NYFF ’15: Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words

It is to believe now what a scandalous figure Ingrid Bergman was in 1950. The Kristen Stewarts and Lindsay Lohans of today should bow down to Bergman, both in recognition of her vastly superior talent and in gratitude for all the heat she took, helping normalize their chaotic private lives in the years to come. It was a profoundly difficult time for Bergman, but she never stopped being a grand movie star. To commemorate her centennial, Bergman tells her own story through home movies, private letters, and the diaries she kept nearly her entire life in Stig Björkman’s Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words (trailer here), which screens as part of the Spotlight on Documentary section of the 53^rd New York Film Festival.

Björkman immediately establishes how deeply unhappy Bergman’s early childhood years truly were. Her mother died before she ever really knew her and her beloved father passed away when she was only twelve. Subsequently, her caretaker maiden aunt also died not long after taking her in. Although Björkman and some of Bergman’s children speculate Bergman sought to find the love and acceptance she longed for as a child through her acting career, many viewers will just figure she deserved a break during the Rossellini-Magnani “War of the Volcanoes” feeding frenzy.

Björkman chronicles her career as an extra beaming out crowd scenes, her initial Swedish success, the Hollywood glory years, her difficult collaborations with her second husband Roberto Rossellini, and her triumphant return to America cinema. She may well be the only screen thesp who worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, George Cukor, and of course, Rossellini. It also shows how some films appreciate over time, whereas others depreciate critically. Bergman won an Oscar for Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (her third), but it gets scant mention here.

While Björkman worked closely with Isabella, Ingrid, and Roberto Rossellini, Bergman’s three adoring grown children with Rossellini père, he still assembles a remarkably balanced profile. Arguably, the most revealing interview segments are with Bergman’s eldest daughter, former New York arts correspondent Pia Lindström. It is not that she is critical or resentful, but she clearly has a more complex and nuanced perspective on the mother she rarely saw during her formative years.

Much of the archival photos and video of Bergman is quite stunning. This is Ingrid Bergman, the woman millions of people start each New Year with as part of the annual Casablanca re-watching tradition, enjoying family celebrations in their Italian villa or jockeying for the camera’s attention as a young drama student in Stockholm. Yet, she has the same look that tormented Bogart and seduced Cary Grant.

Somehow Björkman nimbly walks the fine line, crafting a balanced enough portrait to avoid charges of white-wash, while sufficiently capturing his subject’s charm and warmth to satisfy her family. It is also worth noting, Alicia Vikander, the current Swedish toast of Hollywood, narrates the extracts from Bergman’s journals and correspondence, which probably resonate with tremendous meaning and irony for her. Regardless, Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words is an intimate but classy doc that should well please her fans when it screens this coming Monday (10/5) at the Walter Reade and Tuesday (10/6) at the Gilman, as part of this year’s NYFF.

NYFF ’12: The War of the Volcanoes

Before Pitt, Jolie, and Aniston dragged their relationships through the tabloids, Ingrid Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Anna Magnani thoroughly outraged the filmmaking world.  However, they did it with exponentially more talent.  Francesco Patierno documents their headline-making scandal and the competing film sets on which it played out in The War of the Volcanoes (trailer here), a selection of the Cinema Reflected sidebar at the 50^th New York Film Festival.

Rome, Open City was an international triumph for both Magnani and her director, Rossellini.  They quickly became close collaborators and lovers, despite their differences in temperament.  Magnani was the passionate, ever faithful diva.  Rossellini was the charmed smooth talker.  It probably would not have lasted, even without Rossellini’s mutual admiration for the unhappily married Ingrid Bergman.

Looking for a break from the Hollywood system, Rossellini’s Stromboli appeared to be the perfect project.  A morality play set against the exotic backdrop of the volcanic Aeolian Islands, Stromboli was largely lifted from a proposal developed by Rossellini’s cousins—or at least that is how they saw it.  Slightly put out by the appropriation, the budding filmmakers produced their film anyway, with Hollywood director William Dieterle at the helm and none other than the spurned Magnani herself as the star.  Guess which director brought their film in on-time and within budget.

As production began on the isolated Stromboli Island, thanks to Howard Hughes, the relationship between Rossellini and Bergman intensified.  With rumors swirling and pictures of PDA’s splashed across the newspapers, she became radioactive for her former Hollywood colleagues, leading to no end of stress for the Swedish movie star.  The narrative elements of both competing films, featuring disgraced women shunned by narrow-minded islanders, did not exactly help either, but it certainly represents fertile soil for film critics and historians to analyze.

Most movie fans will know the broad strokes of this infamous story, but the details are fascinating.  Patierno completely eschews talking heads, telling the tale through anonymous voiceover narration, archival publicity footage, and shrewdly selected clips from the principles’ films that thematically fit the events under discussion (like for instance, Hitchcock’s Notorious).  Almost entirely black-and-white as a result, Volcanoes captures a vivid sense of the era’s sophistication.

While rather a shorty at fifty-two minutes (preceded by a ten minute short following the eternal Manoel de Oliveira during the filming of The Strange Case of Angelica), War of the Volcanoes is nonetheless quite informative and entertaining, like a gossip show for upscale cineastes.  Recommended for fans of Italian cinema and Hollywood’s golden age, War of the Volcanoes screens this Saturday (9/29) and the following Wednesday (10/3) as part of the 2012 NYFF.