Hollywood: Right Face

Module 1. Cinema

Self –study

Task 1.1.Below you will find two articles about Swedish movie director and theatre producer Ingmar Bergman. Read through the articles and take notes of the information about I.Bergman’s contribution into the world cinematography.

Consider the following points:

- output;

- concepts;

- styles;

- techniques

Ingmar Bergman (1918- )

Ingmar Bergman is a Swedish movie and theatre director, playwright, screenwriter. Although Bergman is widely known as afilm director, he has also become one of the foreground figures of the modern Swedish theatre. Bergman's artistic career includes about a hundred stage performances, forty radio productions, fifty feature films, and fifteen TV productions. In several books, from The Magic Lantern (1987) to Private Conversations (1996) Bergman has explored his childhood, his relationship to his father, and the strained marriage of his parents.

“I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It’s a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develop relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.” (Bergman in John Simon’s book ‘Ingmar Bergman Directs’, 1972)

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala. His father, Erik Bergman, was a Lutheran minister and chaplain to the court of Sweden. Bergman was raised under strict discipline. His mother Karin, née Åkerblom, came from a prosperous family; she was a proud, strong-willed person, and the relationship between his parents became mutually destructive. “Mother, you are my best friend,” Bergman wrote to her years later, as a grown-up man. From his childhood pressures Bergman later drew material for his plays and films. Many of Bergman’'s works have explored the father-god trauma, among them the films Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963).

At the age of 10 Bergman received as a toy a laterna magica. He made dolls for his puppet theater and saw in 1935 his first theater production, A Dream Play by August Strindberg. Bergman studied literature and art at the University of Stockholm. After graduation he became a trainee-director at a Stockholm theater. During this period he published a few short stories and wrote a number of plays including Kaspers död (1942) and Jack among the Actors (1946). At the age of twenty-six Bergman became the youngest theatre manager in Europe at the Hälsingborg City Theatre in Sweden. He secured his position through a large number of impressive works on stage, especially classical plays. Bergman was manager of the Helsingborg city theatre (1944-46), director at Gothenburg city theatre (1946-49), at Malmö city theatre (1953-60) and at the Dramaten in Stockholm (1960-66), the last three years as manager.

Bergman made his debut in film in 1944 as ascreenwriter to the Alf Sjöberg film Hets (Frenzy). In 1949 he directed the film Fängelse (The Devil’s Wanton). Swedish critics referred to Bergman as “the puberty crisis director” specializing in “delayed adolescence”. The artistic breakthrough came with the film Gycklarnas Afton (1953, Sawdust and Tinsel). In this film Bergman describes an artist’s life as despised and wasted. The background is a third class circus environment. “It is true people often talk about ‘decisive moments,’’ Bergman said once. “Dramatists in particular make much of this fiction. The truth is probably that such moments hardly exist, but just look as if they do... The actual breakthrough is a fact far back in the past, far back in obscurity” (from Private Conversations, 1996).

His first international success was Sommarnattens leende (1955, Smiles of the Summer Night). In the story a country lawyer meets again a touring actress who was once his mistress. He accepts an invitation for him and his young wife to stay at her mother’s country home for a weekend. Wild Strawberries (1957) is considered alandmark film in Bergman’s career. It dealt with the subject of man’s isolation, and like in several films, Bergman used a journey as a plot structure. The Seventh Seal (1957) won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. It explored the individual’s relationship with God and the idea of Death. In the story, set in the fourteenth century, a knight challenges Death to a game of chess. Over the years Max von Sydow, the knight of the film, came to be identified as Bergman’s on-screen alter ego. However, von Sydow has played also in action films. Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Liv Ullmann became Bergman's favorite actresses and Sven Nykvist his regular cameraman. Ullmann, his muse, later left the island of Farö, where they lived, and gained international stardom. Their daughter Linn became a novelist. In 1971 Bergman married Ingrid von Rosen; they had already had an affair in the late 1950s. Bergman had four previous marriages: with Else Fisher, Ellen Lundström, Gun Grut, and Käbi Laretei. Ingrid von Rosen died of cancer in 1995.

“Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to pure emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster - a movement” (from The Magical Lantern, 1987).

Recurrent themes in Bergman's films are men’s and women’s inability to communicate with each other, metaphysical questions of guilt and the existence of God, and the emotional cruelty of human beings. “For many years, I was on Hitler’s side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats,” Bergman has revealed from his youth. Already from his early play Jack among the Actors, Bergman showed his interest in the ambiguous tension between artist and public. Persona (1966) marked Bergman's departure from metaphysics toward the realm of human psychology. At that time Bergman was leaving his post at the Royal Dramatic Theater. He wrote the script in 1965 while hospitalized; withdrawal and illness were also subjects of the film. In his self-analysis and films about tensions between the sexes Bergman has continued the psychological tradition of Strindberg. Among Bergman’s most probing and honest studies of middle-class married couples from the 1970s is Scenes from a Marriage (1974), starring Liv Ullmann, Erland Josephson, Bibi Anderson, and Jan Malmsjö. Originally it was made as six TV episodes, but Bergman later edited it into feature-length.

Despite Bergman’s international status, his films were not always positively received by critics in Sweden. In 1962 the director Bo Widerberg published a pamphlet attacking him for reinforcing national stereotypes and calling for a new and more socially conscious national cinema. On the other hand, Summer with Monika (1953) was attacked in the United States. Its prints were confiscated in Los Angeles, and a judge declared that the film appealed to potential sex murderers. Smiles of the Summer Night was promoted as “a Swedish smorgasbord of sex, sin and psychiatry...” In the 1970s and 1980s feminists criticized Bergman's portrayal of women, although he has been considered among the most sensitive interpreters of the inner world of women in Europe.

In 1976 Bergman was arrested by two policemen and charged with income-tax fraud. He suffered a nervous breakdown, closed his studio on the Baltic island of Fårö, and left Sweden in protest. The charges were later dropped. Bergman made his home in Munich, where he was a director at the Residenztheater. He also made films, such as The Serpent's Egg (1977), which dealt with the collapse of the German currency and other events of the 1920s that paved the way for the Nazis.

Bergman once noted that the cinema was like an exciting mistress to him, but the theatre was his faithful wife. As a film director his greatest international success was the autobiographical Fanny and Alexander (1983), which received the Oscar for best foreign film. Reviews were in general positive, and Bergman was compared to Maz Ophuls, Federico Fellini, and Luchino Visconti. In the film a well-to-do Uppsala family comes together to celebrate Christmas 1907. Statues come to life and the ghosts of the departed mingle freely with the living. Alexander, a 10-year old boy, clashes with ironclad dogma and the icy Bishop Vergerus.

After returning to Sweden, Bergman wrote film scripts for Billie August and Daniel Bergman and directed at the Royal Swedish Theatre. The Swedish Film Institute launched a new Ingmar Bergman prize to be awarded annually. In 1988 Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic Lantern, appeared. It was followed by his film memoir: My Life in Film (1993). Bergman’s novel The Best Intentions (1993) was based on his parents’ lives, and thescreenplay for the 1992 film on the same subject. Private Conversations (1996) dealt with the extra-marital affair of Ingmar’s mother, Anna with a student-priest, Thomas.

In October 2001 Bergman announced his plans to make asequel to Scenes from a Marriage with the 78-year old Erland Josephson and the 62-year old Liv Ullmann who also were members of the original cast in 1973. He wrote the screenplay for Liv Ullmann’s film Faithless (2000) and two years later Bergman had a new television film under way - Saraband (2003), saying it would be his last picture. Bergman shot the chamber piece on digital video. “Saraband may be Bergman’s final primal scream, which his art and craft give the severe majesty of a Bach cello suite,” wrote Richard Corliss in Time (August 29, 2005). Bergman has spent his time on Farö mostly reading and talking with his friends on the phone.

INGMAR BERGMAN

Universally regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, Bergman has often concerned himself with spiritual and psychological conflicts. His work has evolved in distinct stages over four decades, while his visual style - intense, intimate, complex - has explored the vicissitudes of passion with a mesmerizing cinematic rhetoric. His prolific output tends to return to and elaborate on recurrent images, subjects and techniques. Like the Baroque composers, Bergman works on a small scale, finding invention in theme and variation. Bergman works primarily in the chamber cinema genre, although there are exceptions, such as the journey narrative of Wild Strawberries (1957) and the family epic of Fanny and Alexander (1983). Chamber cinema encloses space and time, permitting the director to focus on mise-en-scène and to pay careful attention to metaphoric detail and visual rhythm.
Perhaps his most expressive technique is his use of the facial close-up. For Bergman, the face, along with the hand, allows the camera to reveal the inner aspects of human emotion. His fascination with the female face can be seen most strikingly in Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1972). In his autobiography, Bergman claimed that he was always trying to generate his mother's face; hence, psychological and aesthetic needs are realized in this cinematic signature.
Of the early period Wild Strawberries stands out for its narrative invention in a fluid manipulation of flashbacks, reveries and dream sequences. Its penetrating psychological investigation of the closing of the life cycle established Bergman’s preoccupation with the relationship between desire, loss, guilt, compassion, restitution and celebration. Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)/Naked Night, more allegorical than Wild Strawberries, is likewise designed around a journey motif of existential crisis. In contrast, the Mozartian Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) displays Bergman's romantic, comic sensibility. The early period concludes with two symbolic works, The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1959), both set in the Middle Ages. The extreme long shot in The Seventh Seal of Death leading the peasants in silhouette across the horizon now forms part of the iconography of modern cinema.
The second stage of Bergman's cinematic evolution shifts to the chamber style. Intense spiritual and psychological themes are explored in the "Silence" trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, 1961, Winter Light, 1962, The Silence, 1963), and in The Shame (1968), Hour of the Wolf (1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969), three films all seton the island of Faro. With its dialectical editing and expressive compositions, The Silence is considered one of Bergman's most artfully structured films. The Passion of Anna, with its innovative application of red motifs, marked Bergman's first use of color photography.
Between these two trilogies came Persona, a work many critics consider Bergman's masterpiece. Persona shares a similar look and ambience with the Faro trilogy, and has direct links with The Silence in its focus on the antagonistic relationship between two women. Yet, with its distinctly avant-garde style and rhythm, it stands apart from any other of Bergman's films. Ostensibly concerned with identity crisis and the role reversal of a nurse and her mentally ill patient, the subtext of the film explores the nature of the cinematic apparatus itself. The narrative is framed by opening and closing shotsof a film strip, projector and light, which lead into and out of the figure of a young boy. With his directorial hand, the boy conjures up a gigantic close-up of the female face. In a now celebrated sequence, the two faces of the female protagonists dissolve into one. (The figure of the precocious, magical child, previously seen in The Silence, would later reappear in the autobiographical Fanny and Alexander, 1983.) Sadomasochistic behavior, along with problems of role reversal and denied maternity, form the tortured core of both Persona and Cries and Whispers, the masterwork of the late period. In contrast to the spare decor, sharp black and white photography and disjunctive editing of Persona and Cries and Whispers is a 19th-century Gothic period-piece featuring rich colors, draped, theatrical decor and muted dissolve editing. The film revolves around three sisters, one of whom, Agnes, is dying, and their maid, Anna. Bergman evokes religious iconography, with each of the three sisters representing various theological concepts. The dying Agnes, set in cruciform position, returns as a resurrected savior/prophet. The exquisite Pietà/birth shot of Agnes and the Maid, as well as the revolutionary dissolve red-outs, are highlights in this brutal and beautiful film.
Even the minor films of Bergman’s later period, such as Face to Face (1976), Autumn Sonata (1978) and From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) continue to explore and refine recurrent themes and techniques. In the underrated The Touch (1971), Bergman examines the theme of marriage, with an inventive subtext of the Persephone myth, in a visually expansive way that distinguishes it from the more conventional Scenes From a Marriage (1973). The cycle of Bergman’s work appropriately concludes with Fanny and Alexander, an epic of family romance, touched with elements of fairy tale, horror and ghost story. All the preoccupations of Bergman’s extraordinary career flow through the imagery, action and stylization of the film.
Continuing his exploration of family relationships, Bergman drew inspiration from the marriage of his own parents to write the autobiographical screenplay for The Best Intentions (1992), which Bergman entrusted to director Bille August after announcing his retirement from filmmaking. As an artist, Bergman pays homage to music and theater in general, to Bach, Mozart and Strindberg in particular. His work seems a synthesis of the internalized Swedish sensibility and harsh Scandinavian landscape, yet he speaks to a universal vision of human passion. Although apparently not influenced by other filmmakers, with the possible exception of Carl Dreyer, Bergman himself has had a wide-ranging influence on a generation of filmmakers. A unique and powerful presence, his genius has made an extraordinary contribution to the art of the cinema.

Task 1. Read the text from U.S.NEWS & WORLD REPORT, MAY 15, 1995 (P.66-72) and choose the sentence which gives the gist of the article:

1. Under siege, filmmakers and TV bosses become more family friendly.

2. Hollywood poisons the minds of our young people.

3. The boom in family films is a consequence of changes in American politics.

Hollywood: Right Face

The innocuous title of an upcoming Miramax movie Kids makes it sound like just the kind of film the Walt Disney Co., Miramax's corporate owner, would love. But Kids is no Lion King. The movie chronicles 24 hours in the lives of a band of thrill-seeking New York teens. In the opening scene, a boy known as “Virgin Surgeon” deflowers a teenage girl. After that come graphic depictions of unsafe sex, full frontal nudity, pot smoking and racial violence, all performed by a cast of barely pubescent-looking actors and actresses. Critics are already calling the film, which will be shown at the Cannes Film Festival this month, the most controversial film of the year, perhaps even of the decade. If, as expected, Kids gets an NC-17 rating, Disney, which has a corporate policy of not releasing NC-17 ratings, will most likely force Miramax to sell it to another distributor.

Kids will doubtless reinforce Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole’s recent complaint that Hollywood “poisons the minds of our young people with destructive messages of casual vioence and even more casual sex.” […]

Kids will also provide fodder for the army of critics who complain that Hollywood’s attitudes on most social and behavioral issues are more permissive and liberal than most Americans’. […]

Family trend. Yet, the controversy surrounding Kids and a handful of other upcoming movies like the blood-splattered Dead Presidents and Striptease, the Demi Moore film about nude dancers, masks a larger, if unheralded, trend in Hollywood. The entertainment industry is churning out more “family friendly” movies than it has in years. “The industry is finding out that it’s possible to generate large sums at the box office without gratuitous sex and violence,” says Motion Picture Association of America Chairman Jack Valenti. Adds critic Michael Medved, who blasted Hollywood for trashing American values in a 1992 book: “It’s really extraordinaryhow fast the change has come about.”

In its annual report on the movie industry, the Christian Film and Television Commission points out that the big Hollywood studios released 132 family-friendly movies in 1994 about 40 percent of their total output and a jump of 8 percentage points over the previous year. “As someone who has spent nearly a decade lobbying Hollywood executives,” says Theodore Baehr, chairman of the commission, “I’m happy to report that 1994 was an extraordinary breakthrough for the good, the true and the beautiful in popular entertainment.”

TV’s response. The television industry is also making a clear effort to make TV more family friendly. Less than two years ago. Attorney General Janet Reno put Hollywood on notice: Cut down on graphic portrayals of violence on television on your own or else Washington will step in. In response, both the network and cable industries commissioned independent organizations to define and monitor television violence. […]

Television is also grappling with the notion of values. Father Ellwood Kieser, president of the Humanitas Prize Organization, which honors TV programming that promotes human values, applauds what he terms a “new sensitivity” in the creative community. More than 100 writers, up from an average of just 30 only three years ago, attend the all-day seminars for Writer’s Guild members that his organization holds each month to discuss ways of incorporating values into entertainment programming. “When you look at the spectrum of American TV,” he says, “the hourlong dramas are healthier than ever from a values standpoint.”

The simplest explanation for what’s taking place in television and movies is financial self-interest. Advertisers are more reluctant today to sponsor programs with excessive violence or controversial themes. For example, commercial time for the critically acclaimed “NYPD Blue,” known for its use of nudity and profanity, goes for far less than ad time on a comparably rated but less controversial show, says an ABC executive. Under pressure from Congress, some big agencies like Amtrak, the Postal Service and the Department of Defense, which spend a combined $68 million on TV advertising, have signed a pledge not to purchase ads on shows considered “excessively violent.”

Moviemakers also insist that politics has nothing to do with the boom in family films. “It’s 100 percent business driven,” says Bill Mechanic, president of Fox Filmed Entertainment. “The most successful films tend to play to the greatest number of people, and that’s not true of R-rated films.” The recent surge in family films, most studio executives insist, has more to do with the success of Home Alone than Dan Quayle’s scoldings. Ed Pressman, who is producing the forthcoming Sylvester Stallone movie Judge Dredd, is toning down the film’s most violent scenes in an effort to win a PG-13 rating, but the decision has more to do with box office and merchandising than politics. As for the actors themselves, Steven Seagal puts it best: “Gossip in the tabloids has more of an impact on me than anything [social critics like] Rush Limbaugh says.”

“Under attack.”[…]

Nothing seems to have hardened the views of Hollywood leaders like the fear of crime. It was by far the most important problem the entertainment elite said was plaguing the nation, with 92 percent describing it as a serious or extremely serious problem. In response, industry leaders said they supported the death penalty (56 percent) and believed that courts are not dealing harshly enough with criminals (72 percent). Still, Hollywood leaders are not nearly as concerned as the general public about the impact of TV and movie violence —57 percent of the public thinks violence in the media is a major factor in real-life violence, while only 30 per­cent of the Hollywood elite thinks so. “The one area — crime — where Holly­wood shares the public’s concern, it doesn’t take much responsibility,” ob­serves U.S. News pollster Ed Goeas.

Another development supporting the rise of conservatism in entertainment is that Hollywood is graying: In recent years, the most active part of the cre­ative community has aged, started fam­ilies and moved out to the suburbs. Ac­cording to Charles Slocum, a consultant to the Writer's Guild who analyzes membership demographics, the per­centage of guild members under age 31 decreased from 12 percent to 9 percent between 1982 and 1991. At the same time, writers in the 41-to-50 age group increased from 23 percent to 34 percent, and the trend accelerated through last year. More and more writers also live in suburban communities like Encino, Sherman Oaks and Studio City rather than hipper parts of town like Santa Monica, Venice or Beverly Hills.

For all the hype about the industry’s notorious “alternative lifestyle,” there are signs that the creative community is beginning to behave more like aging yup­pies elsewhere in the nation. “It’s been a while since the executive offices of stu­dios were carefree dens of iniquity,” says Pressman, the producer. “There are even day-care centers at the studios now.”

Above all, Hollywood is responding to shifting popular tastes—and the na­tion’s mood today is unmistakably con­servative. “Recent films are saying that people are fed up with overindulgence and suggest a healthy return to family values,” says New Line Cinema CEO Robert Shaye. Christopher Meledandri, president of Fox Family Films, also de­tects a yearning for more spiritual fare. “Clearly, audiences responded to the magic and spiritualness of Angels in the Outfield and other films with religious overtones,” he says. In the Hollywood elite poll, 72 percent of respondents said they believe in God and almost a third said religion had become more important in their life in the past dec­ade. However, 56 percent said they had little or no faith in organized religion. […]

Sex on the tube. But despite the de­crease in religion-bashing and the boom in family films, critics who believe Hol­lywood trashes traditional values and institutions can still find plenty- of am­munition. Sex, for example, remains rampant on TV. “Today’s typical viewer sees about 10,000 scenes of suggested sexual intercourse, sexual comment,or innuendo during one year of average viewing,” according to research by Rob­ert Lichter, co-director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. He also found that 7 out of 8 acts of intercourse on prime time are extramarital. A re­cent survey of 750 children commis­sioned by the advocate group Children Now found that 62 percent of young people believe television encourages them to take part in sexual activity too soon.

And while violence may be declining on prime time, most Americans think there is still far too much of it. In the U.S. News general public poll, 90 percent said violence in the movies and on TV is a serious problem, and 60 percent think the government can play a constructive role in addressing the problem.

It is possible that the recent trend of more family-friendly movies could prove ephemeral. Says John Badham, whose directing credits’ include. Saturday Night Fever: “If we sense that people are responding to family films, all of us me-tooers will say, “I’ll do it too—until they stop making money.”

By Jim Impoco with Monica Gyttman

Task 2.Give the Ukrainian equivalents of the following word combinations and phrases from the article:

- an upcoming movie

- to poison the minds of young people

- to generate large sums at the box office

- an extraordinary breakthrough for the good, the true and the beautiful in popular entertainment

- to cut down on graphic portrayals of violence

- to define and monitor television violence

- to promote human values

- to incorporate values into entertainment programming

- to be reluctant to sponsor programs with excessive violence or controversial themes

- not to purchase ads on shows considered “excessively violent”

- the boom in family films

- to trash traditional values

- to plague the nation

- to gray / age

- to tone down the films most violent scenes

- to be fed up with overindulgence

- to remain rampant on TV

Task 3. Make use of the phrases in Task 2 to answer the questions:

1. What’s the critics’ attitude towards the Miramax movie “Kids”?

2. What trend appeared in the Hollywood entertainment industry at the beginning of the 1990’s?

3. What did the network and cable industry do in response to the order to cut down on graphic portrayals of violence on television?

4. What is the simplest explanation, in the author’s opinion, for what’s taking place in television and movies?

5. What causes the rise of conservatism in Hollywood entertainment? (4 factors/ developments)

6. Is there any decrease in “sex on the tube”?

Task 4. Make an outline of the article (main ideas of the article) in 4-5 sentences.

Task 5. Think about and share your opinion on the following points:

1. Does violence in cinema and on TV contribute to violence on Ukrainian streets?

2. Do you think that television and cinema are more family friendly today?

2. Do you believe that television and cinema encourage young people to take part in sexual activity too soon?

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 877