Film
Bergman on Stage: In the Presence of a Clown + The Last Cry
- 7PM
In celebration of the Ingmar Bergman centennial, BAMcinématek honors the director’s legacy with a pair of rarely screened, late-career chamber works that reflect his lifelong infatuation with the theater.
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
With Börje Ahlstedt, Erland Josephson, Marie Richardson
1997, 119min
Made for Swedish television when the director was nearly 80, this piercing chamber work explores the tensions between cinema and live theater. The story concerns a 1920s psychiatric patient who sets out to create a new medium fusing the two art forms. Some of Bergman’s key themes—spirituality, mortality, creativity, madness, performance—are illuminated with the sure hand of a master in his twilight years.
With Ingvar Kjellson, Björn Granath, Anna von Rosen
1995, 60min
Bergman’s staging of his own one-act play imagines a charged encounter between a silent-era movie mogul and a drunken, washed-up filmmaker desperate to direct again.
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