FSLC announces Liv & Ingmar: The Films, Dec. 13-19

Film series highlights the cinema classics created by the legendary
filmmaker Ingmar Bergman with his partner and muse Liv Ullmann,
including AUTUMN SONATA, CRIES AND WHISPERS, PERSONA
and “Scenes From a Marriage”

CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972) 95 min
Format: 35mm
Country: Sweden
A shattering close encounter with death, the painfully voluptuous visual and aural experience of which should elicit only an eloquent silence. Three sisters have taken up residence in a large family manor:  Agnes (Harriet Andersson), dying in agony of cancer; Karin (Ingrid Thulin), ripped apart by a vampirelike appetite for human connection and an inability to get outside herself; and Maria (Liv Ullman), trapped in her own narcissism and sensuality. Death, to Agnes's sisters, is inconvenient, an affront to their egotism– they are heartless souls islanded within the rounds of their flesh. In contrast, the dead Agnes, sacramentally cradled against her maid's earth-mother breasts, finds heaven– even resurrection– in sweet memories of summer innocence. This superb film plumbs the deepest, darkest waters of the female body and spirit to find transcendent beauty and truth.
Friday, December 13
Monday, December 16

FACE TO FACE (1975) 136 min
Format: Digibeta
Country: USA
The brilliant Liv Ullman plays a psychiatrist whose sanity begins to erode during a stay with her grandparents while her daughter and husband are away on trips. Originally a made-for-TV miniseries, FACE TO FACE dives soul-deep into the landscape of Ullmann's face as she confronts and succumbs to madness.  “When the camera is as close as Ingmar's sometimes gets,” testifies Ullmann, “it doesn't only show a face but also what kind of life this face has seen.” With Erland Josephson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, and the always-superb cinematography of Sven Nykvist.
Sunday, December 15
Thursday, December 19

HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968) 89 min
Format: 35mm
Country: USA
Originating from a script entitled The Cannibals, HOUR OF THE WOLF is the first of three films featuring Max von Sydow as Bergman's alter ego, the artist in retreat to an island (Faro, the director's own home) where all his demons and imagined monsters can come out to play, threatening to possess their creator and “disappear” him into the darkness behind the brain. A strikingly Gothic tale of horror, HOUR OF THE WOLF owes much to Bram Stoker's Dracula in its evocation of the artist's admirer's and tormentors as vampires, flocks of flesh-eating birds and insects. A puppet show of Mozart's The Magic Flute, staged after dinner in a sinister castle, counters the artist's descent into nighttime madness with a quest that ends in light and joy. With Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, and Erland Josephson.
Saturday, December 14
Thursday, December 19

LIV AND INGMAR (Liv og Ingmar) 82 min
Director: Dheeraj Akolkar
Countries: Norway/UK/India
She was 25, a new actress with a handful of films on her resume; he was 46 and widely considered one of the greatest living filmmakers. He invited her to work on a film called PERSONA, and the rest is cinematic history. Over twelve films in which he directed her, and two films she made based on his screenplays, Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman formed one of the most remarkable and fruitful artistic collaborations ever. The intensity of their work on screen was matched by their passion off screen; they fell in love, and for about five years lived as a couple. Yet even after their romantic break-up they continued to be, as Bergman put it, “painfully connected.” Narrated by Ms. Ullman, Dheeraj Akolkar’s elegant film shows how much their relationship became the subtext—and perhaps in a few cases such as “Scenes From a Marriage,” the actual text—for many of the masterworks they created together.

THE PASSION OF ANNA (1969) 100 min
Format: 35mm
Country: USA
Filmed on Faro, Bergman's bleak island home, THE PASSION OF ANNA is really the case history of a contemporary Everyman, one Andreas Winkelmann (Max von Sydow), a lost soul ricocheting emotionally among a trio of equally damaged folk. Trapped in one of Bergman's hellish marriages, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson are worlds apart– she, fading from lack of love; he, armored in cold cynicism. Anna (Liv Ullman), the woman who becomes Andreas' lover, assaults him with her righteous honesty until he explodes in brutal rage. All are helpless to halt the horrific murder of animals on the island, as well as the lynching that results. THE PASSION OF ANNA is a devastating modern day take on THE SEVENTH SEAL.
Saturday, December 14
Tuesday, December 17

PERSONA (1966) 83 min
Format: 35 mm
Country: USA
The temptation is to take Bergman's masterpiece for granted. It is probably the most famous of all those modern, post-Pirandellian films concerned with themselves as works of art. It also contains one of the most truly erotic sequences on film, demonstrating what can be done on screen with told material. An actress named Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) elects to become silent and is put into the care of Alma (Bibi Andersson), a nurse companion. The actress's act, we soon learn, has two aspects: it is a wish for ethical purity, but it is also a species of sadism, a virtually impregnable position of strength from which to manipulate her nurse, who is charged with the burden of talking. By the end of the film, the two characters are engaged in a desperate Strindberg-like duel of identities, and Bergman has turned that struggle into a metaphor for the fate of language, art, and consciousness itself.
Tuesday, Dec 17

SARABAND (2004) 107 min
Format: HD Cam
Country: Sweden
In this sequel to 1973's Scenes From A Marriage, using the same incomparable acting duo of Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, Ingmar Bergman has given us a glorious late masterpiece. Marianne decides to look in on her ex-husband Johan, to see how the old goat is doing after all these years. While the two revisit their wounds and rediscover an irritable, mocking fondness for each other, they are suckered into a more volatile power struggle between Johan's widowed middle-aged son Henrik and his beautiful, talented daughter Karin. Both father and daughter are cellists; and the dance and musical form to which the title alludes conveys their elegant, risky movements of converging and parting. Bergman's ability to push scenes beyond civility to explosive feelings of love and hate remains unsurpassed. The acting of the four principals is peerless. This is no old man's sentimental valentine, but a work of shocking vitality and robustness, sublimely poised, directed by one of the grandmasters of cinema.
Saturday, December 14
Wednesday, December 18

Scenes From a Marriage (1974) 168 min
Format: Digibeta
Country: Sweden
Bergman's first shot-for-TV effort, Scenes originally ran 300 minutes in six parts– each with a chapter title ranging from “Innocence and panic …” to “In the middle of the night, in a dark house…”  A truly harrowing chronicle — much of it in lacerating close-up– of the death of what initially looks like a perfect marriage. Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman are nothing short of miraculous as they fight out over a period of years all of the skirmishes and assaults, retreats and truces, betrayals and surrenders that constitute their coming apart and reconstitution — as couple and individuals. A Swedish-TV Civil War, scenes makes us see how poisonous and sustaining the umbilicals of Bergman's marital unions can be.
Sunday, December 15

SHAME (1968) 102 min
Format: 35mm
Country: USA
Two married musicians (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullman) have withdrawn to a remote island, where they survive by growing and selling fruit, indifferent to everything outside their small world. Civil war and institutionalized violence overwhelm them (“Sometimes it’s like a dream. Not mine. I’m forced into someone else’s dream.”), stripping them of every pretense of autonomy, privacy, or decency, until only shame remains. Bergman speaks of the Vietnam newsreel that gave birth to this shattering masterpiece: “An old man and woman were walking with a cow … And all of a sudden, a helicopter … started up and began making a racket … And the cow tore itself loose, and the old woman dashed away after the cow, and the helicopter rose and rose, and this old man just stood there, completely non-plussed and utterly confused and desperate. And, somehow, more than all the atrocities I’ve seen, I experienced that third party’s misery, when everything breaks loose over his head.”
Saturday, December 14
Wednesday, December 18

Film Society of Lincoln Center
Founded in 1969 to celebrate American and international cinema, the Film Society of Lincoln Center works to recognize established and emerging filmmakers, support important new work, and to enhance the awareness, accessibility and understanding of the moving image. Film Society produces the renowned New York Film Festival, a curated selection of the year's most significant new film work, and presents or collaborates on other annual New York City festivals including Dance on Camera, Film Comment Selects, Human Rights Watch Film Festival, LatinBeat, New Directors/New Films, NewFest, New York African Film Festival, New York Asian Film Festival, New York Jewish Film Festival, Open Roads: New Italian Cinema and Rendez-vous With French Cinema. In addition to publishing the award-winning Film Comment Magazine, Film Society recognizes an artist's unique achievement in film with the prestigious “Chaplin Award.” The Film Society's state-of-the-art Walter Reade Theater and the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, located at Lincoln Center, provide a home for year round programs and the New York City film community.

The Film Society receives generous, year-round support from Royal Bank of Canada, Jaeger-LeCoultre, American Airlines, The New York Times, Stonehenge Partners, Stella Artois, illy café, the Kobal Collection, Trump International Hotel and Tower, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

For Media specific inquiries, please contact:
John Wildman, (212) 875-5419                                 David Ninh, (212) 875-5423
[email protected]                                              [email protected]