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Bibi Andersson: Ingmar Bergman
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Bibi Andersson made 11 films with Ingmar Bergman and is wonderful in all of them. But in 1966’s Persona, the actor—playing a nurse caring for a performer (Liv Ullmann) who has stopped speaking—gives one of cinema’s most revelatory performances. On the occasion of “BAM Remembers Ingmar Bergman,” in which Andersson is participating, and her introduction of the 6pm screening of Persona at BAM on Tuesday 20, TONY spoke with the 72-year-old Swedish legend from her home in Nice, France, about her memories of working on Bergman’s masterpiece.
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Swedish actress Bibi Andersson received her training at the legendary Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern, then graduated to the Royal Theatre of Stockholm. While performing in a stage production in Malmo, the 17-year-old Bibi, she was discovered for films by Ingmar Bergman, who tested her in a TV soap commercial before casting her in a small but showy role in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).
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With the exception of a role in All These Women, Andersson did not work with Bergman for six years. Their collaboration resumed with her most important film, Persona, in which she established herself as an actress of international stature. This masterpiece owes much to Andersson's brilliance and is evidence of her greater emotional experience than was apparent in her earlier work. The film required of Andersson an enormous extension of her talent; her submission to the film's somewhat cruel objectivity attested to Andersson's dedication—not only to the aims of Bergman's films but ... to the demands made by a role of extraordinary emotional complexity. The characterization did much to erase the rather condescending view of her as a pleasant, lightweight actress, and elevated her to the first rank of Bergman's ensemble, along with Thulin and Ullmann.
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Andersson hopes that subsidized theatres like the Dramaten won't suffer from budget-cutting, as arts organizations have in the United States. "The continuity of cultural life is very valuable—especially now, when Sweden has a difficult economic situation," the actress notes. "And this festival really gives a broad picture of Swedish culture over a long period of time." In addition to Bergman's work, the Museum of Modern Art offers a retrospective on Alf Sjöberg, who directed Bergman's first script, and the American Museum of the Moving Image has a series on Sven Nykvist, Bergman's longtime cinematographer.
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PERSONA is an intense and unsettling study of the symbiotic relationship between Alma, a nurse (Bibi Andersson), and Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann), an actress who has mysteriously lost the power of speech. To bring about her patient s recovery, Elisabeth s doctor asks Alma to accompany her to a private cottage by the sea. In this isolated setting, the two women fall into a strange state of codependency laced with jealousy and resentment--and eventually, their identities begin to merge. PERSONA is considered one of Ingmar Bergman s greatest cinematic accomplishments and should not to be missed by anyone seriously interested in film.
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Well-known Danish film producer Per Holst turned director for this muddled psychological melodrama about a civil servant (Ove Sprogøe) who cannot admit to his unfaithful wife (Bergman regular Bibi Andersson) that he has just lost his job. In desperation, the quiet clerk murders the entire family. Again and again. Or is it all in his head? Is the timid civil servant indulging in a stress-relieving fantasy, or his he really a homicidal maniac? Holst, who kept to folksy comedies thereafter, apparently couldn't decide whether he was making a Bergmanesque piece on marital angst or a straightforward crime drama and the end result convinces no one.
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