A crowded movie in both characters and ideas. It has the bubbly ensemble- and vignette-based light erotic comedy of Smiles of a Summer Night (also seen in The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries... the international hits that made Bergman's reputation, really), but it also coats each character with heavy symbolic importance about the function and meaning of art.

It heads in the direction of The Rite in being an attack on the critics and audiences who have humiliated him. Smiles…

It's donkey week! Every day this week I will watch one movie about a donkey.

The donkey is the cutest beast of burden. It is alternately associated with gloom, stubbornness, indecisiveness, intelligence, stupidity, lust, mysticism, and the pastoral. It's a symbol that points in many directions, which means that a lot has been done with it. There are a lot of donkey movies to choose from.

I'm kicking things off with the donkiest of them all, Au hasard Balthazar. Balthazar's…

Honestly, I found The Rite sort of embarrassing. Bergman craved vengeance against his censors so badly that he wrote a small but grandiose piece in which a horrid and hypocritical sweaty worm of a judge tries to suppress perversity but gets obliterated by the power of art.

Art cannot do this. This is the fantasy of someone impotent. It's like peeking into a nerd's daydream about skeletonizing a jock by defeating him at Doctor Who trivia. No matter how much…

Here is the Bergman movie that most exemplifies his belief that humiliation is the supreme evil. Bergman's made plenty of movies about sexual humiliation, and he has a few about professional humiliation (To Joy, most directly), but this combines both versions into a hard nugget of total desperation and despond. It's Midlife Crisis: The Movie. Written while dealing with his own professional and personal shames (he had just had an offer to work at the Royal Dramatic Theater rescinded and…

A mark of a good proto-slasher is a big creepy 👁️ peering out of the darkness.

You've got the horrible 👁️ in Black Christmas, it's a common motif in Peeping Tom, and let Deep Red synecdochically represent gialli in general: there's an incredible one there too. It's a way of hiding the killer's identity until the end of the movie while also distilling him to predation and voyeurism. When Halloween and Friday the 13th spawned a torrent of imitators that…

The Watch Bergman's All These Women and Don't Say "Wow, That Was Awful" Out Loud When It's Over challenge!

Ebert called this Bergman's worst movie. Almost no one likes it. Bergman himself hated it. It's ghastly. Woody Allen spent his whole career making Bergman movies, and this is Bergman's Woody Allen movie... a slapstick farce with pratfalls and dynamite.

What a tonal mismatch! I wouldn't say that Bergman is unfunny, exactly, but his sense of humor succeeds when it's wry…

The Cahiers crowd cited The Devil's Eye and The Virgin Spring as evidence that Bergman had lost his touch. Bergman eventually agreed. This isn't a movie he cares for very much; he made it only to get his studio to agree to make The Virgin Spring.

It's at least a sprightly thing, for the most part. Bergman's farces are never laugh-out-loud funny, but they're typically genial, and fantasy is a good match for his silly side. The first half has…

I'm as interested in the reception of this movie as I am in the movie itself. Bergman was extremely proud of The Virgin Spring when he finished it. He thought it was magnificent and he wanted to show it off, but as the movie began to trickle out into theaters, the arthouse crowd grumbled. Onetime French ers like Godard, Truffaut, and Rohmer had begun to think of Bergman as in decline, and The Virgin Spring finally gave them an excuse…

Uncle Harry is Siodmak's follow-up to The Suspect. The two noirs are very similar but they have an inverted authorial focus. They're both about a gentle and mannered man driven to extremes, and in both cases you're meant to extend empathy to the poor wretch (Siodmak noirs are all about failed heroes). In The Suspect, we stay with Charles Laughton's character nearly the entire time; he is the object of focus. The wife he bumps off is not that interesting:…

My favorite story about Bresson is one recounted by Bertolucci. Bresson always wanted to make a movie about the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis, and in 1964, he finally secured funding for the movie from Dino de Laurentiis. Getting to work, Bresson spent a great sum of Dino's money on the delivery of live elephants. When asked whether the elephants were really necessary, Bresson reported that they wouldn't actually appear in the movie, only the imprint of…

A dynasty of surreal and liminal hotels! It begins with the pearly baroque hotel of Marienbad, and then you can trace the lineage down through the hotel in The Silence to The Overlook to The Great Northern. (The ancestry is easily corroborated; all these directors cite their forebears.) What sparse and ghostly hotel will be next?

This must be the Lynchiest film to anticipate David Lynch. I'm bowled over by how much Lynch took from it. You've got dwarves and…

Siodmak teases. He and Mank are both famous for their mazes of frame stories and flashbacks where they stingily parcel out mere glimpses of what the audience wants. In this case, the audience wanted Deanna Durbin. Durbin was an ultrafamous child actor, and Christmas Holiday marked her graduation into a serious adult role in a crime melodrama (they weren't called 'noirs' yet). Audiences were revved up to see her, and she's the main protagonist, but Siodmak doesn't reveal her until…