bees are about drone...about moving in an out of a pattern ceaslessly and not being cognicent of where its all heading (this is stated in the movie). And Frankenstein I'm guessing is about the 'created beast' that humanity can be. These two themes weave together in the larger experiences of these young girls. Like I said, very interesting movie to discuss if not to sit through directly.

Hmmm, what to watch next?!?!?!?!

Le Notti Bianche

Ok, just finished my first ever Visconti as well.

A bit of a miss on the White Nights. I don't know, maybe its because I've seen stills and clips from The Leopard and Senso, but White Nights feels less plush. Which is ok, if the story had resonated with me, and the style has reflected the story, etc. It was an incredibly terrible love story, about a woman waiting on a bridge for her lover to return after one year. A man finds her there, and over the span of a few days tries to convince her to come with him instead of waiting around for a lover who will never return. Finally she breaks down and comes with him, only to meet her lover at the last minute and ditch him. Its a pretty flat love story, and I was just waiting for 'the other shoe to drop.'

Visconti has a sort of enigma artound him. First off, he picked the setting of Venice, which for some reason just screams mysterious killer to me (yeah, I've been there twice already, and read The Comfort of Strangers). He uses very deep lighting, and in the background the reflection off the canals is always wavering on the building walls. There is heavy fog, and on occassion side characters give funny looks as though they 'know' something I don't. Because I know the little twist in Senso, I was kinda expecting that to happen here, and it never did.

It was just very weepy.

Its odd because the feel of the movie was half way between neo-realism and luxury. Visconti still had alot of control over figures (exactly how people walked, how many people passed by) and had a very swimming camera (kind of like Fellini sometimes does) but the viewer definately had a third person observation of the scenes. Plus, then sometimes he would have these shots that were a bit lazy compared to the rest of the movie. Flat. But he compensated for it by being the director I've seen handle camera focus the best. He would often switch between forground, middle ground, and background focusses in the same shot (fuzzing the views he wasn't concentrating on) and it created incredibly sense of depth. Also, he used all the canal bridges to emphasize deep space, and really I think he was at his strongest when filming the street/canal bridges.

I still enjoyed 'looking' at the film, but without the story having any emotional resonance, I got tired. There was good cinematography, and the direction was very fluid but that's not a whole movie to me. I got a little bored part way through. :-(

Also, that must be some Dostoevsky I don't know about! I've read Crime and Punishment once, and Brothers K a gazillion times, and while some of his characters get excessively love torn, emotional, romantic/theatric, I've never really seen the passions play out quite like this. Am I missing something? Is his other work much less psychological and more fluffy from his earlier years, or is it Visconti's adaptation? At one point Marcello wakes up with a cold and thinks he should feel remorseful and I completely thought it would go the route of all Dostoevsky's murders who spiral into insanity. But then he didn't, and I got confused...

Wow Dolce! That caught me really by surprise. From reading previous posts by you and knowing your love for foreign and not-mainstream cinema, I could have never imagined that until now you hadn't seen any Bergman or Visconti films. Even me, and you know I have a soft spot for B-movies (creature features and the like), have seen some of their work. I try to see all type of movies, even if I know I won't probably like it.

I guess you selected Le Notti Bianche because Marcello was in it . Recently I saw Senso, which is basically a love story with operatic references between two people from different classes. I enjoyed it and it's a beautiful movie to look at, but it's not Visconti's best work. It seems he managed to explore the struggle between classes and the fall of aristocracy in The Leopard, which many consider his best film. Death in Venice I consider a bore, it should be titled Death of a spectator, and I'm trying to find, still unsuccessful, Ossessione, which was taken from James M. Cain's story The Postman Always Ring Twice.

You are right in linking Bergman with the stage, as he has written and staged numerous plays (including opera) (I just taped the other day from TV a version from the Magic Flute directed by him), and you are also right in linking him with religion, as his father was a priest (protestant, I presume). Seventh Seal is probably one of Bergman's most accessible films, with some famous imagery (death playing chess), and I would have preferred if his later movies would have been more similar to this one, but some of them (Persona), I consider to be as entertaining as getting needles stuck under the fingernails. (Just telling my honest opinion )

Btw, other films that also happen during or deal with the Plague are The Last Valley (James Clavell-1971), Flesh+Blood (Paul Verhoeven-1985) and somewhat, The Mask of the Red Death (Roger Corman-1964).

Wow you hadn't seen The Seventh Seal?

Welcome to the club now!

Actually it was "forced" on me in 10th grade... my teachers had fantastic taste.

Cries and Whispers or Scenes from a Marriage should probably be next.

Well, I haven't been able to get my hands on Flesh+Blood yet, but it looks kind of fun. Looks a bit more like an action period drama, though. Maybe I'm mistaken? I did finally get my hands on The Leopard, too. The cover already looks good, and I've never seen Claudia Cardinale in anything except for Once Upon a Time In the West, but I thought she was excellent in it, so...

I did get my hands on Scenes from a Marriage, which I am going to watch. Its volume I. I didn't realize it was volumes at all! In fact, its a tv series? Ingmar Bergman did a tv series? I never knew that, but then again, I don't know anything about Bergman. This will be something new.

For the fun of it I got Short Cuts too, which I haven't seen in years, but don't remember liking so much compared to some other Altman films like Nashville and Gosford Park. It'll be interesting to see what I think years later and now being more familiar with his work.

And I tossed in The Big Sleep too, which I've sadly never seen, either. And still have to see The Conformist. So when I get around to watching all of these, its going to be quite something!