Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) stands as one of the giants of world cinema and perhaps the father of the flowering of art house movement in America during the 1960s and ’70s. After a career as a melodrama journeyman in the postwar Swedish film industry, his creative and popular breakthroughs came with Summer with Monika (1953) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which firmly established him with European critics and audiences. Widespread American acclaim came with The Seventh Seal (1957), which for many remains his most celebrated contribution to film history. This selection of some of his greatest works feature new digital restorations courtesy of Janus Films and the Swedish Film Institute.
The Seventh Seal
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
For many Bergman’s most iconic work, The Seventh Seal is a parable on religion and mortality. When the knight Antonius …
Wild Strawberries
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Continuing his reckoning with death, Wild Strawberries (in Sweden a symbol of protection and safety) dramatizes one man’s remarkable voyage …
Through a Glass Darkly
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Bergman’s first serious foray into examining family trauma and dysfunction follows a young family to remote Fårö Island. Family patriarch …
Hour of the Wolf
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Despite having toyed with aspects of psychological horror in prior films such as The Silence and Persona, Hour of the …
Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
One of Bergman’s most famous and audacious experiments in a career filled with piercing character studies and psychological realism unparalleled …
Cries and Whispers
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Harriet Andersson gives one of her greatest performances as the agonized sister Anna, tortured by illness to the brink of …
Winter Light
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
The second in his “Faith Trilogy,” Winter Light chronicles a day in the life of a disillusioned village pastor (Gunnar …
The Magic Flute
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Bergman’s adaptation of Mozart’s opera—the tale of a young man determined to rescue a beautiful princess from the clutches of …
The Magician
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
When a 19th-century traveling medicine show makes its way into town, the locals subject its performers to a battery of …
The Silence
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
“The third film in his ‘Faith Trilogy,’ The Silence offers a sexually frank depiction of two emotionally conjoined sisters who, …
Sawdust and Tinsel
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
“Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival in one of the late master's most vivid …
Shame
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Musicians Jan (Max Von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann), take refuge in a remote farmhouse hoping to escape the coming …
Autumn Sonata
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Bergman’s only collaboration with Swedish film legend Ingrid Bergman, Autumn Sonata serves as a complimentary, yet more melancholy parallel to …
Smiles of A Summer Night
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
The inspiration for Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and Steven Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, Bergman’s Smiles is …
The Virgin Spring
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Bergman returns to the medieval Sweden of The Seventh Seal with this decidedly modern parable based on a 14th-century religious …
Summer with Monika
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
Originally regarded as an erotic exploitation film, Monika enjoyed reappraisal as Bergman gained international recognition. Here he first articulates his …
Fanny and Alexander
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
With his most pronounced cinematic meditation on childhood and memory, Ingmar Bergman abandons the expressionistic and existentially obsessive tendencies that …