Ingmar Bergman Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Arlene Croce

Critical Essay by Arlene Croce

While Bergman is the darling of the sophisticates, he is nonetheless a cinematic artist of unusual accomplishment, whose works demand a proportionately serious consideration….

The peculiar dualism of Swedish art—what might be called the "noon wine" syndrome—attains in Bergman's films its fullest significance as subjective visual rhetoric. You see in them a characteristic imagery which, with its cold radiance and crystalline gloom, seems continually to convey a perilous balance between the light-dark extremities of human emotion….

He has in fact created a theater of the film, in which landscape itself seems possessed of the power of dramatic suggestion, in which a surgically precise selectivity rules out all ungovernable elements in the course of a film's action. Bergman no longer takes his cameras into the street; the street is horribly empty, the wild fields deserted, the woods ominously still. They are prescient stages for dramas that deal, not in incidentals, but...
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