Bergman's death--silent film connection

[kino eye]

Probably most of you have heard by now that Igmar Bergman died over
the weekend.

While Bergman's career was in the sound era, he did grow up watching
silent films, and was also captivated by toy projectors and earlier
film experiences, to the point that he named his autobiography The
Magic Lantern.

Bergman was one of the last directors who was still alive (until now)
who had grown up in the silent era. I think the filmmakers who came
from this time period had a natural advantage over ones who came
later, because the language of telling a story by using visual images
came naturally to a generation who grew up with this technique.
Bergman went from this background to a theater career, and by doing so
was able to have both silent film technique AND theater technique to
his bow and quiver--in other words, he was in complete command of any
tool film had to offer in his era.

Filmmakers today have grown up in the TV era, and many feature films
use composition and worse, character development right out of TV Land.
The other development is CGI, which is often used more as a crutch
than an occasional tool.

In other words, the filmmakers who were born from around 1900 to 1920
had an advantage of learning storytelling techniques in a way that
will never be duplicated.

[mikeg...@gmail.com]

Not only a director who grew up on silent films but one who was a
living link to that era-- the most obvious example being, of course,
the casting of his mentor Victor Sjostrom in Wild Strawberries, but
also his adaptation of things from films he loved such as Variety
(whose setting and themes Bergman turned into Sawdust and Tinsel).

[Homo the Wolf]

On Jul 30, 3:50 pm, "mikegeb...@gmail.com" <mikegeb...@gmail.com>
wrote:

Bergman was perhaps influenced even more directly by the silent
Scandanavian circus films, a very popular genre there even in the
early 1910s (examples can be found on the Danish Film Archive's DVD
series). Sjostrom was of course among those who transported it to
Hollywood with HE WHO GETS SLAPPED.

According to a Swedish TV documentary made a few years ago, Bergman
screened Chaplin's THE CIRCUS every year on his birthday in his
private cinema (with local children also attending!)

Jonathan