Noticias

Each month will focus on a different theme, genre or region.

The BFI Southbank is launching a year-long monthly programme dedicated to Arab cinema from the region and its diaspora.

Discover Arab Cinema kicks off in November and will show contemporary and classic Arab films, including shorts and features.

Each month’s programme will be organised by a different theme, genre or region, with the first three months (November 2013 – January 2014) dedicated to Egyptian cinema, the Family in Middle Eastern societies and Algerian cinema.

Mona Deeley programmes in association with the Zenith Foundation.

Films to be shown include Tawfik Abu Wael’s Thirst; Yahia Al Abdallah’s The Last Friday; Mohamad Lakhdar Hamina’s Chronicle of the Years of Fire; Mohamed Hamidi’s Homeland; Ibrahim El Batout’s Eye of the Sun; and Ahmad Abdallah’s Microphone.

Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion. As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture.

One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and actor.

This article will examine some of the great director & actor teams. It’s important to note that this piece is not intended as a film history survey detailing all the generally revered collaborations.

There is a wealth of information and study available on such duos as John Ford & John Wayne, Howard Hawks & John Wayne, Elia Kazan & Marlon Brando, Akira Kurosawa & Toshiro Mifune, Alfred Hitchcock & James Stewart, Ingmar Bergman & Max Von Sydow, Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina/Marcello Mastroianni, Billy Wilder & Jack Lemmon, Francis Ford Coppola & Al Pacino, Woody Allen & Diane Keaton, Martin Scorsese & Robert DeNiro...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: May 29, 2012

Price: DVD $19.95, Blu-ray $29.95

Studio: Criterion

Birger Malmsten gets familiar with Maj-Britt Nilsson in Bergman's Summer Interlude.

The 1951 drama-romance Summer Interlude, Swedish master Ingmar Bergman’s (Summer with Monika) tenth film, touches on many of the themes that would define the rest of his legendary career—isolation, performance and the inescapability of the past.

In one of the director’s great early female roles, Maj-Britt Nilsson (To Joy) portrays Marie, an accomplished ballet dancer haunted by her tragic youthful affair with a shy, handsome student (Birger Malmsten, Thirst). Her memories of the rocky shores of Stockholm’s outer archipelago mingle with scenes from her gloomy present, most of them set in the dark backstage environs of the theater where she works.

When interviewed years later, Bergman said that he considered this classic reverie on life and death to be a creative turning point in his career.

Over the past week or so, I’ve had two significant preoccupations on my mind: first and foremost, the wedding this past Saturday of one of my sons, and second, Ingmar Bergman’s 1960 film The Virgin Spring, which I reviewed a few days ago on my Criterion Reflections blog. Kind of an odd juxtaposition, it turns out, with a very happy and celebratory event competing (and easily winning, in the big scheme of things) with a Bergman movie that’s as depressive as it is impressive on so many levels. So to continue with the Bergman theme, and perhaps to take a sobering look at the “for worse” commitments that accompany marriage vows, for this week’s installment of my Journey Through the Eclipse Series, I’ve chosen Thirst, another Bergman flick, shot ten years prior to The Virgin Spring. It’s from the set that started this whole Criterion subsidiary line,...

Updated.

"Gunnar Fischer, a cinematographer whose use of stark lighting and sharp focus lent mood and psychological depth to a dozen of Ingmar Bergman's early films, including The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, died on Saturday in Stockholm," reports William Grimes for the New York Times. "He was 100."

"He is widely recognized as the first cinematographer to capture with unparalleled beauty the cruelty, sensuality and selfishness that often collided in the same scene among Bergman's anguished characters." Adam Bernstein: "Fischer's great skill was in monochrome,' or black and white, film historian and Bergman scholar Peter Cowie told The Washington Post in 2008. 'He gave Bergman's films that unique expressionistic look, with their brilliant contrasts in every gradation of black and white.' He translated Bergman's themes of emotional isolation, sexual anguish and fear of death into unforgettable images: cold Scandinavian sunlight sparkling off water in Summer Interlude (1951) and...

Sad news tonight folks. Longtime Ingmar Bergman collaborator, Gunnar Fischer, has passed away earlier today at the ripe old age of 100. I just saw the Masters Of Cinema twitter feed posting a link to this Swedish web site (HD.se), announcing that he had died earlier today in Sweden.

From the translated story:

Gunnar Fischer out of time

The photographer and film director Gunnar Fischer died on Saturday, 100 years old.

Stockholm. He worked closely with Ingmar Bergman in the 50′s in classic films such as Summer with Monika, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and The Magician.

- He passed away in the afternoon. This fall, he would have turned 101 years, says his son and cinematographer Jens Fischer said.

Gunnar Fischer was employed by the Swedish Film Industry 1935-1970 and the 1970-75 Svt.

Fischer‘s cinematography is well represented in the Criterion Collection. You can find him working with Bergman early...