Bergman @ 89.

For the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab heads up to Fårö:

As a guest at Bergman Week, you can't help but feel like a naturalist hoping to catch a glimpse of a rare and near-extinct breed. This impression is reinforced by one of the week's main events - the Bergman Safari. On a blustery Saturday evening, when the light is grey and overcast (just as Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist used to like it), we clamber aboard an old bus and set off round the island. Our hosts are Arne Carlsson, a bluntly-spoken islander who worked as his truck driver and cameraman for Bergman, and the formidable Katinka Farago, who was an assistant and production manager on many of his films. We wander across "Persona beach," are shown where Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow's farmhouse was burned down in Shame ('Bergman's only action movie') and drive past various houses that he has built for his family and collaborators. We also stop briefly on the north side of the island for a 'Bergman burger.'

En route, there are anecdotes about Bergman's reckless driving, his rivalry with Tarkovsky, his plans to make a film about Jesus on the island and also - by way of contrast - his attempts to make an erotic portmanteau film with Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. (The project fell through when Bergman was the only one to finish his screenplay.)

In the Guardian, John Patterson looks back on the moviegoing days of his youth: "Where Bergman, the northern Protestant miserablist, had Death, miserable and implacable as all-get-out, doomily playing chess by a frigid fjord, Fellini, the Catholic of the exuberant south, would routinely match Ingmar and then raise him a dozen luridly painted, first-century hermaphrodite hookers dancing naked around a phallic birthday cake."

Posted by dwhudson at July 14, 2007 12:35 PM