FAO Otto

I bet you LOVED all these films.

"Twenty-four years after directing Music in Darkness, Bergman would film a spectacularly disturbing scene in which a beautiful middle-aged woman (Ingrid Thulin) mutilates her sex organs with a shard of glass, then smears vaginal blood all over her face as a way of apprising her husband that their marriage is on the fritz (Cries and Whispers). He would also film a scene in Winter Light (1962) in which a suicidal Max von Sydow confesses his fear to his pastor (Gunnar Björnstrand) that life has no meaning, eliciting the not terribly helpful response in that the pastor, a fairly suicidal sort himself, agrees. This is immediately followed by the scene where a justifiably perplexed Von Sydow goes out and blows his head off, after which the pastor's estranged girlfriend (Thulin again), who seems to be afflicted by some exotic, Scandinavian brand of psoriasis, will ask if she can tag along as the pastor drives to his afternoon religious service, theorising that he could probably use some bucking up after a pretty rough morning, and that this also might be a good opportunity to put the moves on him. Bergman would direct 41 more films after Music in Darkness, mostly for theatrical release, a handful for television. Over the course of his 60-year career, he would film many genuinely unnerving scenes including one in which a seraphic teen virgin is raped and murdered by satanic cutpurses (The Virgin Spring) who then churlishly try to sell her clothes back to her parents; another where a sweet young boy falls on his head and dies on the very last day of an otherwise heavenly vacation (Summer Interlude); yet another in which a teenaged girl is burned at the stake by overly enthusiastic monks (The Seventh Seal) and finally the real show-stopper: the scene where a father learns that his wife and daughter have been killed - before his toddler son's very eyes - when the paraffin oven out in the kitchen unexpectedly explodes. The film's name: To Joy."

Super.

Posted By: Old Git, Mar 22, 19:18:40