#filmmakers discuss bergman's legacy

[lostgoonie1980]

238. Invadindo Bergman (Trespassing Bergman, 2013), dir. Jane Magnusson & Hynek Pallas

[driusha]

"So we can assume that the old Bergman, and this I want you to include, sat here and masturbated like crazy.” - Lars Von Trier 

LMAO.

[ratherhavetheblues]

ANDREI TARKOVSKY’S ‘SOLARIS’ “We don’t want to conquer space at all. We want to expand Earth endlessly…”

© 2021 by James Clark

Ingmar Bergman, not widely known to praise other filmmakers, was, however, on one occasion, drawn to remark: “My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first film [Ivan’s Childhood, 1962] was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt as if I was entering and encountering a range of stimulation. Someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, as a dream.”

With Bergman, however, being a tricky hand-to-hand brawler, you have to look carefully about such a homage. Yes, Tarkovsky comes on the field as remarkably brilliant. His instinct for dynamics and mis en scene is truly inventive and revolutionary. But where do you think that new genius learned his chops as an exhaustive challenger of world history as it has enjoyed total and disastrous power since societies on earth began? Tarkovsky’s film today, namely, Solaris (1972), is about space discovery, the wonder of the “new,” in the bright solar awakening. But the solar, if you look at it, is a fury, a visitation of intensity (emotion) having been censored from the entirety of life, of nature; while religion and science have carved up everything in sight, despite being possibly, however, having much to do with the new. The protagonist, Kris Kelvin (a surname redolent of “hard” science and control of heat), does not, at first blush, present any hope of becoming a paragon of emotive innovation. His father, on the eve of Kris’s departure—to a Soviet space craft having encountered disarray, and which he seemed to be the right man to straighten it out—far from a radical but aware that there is more in life than science, remarks, “He reminds me of a bookkeeper, preparing his accounts… It’s dangerous to send people like you into space. Everything is fragile. Yes, fragile. The Earth has somehow become disgusting to people like you, although at what sacrifice!  The Earth has somehow become adjusted to people like you. What, are you jealous that [someone else] will be the one to bury me, and not you?”

There are specific Bergman films which anticipate Tarkovsky films. They are not delivered in neon, but they shine for those who pay the price. The films, The Devil’s Eye (1960) and All These Women (1964), have meant a lot to Tarkovsky. He would have found nothing about science, let alone space travel, in those bemusing actions. What he was alert enough to see there was the problematic of pathos. Solaris is a saga of pathos, and how the powers of that sensibility embrace and improve the cosmos itself—especially, though, from afar. The Devil’s Eye presents a vicar’s wife being unfaithful one time only, to a suitor more spirited and loving than her husband, and which touches off the rest of the couple’s life in struggling to reach a cogently shared life. All These Women tracks a virtuoso musician (with a harem), seeing his craft being to be not enough for cogency. He had been loved from afar from his servant. After his death, she bids hopelessly (but with special assets) for a replacement at the music palace. This Isolde does not die young. Her pathos becomes what no one else will discover. And yet one very large heart will know and care. Sci-fi fans might not want anything about it. Though the unique and very beautiful pulsation can turn things around, given much concentration and courage.

The rest of the skirmishing, before Kelvin takes on deep space, involves, in Bergmanesque style, the disadvantage of struggling to maintain emotive sophistication in a world-history drunk with cheap advantage, cheap jubilation. Invited by the dad, there is a former cosmonaut, Burton, whose legacy is humiliation from mainstream science. (Humiliation having been frequently displayed by Bergman’s audacious minorities.) Burton brings a video of the inquisition where his career ended. (Before our chance to see the sentencing, there was the guest, appreciating the dad’s farm. “It’s so pleasant here.” The host tells him, “This house reminds me of my grandfather’s house. I really liked it. So I decided to build one just like it. I don’t like innovation…” (Is the ancient that lovely?)

Kelvin, not pleased to have the joke, visiting—“I’ve already seen it many times”—forces himself to see it once again, no doubt, however, enjoying seeing a pariah burned at the stake. Burton’s report does seem mad. But there are many angles in the universe, some of them magical. (Some, as with Tarkovsky, here, bringing to visuality the death of a wished-for affection [a pathos, of sorts], on the basis that, inasmuch as one is remembered, the figure is still, somewhat, in play, lingering, factoring within the matters of nature itself.) The outlaw’s account admits, “ [I] was in a state of shock. This was highly unusual for a man with eleven years of experience flying in space. I recovered in a couple of days, but I would never leave the station and refused to approach the window overlooking the Ocean” [of the maritime planet, Solaris]. “Later he wrote to us from the clinic. He was preparing a statement of great importance, one that would decide the fate of Solaristics.” His formal account is not taken well (despite a minority account hoping for pursuing the matter). With fog creating problems, he elicits circumstances for this saga: “When I looked down I saw shrubs, hedges, acacia trees, little paths. Everything was made of the same substance—plaster.” (In All These Women, a Madame Tussaud owns a lucrative wax museum. All of a piece! Compare and contrast.) “Then everything began to crack and break.” His film shows nothing but clouds. Burton insists, “This person had no space suit.” (Cut to Kelvin, no question to him!) With the embarrassment mounting, what began as a modest possibility roars into cheap melodrama. “He was about four meters tall. He had blue eyes and dark hair. He was naked, absolutely naked, like a newborn. He was wet, or rather slippery. It was disgusting…” The questionable seer declares, “The commission has not offended me, but it has offended the spirit of expedition… Therefore, I consider it my duty to announce…” [and so on].

The discussion the dad wanted Kelvin and Burton to have, goes, of course, nowhere. (Behind his back, the imminent voyager calls the overwrought surrealist [surrealism, meaning, “more real”], “What a ridiculous man.”) Which causes the dad to retort, “You have no reason to say that…” Kelvin’s aunt, Anna, one of many uncanny women in Bergman’s films who exerting, in one sense, bringing to bear difficult truths, and yet being named (Anna) the homicidal horror in other films, tries to convince Burton’s young son that the beautiful and lively horse at the farm is not a killer. Fear having saturated Burton’s nerve, and being left a worrier, the horsepower of the  drive home, however, becomes a dash for the ages, if one allows it to be. Though his function, when alive, was a space pilot, now he’s using a chauffeur and we see him hunched in the death-seat failing to appreciate the series of freeways, most of them underground (his territory, you’d think) where the speed and lights should be galvanizing. At somewhat like Mach 1, the flights of the lights, twisting and turning, are a godsend. (Solaris, far less remote than humankind would have it.) However, that his care to revisit insult in hope to wakening the near-dead, constitutes a small but notable triumph of dignity.

Reaching the troubled phenomenon, Kelvin wastes no time in unlocking his ancient sleuth’s, deductive genius upon a skeleton crew of two. (Could there be something wrong about going to the well which has served for eons?) His sendoff by the corporation included the touch, “Don’t worry about anything. Have a great trip!” In entry, he had allowed himself to be a mite confused, with his pair of eyes (becoming upside-down), and all around, pitch darkness. The frequent instance of cliché throughout, being a strain of American filmic melodrama, a Bergman standby. On entry, Kelvin trips upon one of his boot laces. The American pall presages far more trouble than he could ever have imagined. (The dash through the freeways having upstaged the great frontier.) Kelvin’s position, on hands and knees from the fall, anticipates his long learning curve materializing toward his being on his knees in face of an erstwhile hated father.

The few darlings of scientific sobriety still standing there had already anticipated Kelvin being in for a reversal of more of the same. The core of the scenario reprises that long-ago humiliation of Burton, but with the action given more lucid power. It is not an exaggeration to realize that Bergman’s two studies of pathos have been intensified here on the prospect of eliciting a very different cosmos than that patented by thousands of years. The run-up to the singularity can be succinctly noted. Kris encounters Dr. Snaut, a renowned physicist, in his office/ studio, where he moots a shock coming for the visitor, but can’t bring himself to explain. “If you see something out of the ordinary, try not to lose your head.” Snaut’s name brings us the  figure of the rhinoceros, in the Eugene Ionesco play, Rhinoceros (1960), with its baggage of Theatre of the Absurd in the service of a wake-up call, which Bergman would bring to bear, in his film, The Rite (1969). The Doctor leaves the troubleshooter with the notion that what will be striking, “depends on you.” The second scientist, Dr. Gibarian, comes to Kris in a video, the scientist having recently committed suicide. “Hi, Kris. I still have a little time left. (His office is heavy on Cubist art.) There are some things I must tell you and some things I must warn you about. By now you’re at the station and I know what has happened to me. What happened to me is not important. Or rather, it cannot be explained. I’m afraid what happened to me is only the beginning. I wouldn’t, of course, want it to happen, but this could happen to you and the others. It could probably happen to anyone. Just don’t think I’ve lost my mind.” He, having been a great friend of the ponderous protagonist, the pal goes on to propose, “heavy radiation,” to expunge the supposed hazard. (Pedants over their head. Wallowing in bathos.) Soon, on another visit to the boob-tube, we see that the Cubist has a young girl with him. The divided broadcaster sends out, “Do you see, Kris, how it’s not entirely absurd?” (That last word.) Just prior to that, Kris had made contact with the other one breathing, namely, Dr. Sartorius (a persistent chemist), and a name meant to elicit power. In an unhelpful interview, at the nearly closed door, a little boy pops out, to be quickly lifted back in. (Not only the Absurd; but, a crackling noire, sort of! Kelvin having picked up two pistols along the way. Crushed with bathos.) Also in that latter conversation, Sartorius tells Kelvin that Gibarian (“Barbarian”) was a coward, to commit suicide. He adds that the coward had failed his “duty to the truth.” The newcomer, showing how scientific he is, sneers at the issue of duty—”You mean to people… Your position is absurd.” At this point, then, Kelvin is nothing but a didactic brute. Sartorius concludes, “Your so-called courage is inhuman.” Only someone who has a lot to amends would visit the territory of our adventure. A beautiful woman flits by in the room of the big, crooked computer. Another rapid sighting, this time in the craft’s “intelligence” queue, clearly becoming someone to investigate. All he can think about there is that an invasion is underway, something to kill. However, he has an investment far more crucial than that. In a third impression, the infrastructure begins to reveal itself, as her half-covered, frozen apparition in that freezer, stored by Gibarian’s insistence to be given a traditional burial at some future day. Unable to sustain the mystery, he looks up Snaut and reports something clearly understandable, that Sartorius, “is a rotten person.” (What he thinks of the little boy, runs to “adult” toys.) The “sensible” man, admits, “I think I’m a little sick… What were you warning about? Was it a human being? Is she real? Can she be touched?” (He sees the woman racing passed. “Where did she come from?” the hasty cop asks. Snaut, a little less scientific than the others, provides the crucial ingredient: “It has something to do with conscience.” Kris is sweating. The blur of the girl continues.

Exhausted from the voyage, our protagonist comes to his bed and doesn’t sleep. Why? And though the straightforward answer would be, “conscience,” the takeoff here is multi-faceted. Only the agency of another could bring dignity to a creature like our protagonist. Conscience does stir, but almost as if the corpse in the morgue. The woman, now in his bedroom, is given an introduction as if, in the murky light, she is a horse being close-by, a figure which a coward would fear. Firstly, in the dim light, we could imagine an auburn mane. With more perspective, we realize that we’re in the presence of a woman wearing woolens. (Woolens [and sheep] being a vehicle in many Bergman films, where violence is a panacea to stanch the intrinsic hardness of life. She is seated, bemusingly, in one of the chic, Italian modernist chairs, perhaps due to the suicidal Cubist.) His arm and hand lie on the plastic mattress, being able, if alert, in the lexicon of Bergman’s triadic forces. Now, beside him in bed is Hari, his former lover, having been dead for 10 years, due to suicide. The transaction is elliptical, and yet a thrust of life, about material but something powerfully lucid. His eye loosens a tear. He gets up as if not having seen her. An apparition with a passionate history. A memory of unfaithfulness and violence. Hari is given the floor, in order to maintain a precinct by which creativity can thrive. All that, with one accomplishment—courage, complete courage. Tarkovsky’s dare: to take away our breath. And right at the get-go, the victim is adulterated. Her visage carries a snide smile. Where does she come off struggling to make amends?

Whereas Bergman’s studies of pathos stay within theatrical boundaries, Tarkovsky—minding that the target is far from romance—stages a surrealist “insurrection.” (Insurrection, requiring maturity to make true progress. Otherwise, true to dogmatic science, little people who will horrifically fail.) The gift, however, is a physical frenzy, dragging the thug and his remembered “love,” to portals which they lack commitment to digest. Kelvin’s way with heat has opened a metaphysical construction. The pathological lifer will, if we carefully scrutinize, disclose from afar the makings which their betters could deliver. Whereas tinctures, however, might be seen as drawn by the living, here it is a case of the tinctures driving the living. (Whatever crude appetite Kelvin had elicited here, his former partner was on the hook to clean up the mess.) After getting one of those pistols off the bed, and drawing from her, “Don’t, Kris, that tickles!” there is one more speed bump to negotiate. Her 60’s buckskin and long, easy, earthiness pigtail, discovers, amidst his gear a framed photo of a woman they had known, and disappointed. Before covering that matter, though, we’ll open up the gauntlet which the fixer presents to Hari, and displays his pathetic version of efficacy.

Kelvin’s initial overture is to attempt to kill the demanding entity. On a pretext of a joint adventure, he locks her into a vehicle which burns completely. “Get in, it started…” He undergoes some burns in her takeoff; she’s soon back as ever (as long as Kelvin keeps her in mind, however carelessly). The cheap melodrama on the move stalks her, and leaves a bad taste. Once again, it is Snaut who has a clue: “After all, she’s a part of your past.” The curse called Hari (as in harem, where a real harem, in the Bergman film, All These Women [1964], demonstrate how hard finding pathos is), is once again apparently welcome. “Come here,” the fixer asks, “don’t be afraid…” They embrace and kiss. In the morning, he leaves the room, and soon she wakens to find him gone. That lacuna drives her to mortal straits, attempting to leave the room and find her acolyte. Failing to understand the direction which the door opens, she rips into and beyond the entrance, leaving her becoming bleeding in many ways. The intent and power of that interface derives from the cosmos itself, a cosmos beyond science. On his return, his feeble effort to deal with the blood and ripped flesh is striking. She grasps his feet. “When I saw you weren’t there, I got scared.” In a third extremity, after hearing of what is in store for her, she ingests poison, and for a while she is the epitome of a corpse. After twisting and turning, she’s solvent again, but finding her true métier a nightmare. Her gambit being, therefore, “You don’t love me.” His reply: “Stop it, Hari!” To reach her work here being not about guilt but girth.

“Kris, what’s wrong with me?” the serious one asks. “Maybe it’s epilepsy?” As the systematic menfolk prepare for a grand finale to this “perversity,” Sartorius has to admit, “You’ve got a superb specimen.”/ Launching with what is in store for her, “That’s my wife… So, if I ever catch you…”/ The tall man of duty interrupts, “After all, you’re not guilty of anything.”/ Kelvin the paragon corroborates, “Of course.” Promptly after the conceptual saint maintains that, he becomes snagged in recalling, along with Hari, a video of his former father-in-law’s, supplemented by a bit of Kris’s’ camerawork. It’s snowing and a little girl is tending a small bonfire of scant warmth. A stilled swing is also in the story. A young Kris strikes a spicy tone. The woman, his wife, actually the woman Hari saw in the photo and had almost buried the recollection, is far from spicy. A cut to Kelvin’s father’s house shows Hari now in place. Cut back to the wife, morose. Cut back to Hari at the farm, waving happily. The show over, Hari, in the mirror of Kelvin’s space, looks at herself. She says, with Kris in attendance, “I don’t know myself at all.” He says, “I don’t remember.” Hari asks him, “Do you know yourself?”/ “Like all humans.”/ “That woman in the white coat hated me.” He chooses lightness. “Don’t make thing up. She died before you and I met…” She comes back with, “I don’t understand why you’re deceiving me. I remember perfectly. We drank tea and she kicked me out. Naturally, I stood up and left. I remember perfectly. What happened after that?”/ “After that I was away and we never saw each other again,” the man about truth maintains. “Where did you go?” she asks. / “To a different city.”/ “Why?”/ “I was transferred.”/ “Why did you leave without me?”/ “You didn’t want to come.”/ “That I remember!” (She spits on the mirror. Here we have a far more complicated vision of pathos. Kris may have had some enjoyable, even memorable frolics; but his pathos register would have had at best, a modicum. Hari’s quest, we realize now, is making amends to the other woman, despite needing Kelvin’s entryway. Not one but two suicides decorate this drama, along the scuzzy paths of melodramatic bathos. Whereas the Bergman’s figures as to pathos are allowed to toil in valid dignity, Tarkovsky, to his credit, and his powerful glee as to the surreal and the absurd, brings matters to the germane disaster of the preponderance of mankind. Hari the surreal and the absurd, maintains, that “I’m not Hari. Hari is dead. She poisoned herself. I’m somebody else [somebody more extensive]. How have you lived all this time? Were you in love with anyone?”/ “I don’t know. Did you think of me?”/ (He nods yes.) “Yes, but not all the times. Only when I felt unhappy.”/ (Hari’s tears.) She adds, “You know it feels like somebody is tricking us. No, not tricking.”/ “We argued toward the end. We argued a lot. I gathered my things and left… When you live with someone a long time, some things are necessary… But that has nothing to do with love. It might have much to do with technology.” (He had left some dangerous material.) “After three days, I couldn’t take anymore and I went to see her. My God, what’s the difference?”/ “You know, it feels like somebody is tricking us…”/ “How can I help you? Tell me! When I got there, she was already dead. There was a needle mark on her arm…” (Hari adds, “Like this?”)/ “She probably sensed that I didn’t really love her. But now I do…”

It’s Snaut’s birthday and she (noire-style) has ascertained that the fix is in for the minorities. Nevertheless, the birthday boy provides some tasty remarks within the menu. He shows up an hour and a half late, drunk, and with a dress suit with one shoulder missing. Many lighted candles, momentarily fine, but without impact (like the station). The tipsy genius begins by announcing, “It’s all rubbish! Mankind has lost the ability to sleep.” He finds a book he likes, and asks Kelvin to read the appropriate excerpt. “I know only one thing. When I sleep, I know no fear, no hope, no trouble, no bliss. The common coin that purchases all things, the balance that levels shepherd and king, fool and wise man. There is only one thing about sleep. They say it closely resembles death.” Dr. Sartorius steps in. “I propose a toast to Snaut. To his bravery, to his devotion, to duty. To Science and Snaut.” Snaut is not having any of it. “Science? Nonsense! In this situation mediocrity and genius are equally useless. We have no interest in conquering any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth to the to the borders of the cosmos. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.” (The boozy irony of a gift to himself, being shooting down classical rational majesty, because it has strangled the possibility of complementing lucidity. Hari’s adventure with pathos being a step in the right direction, while being directed [even by Snaut] to the gallows.) Snaut sneering against a “mirror,” a fan club. “We struggle for contact, but we never find it. We’re in the foolish-human predicament of striving for a goal that he fears. Man needs man… Gibarian was not frightened. He died of hopelessness…” Hari: “My God, all these heartbreaking lamentations, and nothing but second-rate Dostoyevsky.” Sartorius: “Man was created by nature” [bits], so he can learn her ways. In its endless search for the truth, Man is condemned to knowledge. Everything else is whim. Snaut, you spend all day lounging in bed with noble thoughts. You’ve lost touch with reality.” Then Hari, seeking the trail of the savage, Kris, who might bring tidings of the dead wife, by which to presents a canny trap, in the service of the uncanny. “I think that Kris Kelvin is more consistent than both of you.” (Kris Kelvin’s consistency is a function being lost from love.) “He has behaved humanely. It’s your conscience…” (Tarkovsky raising a homage to Bergman’s theatrical dialogue.) “And Kris loves me.” Sartorius bites. “There’s no Hari, she’s dead. You’re just a reproduction.” Knowing no one will comprehend, she pretends to cry and then, speaking to the dead, “I can feel just as deeply as you… I can already get by without him.” In her desperation, she knocks over a flaming candelabra. Dynamics injured. Snaut declares, “We’re losing our dignity and human character.” She declares, “I’ve really lost heart.”

By way of a flash-back of the little girl and the reduced wife, being farmed by Hari in the capacity of the almost complete cynicism of—wait for it!—Kelvin’s being a psychologist, the former harem exponent undergoes a nervous breakdown. During his swoon, Sartorius’ science imagines having put an end to whim, including his own “whim.” If the precinct has become sterile, the reason is that the sick man no longer dallies with the range of love. Snaut’s last thought being, “The more she’s with you, the more human she’ll become.” Before the breakdown, Kris had had a rare fantasy to stay with her on the station forever. Blotting out the previous thought, Snaut would insist, “Don’t turn a scientific problem into a love story. I had a feeling it would end badly.” He goes on to moot (in the spirit of ease and cowardice), “Little by little, everything will return to normal.” Kris onboard, tells Snaut, and us, “I’ll even find new interests and acquaintances. But I won’t be able to give myself to them fully. Never. Do I have the right to turn down even an imagined possibility of contact with this, which I have been trying to understand for decades?” (That last word being a sign of lostness. But this shake-up does bring, at the eleventh hour, a player on the road to pathos. Right at the get-go, he shoots himself in the foot: “The only thing left is to wait.”)

Reaching his father’s house, he falls to his knees in asking forgiveness to a superior thinker. At the beginning of the film, where the body of water appeared to be a large lake, a meteoric pink leaf shoots over the water, the hope being more than Kris’s capacity. At the same waters, at the end, we see, in overview, a tiny reservoir. Lifting off, from the house of woe (the roof leaking like a sieve, recalling the damaged roof and damaged life in the Bergman film, The Passion of Anna [1969]), we’re carried to a ruined house on rock, with water all around and signs of once having access to a road. Change or die.

[batmannotes]

Batman vs Two-Face

COMING OCTOBER 10, 2017 TO DIGITAL

AND OCTOBER 17, 2017 TO Blu-Ray TM COMBO PACK & DVD

BURBANK, CA (AUGUST 14, 2017) – Warner Bros. Animation and DC Entertainment bring together two of pop culture’s all-time heroes – TV’s original Batman and Captain Kirk, Adam West and William Shatner, respectively – to voice the title characters in the full-length, animated feature film, Batman vs. Two-Face. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment will make the all-new movie available October 10, 2017 on Digital and October 17, 2017 on Blu-ray™ Combo Pack ($24.98 SRP) and DVD ($19.98 SRP). 

As the sequel to the 2016 hit animated film Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, the all-new Batman vs. Two-Face finds Batman and Robin back in classic 1960s action, protecting Gotham City from some of the most nefarious villains in comics history. But when the mutilated master of multiplicity, Two-Face, begins staging a daring crime wave across Gotham, the Caped Crusaders must work double-time to discover his mysterious secret identity before they can halt his evil-doing – all the while combating the likes of Catwoman, Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Bookworm, Hugo Strange and King Tut! 

The late Adam West leads the star-studded cast in his final performance as Batman. The beloved actor delivers an inspired turn opposite fellow pop culture icon William Shatner (Star Trek) as the criminally conflicted Harvey Dent/Two-Face. This is only the second production of any kind to feature the two titans of the fanboy realm together. West and Shatner first teamed in the 1963 “Alexander The Great” television series that never made it past the pilot. 

The cast also boasts two more pop culture icons of the 1960s. Burt Ward is back for more “holy” fun as the Boy Wonder himself, Robin, and Tony Award winner Julie Newmar reprises her role as the fiendish feline, Catwoman. 

The voice cast includes Jeff Bergman (Joker, Bookworm, Desmond Dumas), Sirena Irwin (Dr. Quinzel), Thomas Lennon (Chief O’Hara), Lee Meriwether (Lucilee Diamond), William Salyers (Penguin), Lynne Marie Stewart (Aunt Harriet), Jim Ward (Hugo Strange, Commissioner Gordon), Steven Weber (Alfred, Two-Face henchmen) and Wally Wingert (Riddler, King Tut). 

The core Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders filmmaking team reprises their roles for Batman vs. Two-Face.  Rick Morales (LEGO DC Comics Super Heroes – Justice League: Cosmic Clash) directs from a script by Michael Jelenic (Teen Titans Go!) and James Tucker (Teen Titans: The Judas Contract). Tucker and Jelenic and also Supervising Producer and Producer, respectively. Sam Register is Executive Producer. Benjamin Melniker and Michael Uslan are Executive Producers. 

“Batman vs. Two-Face is a must-have for all Batman fans featuring a cavalcade of his foes, and an amazing cast including two giants of pop culture, Adam West and William Shatner,” said Mary Ellen Thomas, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Vice President, Family & Animation Marketing. “Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is excited to bring these beloved characters to animated life, and proud to have been associated with an actor as impressive, gracious and entertaining as Adam West. We salute his extensive contributions to the legacy of the character, and we are greatly appreciative of his cooperation and support in bringing this animated film to fruition. He will be greatly missed.” 

WATCH TRAILER BELOW:

⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️       ⬇️  

Special Features for Batman vs. Two-Face include:

·         “The Wonderful World of Burt Ward” (featurette) – Spotlighting Burt Ward’s life away from acting – particularly his many benevolent activities, and his lifelong devotion to the health and welfare of dogs.

·         Adam West Tribute Panel/2017 Comic-Con International 2017 – At the 2017 Comic-Con International in San Diego, a panel celebrated the life and times of the late Adam West, the legendary “Bright Knight.” Fans laughed, cried and cheered as actress Lee Meriwether (Catwoman from the 1966 Batman movie), director/writer/actor Kevin Smith, actor/radio personality Ralph Garman, producer James Tucker and moderator Gary Miereanu captivated the audience with anecdotes and tales about Adam West.

·         Actors Burt Ward and Julie Newmar discussing various aspects of their lives, ambitions and inspirations.

[mrmichaelchadler]

Believing in Ingmar Bergman's Cinema

It begins with a high overhead establishment shot of a community in postwar Sweden. The narrator sets the serene tone: “This is such a small town. I wouldn’t call this a great or harrowing tale. It is really just an everyday drama. Almost a comedy.”

The 1946 movie, “Crisis” (pictured below) marked the directing debut of 28-year-old Ingmar Bergman. It was not, like “Citizen Kane,” or “Breathless,” a first feature that signified a dynamic new talent behind the camera. The artistic authority existed in a much different register. In retrospect we are just now coming to fully understand the depth and full meaning. The movie launched one of the most significant and polarizing careers in the history of the cinema.

From the moment of his first film until his death, on July 30th, 2007, at the age of 89, Bergman was a towering cultural figure in film, theater, literature and film criticism. From 1946-1982, Bergman directed more than 40 films, the lynchpin of his artistic legacy. It is a body of work at once austere, beautiful, tactile, allusive and deeply generous.

He would have turned 100 on Saturday, July 14th. How do you begin to even fully process or critically assimilate so many films? Bergman’s critical reputation has always been volatile and fluid. There has never been a time when it does not seem essential or important to think about the man or discuss his films. The centennial of Bergman’s birth has reinvigorated the discourse.

The legendary art-house distributor Janus Films is currently presenting the national traveling retrospective, “Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema: A Centennial,” through October. FilmStruck, the essential streaming platform of Criterion and Turner Classic Movies, is showcasing the collection, “Director of the Century,” made up of 29 Bergman features, including the extended, multipart television versions of “Scenes from a Marriage” and “Fanny and Alexander.”

On November 20th, Criterion is issuing a 39-film boxed set, also called "Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema," that features new digital restorations of many of the keys works and a wealth of extraordinary supplemental materials and a 248-page book.

In a remarkable essay published in the current issue of Film Comment, contemporary French master Olivier Assayas writes: “You could ask what Bergman’s work has to tell us today, but you could just as well reverse the question and ask what our relationship to his films says about us.”

Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” is the dominant influence on Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed,” arguably the director’s greatest achievement. Bergman’s “Winter Light” is another essential reference on the film, and it testifies to his impact that Bergman marked the careers of so many critics turned filmmakers like Assayas, Schrader, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.

“It’s ironic to realize that Bergman’s finest work is precisely involved in bringing out the dormant genius in each of the actresses he’s chosen to work with—Maj-Britt Nilsson, Harriet Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann,” Truffaut wrote in a 1973 essay. “They are not kittens or dolls but real women. Bergman films them as they look out at the world, their gazes increasingly intense with toughness and suffering. The results are wonderful movies that, like Renoir’s, are as simple as saying hello. However, is saying hello so very simple?”

He touched all sides. Bergman came to film from theater. Bergman’s 1942 play, “The Death of Punch,” secured his entrée into the Svensk Filmindustri as a young scriptwriter. At SF, he developed under the tutelage of the two greatest figures of Swedish cinema: Victor Sjöström and Alf Sjöberg. Many of the early works are hybrid pieces that play off the expressive and formal differences of theater and film.

Bergman cannily synthesized, calibrated and usurped the dominant film movements for his own purposes: the French poetic realism of Jean Renoir, the play of memory and time from Max Ophuls and the speed and rhythm of Alfred Hitchcock. The great cinematographer Gunnar Fischer began his professional collaboration with Bergman on “To Joy,” in 1948 and he brought a sharper and more precise visual fluency to the material that fused perfectly with Bergman’s skill with language, ideas and his work with actors. The peerless Sven Nykvist started working with Bergman on “Sawdust and Tinsel,” in 1953, the start of the most celebrated director and cinematographer collaboration in history.

The release of three successive titles: “Smiles of a Summer Night” (1955), “The Seventh Seal” (1957) and “Wild Strawberries” (1957) made his international reputation. He became an avatar, the director as superstar. Assayas writes: “One could even add that Bergman has the privilege—or the curse—of having crystallized in the collective imagination as an archetype of the filmmaker: introspective, chatty, misanthropic, and also a kind of Bluebeard who left little space between life and art in his relationship with his actresses.”

The rise of Janus Films—founded in Boston in 1956—is inseparable from that of Bergman. The beauty of the retrospective and the Film Struck series is the circling back in gaining new appreciation and understanding of the director’s artistic progression.

“Summer Interlude” (1951) is a breakthrough work with a brilliant, tormented performance by Maj-Britt Nilsson as a ballet dancer haunted by the memory of her youthful affair with a young student (Birger Malmsten). Bergman’s use of ellipsis and time is beautiful to behold, and the erotic charge between the two young lovers is palpable and enthralling.

The sexual frankness is what gave Bergman’s work its early cache. He explicitly acknowledges as much in the follow-up film, “Waiting Women” (also known as “Secrets of Women”), from 1952. The framing device, a group of sisters-in-law recounting episodes from their past, is awkwardly shaped over the material, pointing out a structural weakness in Bergman that reflected a mechanical construction.

The second episode, again featuring Maj-Britt Nilsson, is extraordinary, composed of a flashback within a flashback, of a woman about to give birth who recalls her romantic travails in Paris. It’s not just the abundant nudity during a French cabaret sequence that feels shocking. Nilsson is pursued simultaneously by an American serviceman and more furtively by a Swedish painter. She offends the American by taking part in a risqué moment on stage that wins her a bottle of champagne. 

The champagne bottle ends up being an emblem of her sexual assertiveness but freedom as she uses it to extricate herself from the bonds of the judgmental American. In the final sequence, Eva Dahlberg achieves a lyrical lasciviousness as a wife of an industrialist. Trapped in a stalled elevator with her husband, she turns the tables that is absolutely riveting.

The French New Wave undercut Bergman’s influence. The critical backlash followed. “If a movie director isn’t going to provide a joke or two and some dancing girls, if he’s going to be serious, then he’d better have something interesting to say,” Pauline Kael wrote in 1968. “If, despite erratic brilliance, I was fed up with Bergman, it was because the pall of profundity that hung over his work and so many people had come to think that that pall was art.”

With the possible exception of Godard, is there any other filmmaker who has engendered so much remarkable writing about film as Bergman? “There is no happy ending,” Susan Sontag wrote in her landmark 1967 essay on “Persona.”

“At the close of the film, mask and person, speech and silence, actor and ‘soul’ remain divided—however parasitically, even vampiristically, they are shown to be intertwined.” 

In the end, wherever you stand on Bergman, believer, agnostic or somewhere in between, that intertwining has never felt so relevant or meaningful.

from All Content https://ift.tt/2JMl87L

[janvba2film-blog]

Post Q: Completed Reference List

Main Films:

The Last House on the Left, 1972. [Film] Wes Craven, USA: Hallmark Releasing.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, 1984. [Film] Wes Craven, USA: New Line Cinema.

Scream, 1996. [Film] Wes Craven, USA: Dimension Films.

Secondary References:

Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. (2010). [DVD] Directed by D. Farrands. 1428 Films. - This was very useful to me as it provided me with a lot of insight into the behind-the-scenes of the film, which was particularly useful in regards to auteur theory, because I learned which aspects were contributed by who.

At the Movies. (1994). Siskel & Ebert - Wes Craven's "New Nightmare" (1994). [Online Video]. 14 October 1994. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMbvJYSTnm4&index=8&list=PLvR8ZsaFQNScK1XB4UMVrVEJJwRuE9PpJ. - I thought this might have been more useful at the time, but having narrowed my field of study more has led me to believe it is not very useful; there are other sources which deal with the points he brings up in more depth.

Sanders, J., 2009. The Film Genre Book. 1st ed. Columbia University Press: Auteur Publishing. - This source aided me in recognising tropes of horror, such as the Final Girl, but also directed my attention to the fact that his debut film was a soft remake of Bergman’s The Virgin Spring. Furthermore, it first brought my attention to how Wes may be an auteur in reference to narrative writing.

Scream: The Inside Story. (2011). [video] Directed by D. Farrands. - Much like my first source, this provided me with great information regarding the background of Scream, and provided me with great points to make in my argument as the production company and the writer of the film had seemingly more input in the film than Wes.

Towlson, J., 2014. Subversive Horror Cinema. McFarland. - This source gave me so much insight into the social commentary of my director’s debut film and so became incredibly useful when studying Wes as an auteur.

Hutchings, P., 2017. The Horror Film. Pearson Education. This source didn’t have a lot of information for me to gather from but made a very strong argument against post-modern horror, which works very well into a counter-argument against Mr. Craven as an auteur as, according to Hutchings, it means movies become trivial instead of doing their job: analysing social fears.

Wes Craven’s Influence in Making the Horror Genre Subversive | The Mary Sue. 2017. Wes Craven’s Influence in Making the Horror Genre Subversive | The Mary Sue. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.themarysue.com/wes-craven-influence/. - This was useful because it commented on Wes’ famously subversive style, which is one of the areas I need to focus on for my argument for him being an auteur.

Myerla’s Movie Reviews.: Origins of an auteur - Wes Craven. 2017.[ONLINE] Available at:http://myerlamoviereviews.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/origins-of-auteur-wes-craven.html. + Cook, P., The Cinema Book 2nd Ed. British Film Institute. - Despite the title, this article brings into question his auteurship and also his filmmaking techniques - it’s all well and good using social commentary but to be defined as an auteur you must also be able to hone your craft of your medium. I could only find one relevant quote from the book, which made me wonder if NoES was simply following the trend of the time by bringing parent culture into question. I paired it with the above source because it also makes mention of the film possibly being a product of the time.

So The Theory Goes. 2017. Auteur: Wes Craven - So The Theory Goes. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.sothetheorygoes.com/auteur-wes-craven/. - This piece states him as more of a genre director when it comes to filmmaking but, much like other sources, uses his use of narrative as an argument for atueur status.

Cristobal Olguin. (2017). Scream - Manipulating Expectations | Film Analysis. [Online Video]. 20 January 2017. Available from:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFbxip5WIIw&feature=youtu.be. + Renegade Cut. 2017. YouTube. [ONLINE] Available at:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wm2lRt5uz6c. -  This video analyses the use of red herrings and foreshadowing used within Scream. This video is particularly useful to me because it outlines a technique that Wes implemented himself. And even if the screenwriter helped out with this technique it is still something Wes has used countless times in his movies (E.g. the replacement of protagonists in NoES). This could be a strong case for Wes as an auteur, as this is a reoccurring technique used in his films. I included the second source with the above one because it goes nicely with the other by touching upon the subversions of common horror tropes, and I believe this to be important as I will most definitely be touching upon this in my essay in regards to Scream. This essay references Carol J Clover’s: Men, Women, and Chainsaws - a book which helped to define the slasher genre in the popular consciousness. The author of the video argues that NoES meets and subverts the criteria of the book and goes through them to prove his point.

Keith, B., 2003. Film Genre Reader III. University of Texas Press. -  This was extremely useful for creating a counterargument against Wes being simply a genre director as Robin Wood is one of the leading theorists behind auteurship. However, the fact that it focused simply on two films instead of a broader aspect of cinema was quite unfortunate, though I still managed to gather relevant information from the text when he discussed his two focal films.

Trespassing Bergman, 2013. [DVD] Hynek Pallas, Jane Magnusson, Sweden: Syndicado. + The Guardian. 2017. Wes Craven: the mainstream horror maestro inspired by Ingmar Bergman | Film | The Guardian. [ONLINE] Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2015/aug/31/wes-craven-the-mainstream-horror-maestro-inspired-by-ingmar-bergman.  - There wasn’t much to write about here as Wes barely appears in the documentary, which was unfortunate considering his debut films was a soft remake of one of Bergman’s. Nevertheless I was able to gather some relevant quotes for when I discuss his influences. Since I was unable to gather much information from the above source, I paired it with one which touched upon the same topic. Together the sources bring into question how much Wes’ inspiration’s bled into his film, which is important to discuss when analysing auteurship.

Jane, B., 2014. New American Teenagers. Bloomsbury +

Academic.CRACKED.com. 2017. The ‘Nightmare On Elm Street’ Series Is Deeper Than You Know. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-secret-message-hiding-in-elm-street-series/. -  I thought that these two sources worked well together as they’re the only sources I could find which discuss the themes of NoES, and they both point towards the central theme of the film being puberty, even if the ‘quirky comedic’ tone of the Cracked article isn’t quite what I wanted. This is hardly surprising since the director and cast have all admitted that there are sexual undertones between Nancy and Freddy especially.