It's too bad they don't give Oscars out for individual performances in documentaries because Liv Ullmann's work in Dheeraj Akolkar's Liv & Ingmar would be worthy of consideration. The Norwegian actress and filmmaker discusses her 42-year relationship with the late Swedish filmmaking legend Ingmar Bergman with such emotional candor and poetic economy that the movie becomes something much more than just a re-telling of one of the most famous work-love relationships in cinema. more »
Legendary auteurs, they're just like us! When iconic filmmaker Ingmar Bergman passed away in 2007, he left behind one of the greatest bodies of work known to cinema -- and a vast, meticulously catalogued VHS collection, the subject of the upcoming Swedish documentary Bergman's Video. Among his tapes, somewhere between the Bunuel and the Tarkovsky: Jurassic Park, Ghostbusters, and The Blues Brothers, which at least partially explains the ghosts and Jake/Elwood-esque sibling dynamic in Fanny and Alexander. The dinosaurs, not so much. [Cineuropa via Movie City News]
We were just talking about Scenes From a Marriage, too: The Swedish actor-writer-director Erland Josephson has died following a protracted battle with Parkinson's Disease. He was 88. Josephson came to prominence as a friend, theater colleague and eventual ensemble player for the great Ingmar Bergman, finally breaking into the leading-man ranks in the filmmaker's seminal relationship epic Scenes before eventually diversifying with roles in films by Peter Greenaway (Prospero's Books), Philip Kaufman (The Unbearable Light of Being) and, most indelibly, Andrei Tarkovsky, who cast Josephson in his 1986 masterpiece The Sacrifice. Very sad. R.I.P. [NYT]
Over in progressive Sweden, cinema icons Ingmar Bergman and Greta Garbo are among six famous Swedes whose faces will appear on currency in 2014. Garbo, silent film veteran and one of the greatest actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood, replaces noted 18th century botanist Carl Linnaeus on the 100 kronor bill; Bergman, one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, gets his own brand-spanking new 200 kronor banknote. But this begs the question: Which influential and iconic American filmmakers similarly deserve to have their faces on dollar bills?
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