Ingmar Bergman began his film career with a paranoid invention salvaged by Alf Sjoberg, who, from the sketch submitted by Bergman, put the Swedish cinema on the map in 1944 with the film known in the United States as Torment. The germ of this...

B. MARCELLO Sonatas, op. 2 * Hans Ludwig Hirsch (cond); Accademia Claudio Monteverdi Venezia (period instruments) * ARTS 47790-2 (2 CDs: 110:10) As long as there have been siblings, there have been sibling rivalries. Could it have been different for the Marcello brothers,...

The movies of John Cassavetes are for and by actors—at their worst, they’re about actors, too. All those grainy close-ups that the director insisted on may be truthful, but it’s the truth of behavior, not drama—drama demands a sense of narrative. Movies like Faces (1968),...

The movies of John Cassavetes are for and by actors—at their worst, they’re about actors, too. All those grainy close-ups that the director insisted on may be truthful, but it’s the truth of behavior, not drama—drama demands a sense of narrative. Movies like Faces...

The close-up is Ingmar Bergman's stock in trade. No other filmmaker has so relentlessly dwelt on the human face in the attempt to lay bare the soul behind it. His new film, Autumn Sonata, is once again pledged to the nuances and intensities of the aggrandized countenance. Wasn't the close-up, it may be asked, the invention and the glory of the silent film? In an eloquent passage in his Theory of the Film, Bela Balazs wrote about the "spiritual dimension" into which silent films w...

You must first accept that Ingmar Bergman's characters are involved, not just in moments of crisis, but in lives of the deepest crisis and pain, or the crushing burdens of his plots will simply seem absurd. The two women in Autumn Sonata …, are what we may now see as archetypal Bergman protagonists…. Some of Bergman's recent films on the theme of how much damage human beings in close contact, through blood and marriage, can do to each other in the name of love, have seemed unfair...