fiba NEW SEASON SPRING-SUMMER 2007

fiba 2006 - f fiba CONTACT - fibaARCHIVES - fiba SPONSORS - fiba 2005



INGMAR BERGMAN 1918 - 2007

Obsessed by death and dying from an early age: Bergman on set in the 1960s

"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up." From "The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman" in Esquire (April 1960); republished as "The Northern Protestant" in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961) and in The Price of the Ticket (1985)

Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal

Ingmar Bergman  (July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007) was a Swedish stage and film director. Ingmar Bergman found bleakness and despair as well as comedy and hope in his indelible explorations of the human condition. He is regarded as one of the most important masters of modern cinema. He directed 62 films, most of which he wrote, and directed over 170 plays. Some of his internationally known favorite actors were Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow. Most of his films were set in the landscape of his native Sweden. The themes were often bleak, dealing with illness and insanity. Bergman was active for more than 60 years, but his career was seriously threatened in 1976 when he suspended a number of pending productions, closed his studios, and went into self-imposed exile in Germany for eight years following a botched criminal investigation for alleged income tax evasion.

____________Foot Note_______________

The following paragraph is taken from Talking at the Gates, A life of James Baldwin by James Campbell - Baldwin was so inspired when he met Bergman in view of writing a feature for Esquire in 1960 he wrote the following film proposal to the Ford Foundation . . . ' an unlikely alliance:

"My film would begin with slaves, boarding the good ship Jesus: a white ship, on a dark sea, with masters as white as the sails of their ships, and slaves as black as the ocean. There would be one intransigent slave, an eternal figure, destined to appear and to be put to death in every generation. In the hold of the slave ship, he would be a witch doctor or a chief or a prince or a singer; and he would die, be hurled into the ocean, for protecting a black woman. Who would bear his child, however, and this child would lead a slave insurrection and be hanged. During the reconstruction, he would be murdered upon leaving congress. He would then be a returning soldier during WW1 and be buried alive; and then during the depression he would become a jazz musician and go mad. Which would bring him up to our own day - what would his fate be now? What would I title this grim and vengeful fantasy? What would be happening, during all this time, to the descendants of the masters?"

____________________________________

fibaa CONTENTS 2007
___________________________

___________________________
fiba CONTENTS SPRING-SUMMER 2007
________________________________

FILMBANK 2007

Year of the PIG