Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema in the 1950s and 1960s: A Centennial Retrospective

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema in the 1950s and 1960s: A Centennial Retrospective

No name is more synonymous with the postwar explosion of international art-house cinema than Ingmar Bergman, a master storyteller who startled the world with his stark intensity and naked pursuit of the most profound metaphysical and spiritual questions. In a career that spanned six decades, Bergman directed dozens of films in an astonishing array of tones, ranging from comedies whose lightness and complexity belie their brooding hearts, to groundbreaking formal experiments and excruciatingly intimate explorations of family relationships.  This series focuses on his prolific period of filmmaking in the 1950s and 60s as his international renown grew.

Purchasing Tickets
Please click on a showtime below to purchase tickets. (Scroll down for film descriptions.)

Wild Strawberries Friday, September 7, 6 pm

Summer with Monika Friday, September 7, 8 pm

Brink of Life Saturday, September 8, 1 pm

Summer Interlude Saturday, September 8, 3 pm

Smiles of a Summer Night Saturday, September 8, 6 pm

The Seventh Seal Sunday, September 9, 3 pm

Persona Friday, September 14, 6 pm

Through a Glass Darkly Saturday, September 15, 1 pm

Shame (Skammen) Saturday, September 15, 3 pm

Hour of the Wolf Saturday, September 15, 6 pm

The Virgin Spring Sunday, September 16, 3 pm

Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Friday, September 7, 6 pm

The film that catapulted Bergman to the forefront of world cinema is the director’s richest, most heartfelt movie. Traveling to receive an honorary degree, Professor Isak Borg (masterfully played by the veteran Swedish director Victor Sjöström), is forced to face his past, come to terms with his faults, and accept the inevitability of his approaching death. Through flashbacks and fantasies, dreams, and nightmares, Wild Strawberries captures a startling voyage of self-discovery and renewed belief in mankind. 1957, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 91 minutes.  Recommended for 13+.

Summer with Monika (Sommaren med Monika)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Friday, September 7, 8 pm

Inspired by the earthy eroticism of actress Harriet Andersson, in the first of her many roles for him, Bergman created a work of stunning maturity with this sensual tale of young love. A girl (Andersson) and boy (Lars Ekborg) from working-class families in Stockholm run away from home to spend a secluded, romantic summer at the beach. Inevitably, it is not long before the pair are forced to return to reality. The version initially released in the U.S. was reedited by its distributor into something more salacious, but this original version of Summer with Monika stands as one of Bergman’s most important films. 1953, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 97 minutes. Recommended for 16+.

Brink of Life (Nära Livet)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Saturday, September 8, 1 pm

Continuing the director’s concentration on the complex inner lives of women, Brink of Life captures the wrenching decisions of three women (Bibi Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, and Ingrid Thulin) in a maternity ward of a hospital.  They wrestle of their futures as they face the decision to keep their children or put them up for adoption.  Bergman won the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival that year and the three women earner a Best Actress award for their ensemble performance. 1958, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 84 minutes.  Recommended for 16+.

Summer Interlude (Sommarlek)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Saturday, September 8, 3 pm

Touching on many of the themes that would define the rest of his career—isolation, performance, and the inescapability of the past—Bergman’s tenth film was a gentle drift toward true mastery. Maj-Britt Nilsson beguiles as an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student (Birger Malmsten). Her memories of the sunny, rocky shores of Stockholm’s outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her dim present at the theater where she works. A film that the director considered a creative turning point, Summer Interlude is a reverie about life and death that unites Bergman’s love of theater and cinema. 1951, Sweden, in Swedish with English subtitles, 96 minutes. Recommended for 13+.

Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Saturday, September 8, 6 pm

After fifteen films that received mostly local acclaim, the 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night at last ushered in an international audience for Bergman. In turn-of-the-century Sweden, four men and four women attempt to navigate the laws of attraction. During a weekend in the country, the women collude to force the men’s hands in matters of the heart, exposing their pretensions and insecurities along the way. Chocked-full of flirtatious propositions and sharp witticisms delivered by such Swedish screen legends as Gunnar Björnstrand and Harriet Andersson, Smiles of a Summer Night is one of the cinema’s great erotic comedies.  The film was also adapted to the stage as the musical A Little Night Music. 1955, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles. Recommended for 16+.

The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Sunday, September 9, 3 pm

Returning exhausted from the Crusades to find medieval Sweden gripped by the Plague, a knight (Max von Sydow) suddenly finds himself face-to-face with the hooded figure of Death and challenges him to a game of chess. As the fateful game progresses, and the knight and his squire encounter a gallery of outcasts from a society in despair, Bergman mounts a profound inquiry into the nature of faith and the torment of mortality. One of the most influential films of its time, The Seventh Seal is a stunning allegory of man’s search for meaning and is a work of stark visual poetry. 1957, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 96 minutes. Recommended for 12+.

Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Friday, September 14, 6 pm

By the mid-1960s, Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth. 1966, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 83 minutes. Recommended for 16+.

Through a Glass Darkly (Såsom i en spegel)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Saturday, September 15, 1 pm

While vacationing on a remote island retreat, a family’s fragile ties are tested when daughter Karin (an astonishing Harriet Andersson) discovers her father has been using her schizophrenia for his own literary means. As she drifts in and out of lucidity, the father (Gunnar Björnstrand), Karin’s husband (Max von Sydow), and her younger brother (Lars Passgård) are all unable to prevent Karin’s descent into the abyss of mental illness. Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Through a Glass Darkly presents an unflinching vision of a family’s near disintegration and a tortured psyche further taunted by God’s intangible presence. 1961, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 91 minutes. Recommended for 16+.

Shame (Skammen)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Saturday, September 15, 3 pm

Shame was Bergman’s scathing response to the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann star as musicians living in quiet retreat on a remote island farm, where the civil war that drove them from the city soon catches up with them. Amid the chaos and confusion of the military struggle, vividly evoked by Sven Nykvist’s handheld camera work, the two are faced with uncomfortable moral choices. This film, which contains some of the greatest scenes in Bergman’s cannon, shows the devastating impact of war on defenseless individuals. 1968, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 103 minutues. Recommended for 16+.

Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Saturday, September 15, 6 pm

The strangest and most disturbing of the films Bergman shot on the island of Fårö, Hour of the Wolf stars Max von Sydow as a haunted painter living in voluntary exile with his wife (Liv Ullmann). When the couple are invited to a nearby castle for dinner, things start to go wrong with a vengeance, as a coven of sinister aristocrats hastens the artist’s psychological deterioration. This gripping film is charged with a nightmarish power rare in the Bergman canon, and contains dreamlike effects that brilliantly underscore the tale’s horrific elements. 1968, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 90 minutes. Recommended for 16+.

The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Sunday, September 16, 3 pm

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film, Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. With grim austerity, the director tells the story of the rape and murder of the virgin Karin, and her father Töre’s ruthless pursuit of vengeance, set in motion after the killers visit the family’s farmhouse. Starring Max von Sydow, the film is both beautiful and cruel in its depiction of a world teetering between paganism and Christianity. 1960, Sweden, DCP, in Swedish with English subtitles, 89 minutes.  Recommended for 16+.