#Liv ullmann max von sydow full#

Hour of the Wolf has been described as the first film of a distinct Fårö trilogy, followed by Shame and The Passion of Anna (1969), in offering the island not just as a shooting location and artistic retreat but a muse in itself. Hour of the Wolf also reflects Bergman’s adoption of the island of Fårö as a base for working, a place of untrammelled creative freedom where he built a film studio and retreated to make movies each year after expounding his other great artistic pursuit, directing theatre. The film in context mediates the portrayal of an artist retreating from reality in Persona and the depiction of being plunged back into its brute immediacy in Shame (1968). Hour of the Wolf belongs amidst a string of films Bergman produced in the 1960s preoccupied with the flailing of the artist before the interminable pressures of the modern world and the impossibility of entirely escaping it, and the accompanying morbid psychology resulting from the tension between inner and outer worlds. The latter, the result of Bergman’s brief exile from his native Sweden over a tax dispute, is a bleak and miasmic portrait of the waning Weimar era in Germany where proto-Nazidom is engaged in voyeurism and grotesque experimentation. Most famously, The Virgin Spring (1960), with its folklore-inspired tale of a medieval patriarch who avenges his saintly daughter’s despoiling and murder by some brigands, provided the springboard for Wes Craven’s notorious Last House On The Left (1972), and through it a vast number of films revolving around rape and vigilante violence.ġ968’s Hour of the Wolf and 1978’s The Serpent’s Egg represent perhaps the closest Bergman came to making proper Horror movies. The Seventh Seal heavily informed the revival of Gothic Horror in the late 1950s, including Mario Bava and Roger Corman’s Poe films, particularly The Masque of the Red Death (1964). Bergman in turn had a deep influence on the genre. Persona (1966) annexed imagery redolent of both Horror and Sci-Fi in its exploration of mental collapse and psychic merging, mental landscapes, climaxing with its two heroines’ faces blended into a monstrous visage fit for a B-monster movie. Through A Glass Darkly (1961) featured a young psychotic who envisions God as a giant spider resting in the centre of a web. The Magician (1958) was a queasy lampoon of gothic horror imagery and the mystique of the carnival sorcerer. The Seventh Seal (1957), the film that made Bergman an international star of the art form, revisited the traditions of medieval folk tales and images of Death personified and triumphant, inhabiting a world of wind-thrashed coastlines and cavernous castles. The anxious, unstable, beleaguered tenor of Bergman’s mature work often employed imagery sourced from the same wellsprings as Horror’s lexicon of preoccupations and metaphors.

#Liv ullmann max von sydow full#

So, much as it might once have infuriated some of his high-minded worshippers in his heyday to say so, Bergman’s films very often grazed the outskirts of Horror cinema, and sometimes went the full distance. And yet Bergman’s fascination, even obsession with pathological behaviour and with the dark and tangled roots of the modern psyche and civilisation repeatedly drew him towards the fantastical, the hallucinatory, and the oneiric, conveyed through cinema that often reached back to the supple blend of naturalism and expressionistic stylisation achieved in early masters of Scandinavian cinema like Carl Dreyer, Benjamin Christensen, and Victor Sjöström. – note in the screenplay of Hour of the WolfĪs a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman synthesised two vital artistic modes, the psychological realism of Scandinavian theatre, and the essential faith of Modernism, that understanding of the world depended on perception and therefore art had to find ways to replicate modes of perception, groping towards a rational understanding of the irrational impulse. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most babies are born. It is the hour when the sleepless are haunted by their worst anguish, when ghosts and demons are most powerful. The hour between night and dawn…when most people die, sleep is deepest, nightmares are most real.