I woke up to the sad news that Max von Sydow, one of the greatest actors of all time, died yesterday. He was 90 years old and he leaves behind a truly amazing filmography. He played saints, sinners, assassins, exorcists, generals, poets, doctors, and even ordinary men who were just trying to make it day-to-day. That he was nominated for only two Academy Awards over a career that lasted 71 years was a major oversight on the Academy’s part. He was an actor who was as capable in arthouse films as he was in the latest installment of a legendary sci-fi franchise.
It’s hard to take a career as long and productive as von Sydow’s and narrow it down to just four shots from four films so I’m not going to try. The shots are below are some of my favorite von Sydow performances but they’re hardly definitive. Max von Sydow gave so many good and memorable performances that it’s hard to know where to start. Below are 4 shots from 4 films from a truly remarkable career.
Max von Sydow, R.I.P.
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Virgin Spring (1960, directed by Ingmar Bergman)
Flash Gordon (1980, directed by Mike Hodges)
Needful Things (1993, directed by Fraser C. Heston)
Shutter Island (2010, directed by Martin Scorsese)
The 1973 film, Scenes From A Marriage, is a real endurance test.
That, in itself, shouldn’t be surprising. It’s an Ingmar Bergman film, after all. Bergman was one of the world’s great directors but the majority of his films did not exactly focus on happy themes. Scenes From A Marriage is a nearly three-hour film in which two people — who start out as married and eventually end up as divorced — talk and talk and talk and talk. They talk about work. They talk about their relationship. They talk about their married friends who are trapped in a loveless marriage. They talk about their unsatisfactory sex life. They occasionally mention their never-seen daughter. The conversations are usually friendly and semi-affectionate but there’s a hint of tension running through every single one of them. Whenever this couple talks about anything, it’s under a cloud of disatisaction and repressed anger. Violence always seems like it could break out at any time and, at one point, it does. (Of course, if 167 minutes seems like a long time to watch a marriage collapse, just consider that the film was an edited version of a four-and-a-half hour miniseries that originally aired on Swedish television.)
Scenes From A Marriage is regularly cited as being one of the best films about marriage ever made and also as one Bergman’s best films. Personally, I think it’s a bit overrated but still, no one can deny the skill with which the film was made. Though it may ultimately just be a reflection of the film’s roots as a television series, the film is full of probing close-ups. When Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) discuss their life, the camera gives them no escape. There’s no sudden jump cuts or fade outs to bring the conversation to an end and, as talky as the film may be, the awkward silences often tell us even more about what’s going on between these two. Ullmann and Josephson both give excellent performances. There’s an honesty to their anger and their disillusionment that will often leave you cringing but unable to look away. When Marianne and Johan discuss why they’ve never had a satisfactory sex life, it’s a crushingly honest scene and neither Ullmann nor Josephson hold anything back. When one of their conversations suddenly erupts into a violent fight, it’s scary, heart-breaking, and expected all at the same time. We’ve spent so much time with these two characters that we feel as if we know them. We can see what’s coming, even if they can’t.
If I’m not as enthusiastic for Scenes From A Marriage as some, it’s because I didn’t particularly like either Marianne or Johan. I understood them. I felt as if I knew them. By the end of the film’s first scene, I could confidently tell you that Johan would probably vote for Mike Bloomberg while Marianne would send money to both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar while joking about how, if it was good enough for The New York Times, it was good enough for her. But ultimately, both Johan and Marianne come across as being a bit too smug and safely bourgeois, even after they realize that they’re “perfect” marriage isn’t perfect at all. This is actually something that I’ve noticed about most films about divorce. It’s rare that you ever seen a film centered around a working class divorce. Instead, it’s almost always the members of the middle and upper classes, people who are relatively stable financially and who have a support system of liberal and sophisticated friends and family to fall back on. In films like this, divorce is an issue where the concerns and sufferings are almost exclusively emotional. I think a lot of this is because most films about divorce are made by directors who have just gone through their own divorce and they basically end up telling their own side of the story under the guise of fiction. Ingmar Bergman admitted as much when he said that Scenes From A Marriage was based on both his two failed marriages and his own relationship with Ullman. (Just last year, we had another example of this with Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, a film that owes more than a little debt to Bergman’s film.) For all of the film’s technical skill and good performances, Scenes From A Marriage is still just two and a half hours of watching two less than likable people get a divorce. By the end of the film, you’re just happy to be away from them.
Indeed. Despite the fact that Bergman’s bleak imagery and existential themes undoubtedly influenced any number of horror filmmakers (Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left was essentially a remake of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring), the 1968 film, Hour Of The Wolf was Ingmar Bergman’s only official horror film.
Of course, it’s also an Ingmar Bergman film, which means that it’s also a meditation on relationships, regret, the difficult of ever knowing what’s truly going on inside someone else’s head, and the artificiality of the artistic process. It tells the story of a painter named Johan Borg (Max Von Sydow) and his pregnant wife, Alma (Liv Ullman) and their life on an isolated island. Alma is worried about Johan’s feelings towards his former muse and ex-lover, Veronica Vogler. Johan is haunted by nightmarish visions of menacing figures and the feelings that demons are pursuing him.
The film opens with a title card, informing us that the story that we’re about to see is true and that it’s an attempt to reconstruct the final days of Johan’s life before his mysterious disappearance. Of course, as anyone who has seen enough found footage films can tell you, the title card is a lie and there never was a painter named Johan Borg, or at least not one who mysteriously vanished while living in an isolated house on an island. Instead of being meant to convince us that we’re about to see a true story, the title card instead establishes that what we’re about to see can be considered to almost be a dark fairy tale. The title card is the film’s way of saying, “Once Upon A Time…..” It’s also a reminder that most fairy tales are considerably more grim than what those of us raised on Disney might expect.
(No coincidentally, the title Hour of the Wolf came from Swedish folk lore. The Hour of the Wolf is the time between 3 and 5 in the morning, during which it is said that most births and deaths occur.)
While the opening credits flash by on a dark screen, we hear the sounds of men working and anyone who has any experience in theater will immediately realize that we’re listening to a set being built. As the opening credits come to an end, we hear Bergman shouting out, “Action!” Our next shot is Alma standing outside of the house that she shared with Johan. Alma looks straight at the camera as she tells us that she still doesn’t know what happened to Johan. She tells the unseen Bergman that she’s revealed to him everything that she knows.
It’s an interesting opening, one that reminds the audience that what they’re seeing is merely a recreation of what might have happened on Johan and Alma. When Alma speaks to Bergman, there’s an interesting subtext to her words and her tone and one gets the feeling that Alma and the director are meant to have a history of their own. It’s almost as if the film is saying that the story’s meaning can only be found in what we can’t see, in what’s going on behind the camera. That seems especially true when you consider that, when Hour of the Wolf was filmed, Liv Ullman, who played the pregnant Alma, actually was pregnant with Bergman’s child and that Bergman himself later said that Johan Borg’s nightmares were recreations of Bergman’s own nightmares. It’s perhaps a little too easy to imagine that the demons that inspire Johan’s art are the same demons that inspired Bergman’s films and that this film is both an apology to Ullman for his own neurotic tendencies and a tribute to her willingness to put up with him.
Hour of the Wolf is a bleakly effective film, one that works as both a dissection of an unstable relationship and a portrait of a man who may be losing his mind. Von Sydow plays the haunted Johan as a charismatic but introverted artist, a troubled individual who can only truly express what’s happening in his mind through his art. Indeed, Johan’s tragedy seems to be that the joy he gets from creating can only come from the pain that he suffers from imagining and dreaming. Ullman is heart-breaking as she tries to keep her husband from succumbing to his own darkness while, at the same time, trying not to get sucked into the darkness herself. About halfway through the film, Johan confesses to committing a shocking crime and, like Alma, you don’t know whether to believe him or to believe that he’s reached the point where he can’t tell the difference between reality and his nightmares. Ullman plays the scene with the perfect combination of fear and sadness, sympathy and revulsion. As for Von Sydow, he brings to life both the natural arrogance of an artist and the terror of someone who suspects that he has no control over his own existence.
Visually, this film is bleak by even the standards of Bergman. The black-and-white cinematography plays up not just the shadows of the night but also the brutal desolation of Johan and Alma’s life on the island. It reminds us that Johan is an artist living in a world without color. Bergman views Johan and Alma through a detached lens, recording the collapse of their lives but, at the same time, keeping his distance as if to protect the audience from getting trapped inside of Johan’s madness.
Hour of the Wolf may have been Ingmar Bergman’s only official horror film but it’s definitely an effective thriller, one that manages to explore both Bergman’s signature themes while also keeping the audience off-balance and wondering what might be lurking in the darkness. It may not be one of Bergman’s “best-known” films but it’s definitely one for which to keep an eye out.
The Seventh Seal (1957, directed by Ingmar Bergman)
I had a bit of a panic attack earlier today when I logged onto twitter and I discovered that everyone was both sharing picture of the great actor Max Von Sydow and debating which one of his many roles was his best.
“Oh my God!” I thought, “Max von Sydow must have died! 2018 sucks now!”
I looked over at the trending topics and, to my shock, Max von Sydow was not trending. However, Mark Zuckerberg was.
“Goddammit,” I thought, “Mark Zuckerberg is totally overshadowing the legendary career of one of the most important actors of all time!”
I was prepared to take advantage of the no-filter atmosphere of twitter and start screaming at people for not showing the proper respect to the life and legacy of Max von Sydow. Fortunately, before I totally lost my temper, I decided to make sure that my assumptions were correct. That’s something that I rarely do but I’m certainly glad that I did it this time because, by doing so, I discovered that Max von Sydow was not dead.
Instead, today was his 89th birthday!
Happy birthday, Max von Sydow!
What is Max von Sydow’s greatest role? There’s so many to choose from. He’s got a whole new legion of fans as a result of his appearances in last two Star Wars films. Considering that he’s been an outspoken agnostic, it’s somewhat ironic that his first English-language role was as Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told and that he epitomized everyone’s idea of the ideal priest in The Exorcist. He’s played assassins, saints, and intellectuals. He’s twice been nominated for an Oscar. When I asked my boyfriend for his pick for Max von Sydow’s greatest performance, he picked the Emperor Ming in Flash Gordon. Speaking of famous villains, von Sydow also played Blofield in Never Say Never Againand let’s not forget the assassin he played in Three Days of the Condor or his role in Minority Report or his performance as Leland Gualt in Needful Things! And what about his performance in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or his Emmy-nominated turn in Game of Thrones…
Well, I could sit here and spend hours listing great Max von Sydow performances. But, when talking about the career of Max von Sydow, you have to start with the films of Ingmar Bergman. And when you talk about Bergman and von Sydow, you have to start with 1957’s The Seventh Seal.
(Some sites claim that The Seventh Seal was von Sydow’s film debut but that’s not true. It may have been his first film for Bergman but von Sydow actually made his screen debut in 1949. Before finding film stardom, von Sydow dominated the Swedish stage.)
In honor of both Max von Sydow’s 89th birthday and his amazing career, today’s scene that I love is from The Seventh Seal. This haunting and atmospheric film is one that you definitely should see if you haven’t see it already. Here von Sydow’s knight first meets Death (Bengt Ekerot*) and settles in for a game of chess.
Happy birthday, Max von Sydow!
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*While Bengt Ekerot never went on to achieve the type of international fame that von Sydow did, his performance here set the archetype of how Death, as a character, continues to be portrayed in books and films to this day.
Today is a very special day! It’s Roger Corman’s 92nd birthday!
Here at the Shattered Lens, we traditionally celebrate this day with a special edition of Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation Film Trailers! Below, you’ll find the trailers for 12 films that were either directed by, produced by, or distributed by the legendary Roger Corman!
Five Guns West (1955)
This western was the first film that Roger Corman was credited with directing.
2. The Day The World Ended (1955)
Though Corman worked in almost every type of film genre imaginable, he’s probably best remembered for his science fiction and horror films. This was one of the first of them.
3. Machine Gun Kelly (1958)
Along with westerns and sci-fi films, Corman also directed several gangster classics. Machine Gun Kelly is remembered as one of his best.
4. The Intruder (1962)
Corman was an exploitation filmmaker with a conscience. At a time when other films were avoiding social issues, Corman dove right in with challenging films like The Intruder.
5. The Terror (1963)
Corman was famous for his ability to spot new talent. His 1963 film The Terror starred a then unknown actor named Jack Nicholson.
6. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
In the 60s, Corman was also well-known for his Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, the majority of which starred Vincent Price. With these colorful and flamboyant films, Corman showed himself to be a pop artist at heart.
7. Boxcar Bertha (1972)
In the 70s, Corman moved away from directing and focused on producing. His ability to spot talent undiminished, Corman helped to launch the careers of the some of the important directors of all time. In 1972, he hired a young director named Martin Scorsese to direct Boxcar Bertha.
8. Cries and Whispers (1973)
While Corman was producing exploitation films, he was also distributing “difficult” foreign-language films that might otherwise have never been seen in an American theater. In 1973, he distributed this classic Ingmar Bergman film. Cries and Whispers was nominated for best picture of the year, losing to The Sting.
9. Caged Heat (1974)
Jonathan Demme was another director who got his start directing Corman-produced films like Caged Heat. Demme would later thank Corman by casting him in several of his films, including the 1991 Best Picture winner, The Silence of the Lambs.
10. Piranha (1978)
Piranha was one of Corman’s biggest hits as a producer.
11. Carnosaur (1993)
With Carnosaur, Corman showed that you didn’t need a lot of money to bring dinosaurs back to life.
12. Dinocroc vs Supergater (2010)
Corman has continued to produce films in the 21st century. Films like Dinocroc vs Supergator not only won him legions of new fans but they also paved the way for films like Sharkando.
The time is the 19th century. The country is Sweden. The setting is a mansion that is decorated with red carpet, red walls, and almost blindly white statues. But beyond that setting, the 1973 film Cries and Whispers is really set in the hearts and minds of four women. One of them is selfless. Two of them are bitter and uncaring. And one of them is slowly dying.
Agnes (Harriet Andersson) is the one who is dying. She spends her time laying in bed and screaming in pain. A doctor (Erland Josephson) provides her with no hope and can only promise that the end will come soon and a priest (Anders Ek) coldly goes about planning for her funeral and offering up empty promises of a final reward. Occasionally, through her diary and flashbacks to her youth, we get glimpses of who Agnes was before her life become dominating by her impending death.
Agnes’s sisters have come to the house to wait out her death. Though they’ve arrived to provide comfort, neither is capable of it. The youngest sister, Maria (Liv Ullman), was her mother’s favorite and has grown up to be coldly self-centered. Through flashbacks, we see the details of her affair with Agnes’s doctor. When Maria’s husband (Henning Moritzen) reacts to her infidelity by stabbing himself, Maria can only dispassionately watch. Meanwhile, the oldest sister, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) has grown up to be bitter and sexually repressed. In a truly shocking scene, Karin mutilates her vagina with a shard of glass and, after smearing the blood on her face, lies in bed and smirks at her husband.
In the end, only Anna (Kari Sylwan) can provide Agnes with any comfort. Anna is Agnes’s maid. Deeply religious and mourning the loss of her own daughter, only Anna is willing to reach out and hold Agnes while Agnes is in pain. And, after Agnes dies, Anna seems to be the only one who shows any real grief.
There are depressing movies and then there’s Cries and Whispers. Cries and Whispers is such an emotionally raw and dark movie that it was difficult for me to watch. It’s also difficult to review because just thinking about the movie brings up so many emotions. It’s just such a well-made and extremely painful movie.
It’s also an Ingmar Bergman film and that’s fortunate because Bergman somehow had an instinct for how to keep audiences watching even when the images on screen were amazingly painful. Visually, Cries and Whispers is as beautiful as it is thematically cold. By emphasizing the color red (not only is the entire house decorated in red but scenes often end by fading to red as opposed to black), Bergman makes the audience feel as if they truly have been transported into the human soul. Red, after all, is the color of blood and life.
And really, Cries and Whispers is one of those films that makes you wonder what exactly the point of life is. While the dream-like flashbacks give us clues as to how the three sisters became who they are, they also suggest that it really doesn’t matter. In the end, regardless of whether they’re in love or alone or happy or sad, they’re all going to die and that’s going to be it. All stories and issues will be left unresolved.
And, in the end, the best we can hope for is that someone like Anna will mourn us.
Cries and Whispers is one of the few foreign language films to be nominated for best picture. It’s also the only Ingmar Bergman film to be so nominated (though Bergman had more success in the Best Foreign Language Film category). It lost to The Sting, a far happier film.
Seeing as how the Oscar nominations are due to be announced on Tuesday, I thought I would devote this edition to Lisa Marie’s Favorite Grindhouse and Exploitation trailers to films that were snubbed by the Academy. Remember them while you’re watching Rooney Mara accept best actress.
1) A Life of Ninja (1983)
Despite the colorful trailer, this film was not nominated for best Costume Design, Art Design, or Cinematography. Instead, all three of those awards went to Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.
2) The Shark Hunter (1979)
Franco Nero was not nominated for best actor for his performance here. Instead Dustin Hoffman won for Kramer vs. Kramer.
3) The Terrornauts (1967)
The true terror is that the 1967 Oscar for Special Visual Effects went to Doctor Dolittle and not The Terrornauts.
4) Americathon (1979)
The Academy has never really appreciated hard-hitting political satire which perhaps explains why the previously mentioned Kramer Vs. Kramer won best picture while Americathon was not even nominated.
5) Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972)
The Oscar for Best Foreign language film of 1972 was given to Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and not to Lucio Fulci’s classic giallo Don’t Torture A Duckling.
6) The Hills Have Eyes (1977)
And yet somehow, Annie Hall was named best picture.
It’s hard for me to say how I feel about this casting. When I first heard about it, my initial thought was, “Who’s that and how could she be better suited for the role than Jena Malone?” However, after talking to Arleigh, I realized that I actually do know Rooney Mara. She was the lead in another remake, this year’s Nightmare on Elm Street. In that movie, Mara was a likable presence but she was no Lisbeth. Then again, woman like Lisbeth Salander — independent women who refuse to be solely defined as either a good virgin or a bad whore — don’t appear in slasher films. What is important is that Mara has proven she can carry a film. She hasn’t proven that she can carry The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.
Then again, considering just how iconic a figure as Lisbeth has become (both in the original novel and in the original film) it’s probably for the best that director David Fincher went with an unknown. Rooney appears to be a talented young actress but she’s got a very difficult job ahead of her.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Rooney also has a small role in Fincher’s upcoming film, The Social Network (which is going to suck, by the way). It’s possible that Fincher saw something in Rooney that she hasn’t been allowed to show the rest of the world. Me, I’m just happy that if there is going to be an American version of Lisbeth Salander, at least she’s going to be played by an Irish-American. At heart, Lisbeth is as Irish as a Swede can get.
(Though again, the ideal Irish-American to play Lisbeth would have been and still is Jena Malone.)
As I’ve stated before, I have mixed feelings about the remake of the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. (And yes, it is a remake regardless of what they’re saying over at Awardsdaily.com.) On the one hand, the entire literary Millenium Trilogy (of which The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the 1st part) is one of the best recent works of pop cultural fiction. Lisbeth Salander is destined to be an iconic noir figure. On a personal note, even though she’s ultimately just a fictional character, she is a fictional character who has provided a great deal of strength and hope to abuse survivors (such as myself). When we read about her and her refusal to allow herself to be victimized or to be dependent on even as well-meaning a man as Mikael Blomkvist, the book’s nominal hero, Lisbeth Salander becomes the vehicle for our own wish-fulfillment fantasies. She is a character who transcends the page to become a role model in real life as well. In many ways, she is the 21st century version of Scarlett O’Hara. Scarlett gave hope to aging Southern belles. Lisbeth gives hope to bipolar neurotics like me. And much as everyone couldn’t wait to see Scarlett on-screen, a lot of us couldn’t wait to see Lisbeth on-screen.
And that is the biggest hurdle that director David Fincher and Rooney Mara are going to face with this much-hyped remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. We’ve already seen Libseth onscreen and, in our mind’s eye, she’s not Rooney Mara. Instead, she’s Noomi Rapace. Both Fincher and Mara have a difficult task ahead of them. Not only do they have to meet the expectations of the people who have read the original novel, they have to exceed the expectations of the people who have seen the original Swedish film.
And that, to me, is the issue that is being avoided, the proverbial Elephant in the room. For all the wannabe, internet-based film critics who are currently gleefully devouring any crumbs of information concerning Fincher’s production, nobody has yet to answer the question as to why this film needs to be made at all? (Beyond the obvious fact that there’s money to be made…)
I found it interesting that, at the end of the EW article concerning Mara’s casting, it is mentioned that the film is set to begin filming in Sweden. Why exactly? Hasn’t a film about a girl with a dragon tattoo who helps a smug journalist investigate a disappearance in Sweden already been made? It would seem that the “American version” has little to offer beyond offering up a fantasy Sweden where everyone speaks English and those viewing the film are freed from having to try to read subtitles and rattle their jumbo tubs of popcorn at the same time. Or are we just sending David Fincher over to Sweden because we think we’ve got a thing or two to teach the nation that gave us Ingmar Bergman?
It’s easy to find a lot of people trying to convince themselves that this film is a guaranteed classic. (“I’m so happy they cast Robin Wright!” they exclaim. “I usually hate remakes but with David Fincher aboard, I’m looking forward to this,” another one will say. And, of course, my favorite: “This movie is not a remake!”) But nobody seems to be willing to address just why exactly we would need a new Lisbeth Salander when she’s already been created to perfection by Noomi Rapace.
Seriously, both Rapace and Lisbeth deserves better.
Through the Shattered Lens 