The Ingmar Bergman Centennial
This fall, theaters across the greater Boston area will celebrate the 100th birthday of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman with a collaborative retrospective of his work. The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, MA, will begin the retrospective on August 31 with a multi-day run of Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, starring Liv Ullmann. The Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, MA will begin their screenings on September 5 with Smiles of a Summer Night, and the Harvard Film Archive in Cambridge, MA, will begin on September 7 with Summer with Monika. Together the theaters will be hosting over 30 screenings of the filmmaker’s work.
No name is more synonymous with the postwar explosion of international art-house cinema than Ingmar Bergman, a master storyteller who startled the world with his stark intensity and naked pursuit of the most profound metaphysical and spiritual questions. In a career that spanned six decades, Bergman directed dozens of films in an astonishing array of tones, ranging from comedies whose lightness and complexity belie their brooding hearts to groundbreaking formal experiments and excruciatingly intimate explorations of family relationships.
Other highlights of the retrospective include a screening of Autumn Sonata at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on September 16 at 2pm with star Liv Ullmann in person. The film was also notably the only collaboration between cinema’s two great Bergmans: Ingmar and Ingrid, the monumental star of Casablanca. The Coolidge will also present a “Cemetery Cinema” screening of Wild Strawberries,outdoors at the Mount Auburn Cemetery on September 26. The Harvard Film Archive will be showing the rarely shown lengthy TV cuts of two Bergman films; Scenes from a Marriage on September 23, and Fanny and Alexander on September 30.