Movie Review: Searching for Ingmar Bergman

Searching for Ingmar Bergman **** / *****

Directed by: Margarethe von Trotta and Bettina Böhler and Felix Moeller.

Written by: Margarethe von Trotta and Felix Moeller.

 

Back in the 1990s, when I started getting interested in film and film history, when it came to foreign masters there were three names that you kind of had to confront first – Italy’s Federico Fellini, Japan’s Akira Kurosawa and Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman. I’m not arguing that these are the three greatest filmmakers ever – just that they occupied a space in film history that made any aspiring film buff at least start there – before delving into the art house cinema from the around the world. The three filmmakers certainly left a lasting impact on me – and their vast filmographies offer lots of interesting work to watch, re-watch and mull over. In 2018, Bergman would have turned 100 – which is why there seems to be renewed interest in his work – including the documentary Searching for Ingmar Bergman, directed by Margarethe von Trotta – which misleading title aside I think would be a great place to start for newbies in terms of exploring Bergman’s work – and offers some interesting stories for those of us who are longtime fans. It is a tribute from one great filmmaker to the one of the filmmakers that inspired her the most.

 

The film opens with von Trotta describing the opening shots of the first Bergman film she ever saw – The Seventh Seal – and remarking on the effect they had on her. It was the early 1960s, and she wasn’t even much of a film fan yet – certainly wasn’t thinking of becoming a filmmaker herself – but those shots, and that movie, moved her so deeply that she started down the rabbit hole of film, and ended up a brilliant filmmaker in her own right. Over the course of the movie, von Trotta will talk to many people about Bergman – other filmmakers about how Bergman’s cinema inspired them, Bergman’s collaborators to get to how he worked, and one of Bergman’s many children to see what he was like in his life outside the cinema.

 

Von Trotta, I think, holds no delusions about Bergman. She gets at stories that are not overly flattering of her hero – the way he could treat people on the set – all but the actors, who he was never cross with, but he would yell at anyone else who angered him. Or his personal life – where it is clear, he wasn’t much of a father or husband to his children or his wives over the years. His son describes Bergman’s 60^th Birthday party, which is the first time he met many of his siblings at all – despite the fact he was nearly a teenager by then. It is curious to Von Trotta that a filmmaker like Bergman – who was capable of so capturing childhood in films like The Silence or Fanny and Alexander – had so little time for his own children, and could never really relate to them. He didn’t seem to keep this a secret from them as well.

 

But her film mainly concentrates on Bergman’s films – and he allows his interview subjects leeway to talk about their favorite films, and stories, and how those films worked on them. It is a curious decision that she spends more time on lesser Bergman films like The Serpent’s Egg or From the Life of the Marionettes than she does on say Persona – which gets a passing reference or Cries and Whispers, which is barely mentioned at all. Then again, those were Bergman’s German films – and being from Germany, they obviously mean more to her than they do to others. This is a personal exploration as well.

 

The interviews subjects are well chosen – even when initially they don’t seem to be. Of course, you would be Olivier Assayas, who published a book of interviews with Bergman and who is incredibly insightful into his work. And the great Liv Ullman, who worked with him so often. But even an interview with Swedish director Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure, The Square) is interesting – in part because it seems like Ostlund isn’t a huge fan of Bergman. He even remarks that no one from Sweden would interview him – because he’s from the “other” side of the Swedish film industry – those who hold Bo Widerberg in higher esteem. Still, his interview is fascinating.

 

Much like what seems to be a growing number of films about director – like last year’ Hal for example – I think the best thing a film like Searching for Ingmar Bergman can do for people is make them go back and watch the films of Ingmar Bergman. There are so many of them – and no, not all of them are masterpieces. But films like Smiles of a Summer’s Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, Autumn Sonata and Fanny & Alexander certainly are – with Sawdust & Tinsel, The Magician, The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, Hour of the Wolf, Shame, The Passion of Anna and Saraband all being pretty damn close as well. It’s one of the best filmographies in screen history. This film, as wonderful as it is, is just the tip of the iceberg with the riches that Bergman created in his career. Do yourself a favor, and explore it.

Movie Review: Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt
Directed by: Margarethe von Trotta.
Written by: Pam Katz & Margarethe von Trotta.
Starring: Barbara Sukowa (Hannah Arendt), Axel Milberg (Heinrich Blücher), Janet McTeer (Mary McCarthy), Julia Jentsch (Lotte Köhler), Ulrich Noethen (Hans Jonas), Michael Degen (Kurt Blumenfeld), Nicholas Woodeson (William Shawn), Victoria Trauttmansdorff (Charlotte Beradt), Klaus Pohl (Martin Heidegger), Friederike Becht (Young Hannah Arendt).
 

Hannah Arendt is more a film of ideas – and their power – than anything else. In the film Barbara Sukowa plays famed German-Jew writer/political thinker/philosopher (although she hated that word)/university professor Hannah Arendt, who in the early 1960s provoked heated debate, and was condemned from all sides for her series of articles in the New Yorker than she turned into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem” about Adolf Eichmann – the Nazi war criminal responsible for overseeing the trains that took Jews to the Concentration Camps where they were murdered en masse. After the war, Eichmann escaped Germany on a fake passport and made his way to Argentina – where eventually the Mossad found him, kidnapped him and took him back to Israel to stand trial.

Arendt questioned the legality of kidnapping Eichmann (which is true), but not the morality of Israel’s standing to put Nazi criminals on trial. She also criticized the trial as merely a show trial – an excuse for Israel to put victims of the Holocaust on the stand with the whole world watching, whether or not they had anything to do with Eichmann’s guilt or innocence. Ultimately however, Arendt does concur with the verdict against Eichmann – and the death sentence that came along with it. That wasn’t what got her in trouble.

What got her in trouble were two separate ideas. The first being her famous phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann. To Arendt, she had to find a way to reconcile the “mediocrity of the man” with the extraordinary evil of his crimes, ultimately concluding that Eichmann’s greatest crime was his refusal to think for himself – and when he refused to do that, he gave up his humanity, and allowed unspeakable atrocities to occur. This came too close to an apology for Nazis for many, who preferred to see Eichmann and his kind as inhuman monsters. What got her into even more trouble however was her contention that the role that Jewish leaders played in the Holocaust helped increase the number of Jews who were killed by the Nazis. It was part of the trial – and is fairly well established now – that there were quite a few Jewish leaders, who for various reasons, collaborated with the Nazis. But back in 1960 – especially in the intellectual community in New York, which had many Jewish people – who either escaped with their lives, or knew people who did not – these ideas were incendiary. To many, Arendt was making an apology for the Nazis, and blaming the Jews for their own destruction.

The film based on these events is at its best when it sticks to Arendt’s ideas – and the debate that they stirred. Sukowa delivers a fierce, stubborn, intelligent performance as Arendt – a woman who is fully convinced she is right, and for most of the runtime of the movie refuses to defend herself or apologize. She said everything she wanted to say in her writing. The University where she teaches tries to force her out – but she refuses to go, and has the support of her students. Israel sends agents to try and convince her to stop publication of the book – and tell her it will never be published in Israel (apparently it was eventually translated into Hebrew and published there – but that was only recently). She loses friends over her book – and is called ugly names by many, and has her past dragged out (seen in awkward flashbacks) when she was the student (and according to the movie, the lover) of Martin Heidegger, the German intellectual, who joined the Nazi party in 1933.

Arendt’s stirring final speech – in front of her students – where she finally agrees to defend and explain herself and what she has written is the highlight of the movie. It will undoubtedly remind many of a courtroom summation – a grand, impassioned defense of her ideas and ideals.

The film is less stirring in many of the more personal moments in the film. I did enjoy the unlikely friendship between Arendt and author Mary McCarthy - played by the wonderful Janet McTeer – who has an excellent scene where she defends Arendt. But the portrait of Arendt’s marriage to poet Heinrich Blücher (Axel Milberg) is less compelling – if only because it takes us away from what is so compelling in the rest of the movie. The film also takes quite a while to get going – the first half hour or so seems to be endless parties and discussions or little consequence. Once Arendt gets to Jerusalem, and starts covering the Eichmann trial (the movie, wisely, decides to use archival footage of instead of casting an actor to play him – like Clooney did with McCarthy in Good Night and Good Luck), the movie becomes far more compelling.

To some, Hannah Arendt will be an overly talky movie – there is little in the movie other than talk to be sure. But I found the film fascinating. Co-written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt finds an interesting way to tell what seems like a completely un-cinematic story. This is a movie about intelligent people engaged in intellectual debate – and while that may sound boring, the result is far from dull.