Autumn Sonata (1978, Ingmar Bergman)
Monday 12th of August, 7pm in the Richard Hoggart Building cinema
Join us on Monday the 12th of August from 7pm (film starts at 7:15pm) for a screening of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata (1978). The film is 1 hour 40 minutes long so the screening will finish around 8:55pm.
Autumn Sonata came towards the end of Bergman’s career as a director – in fact, it was the last film Bergman made expressly for the cinema. Subsequent films - From the Life of Marionettes (1980), Fanny and Alexander (1982) and Saraband (2000) were made for television in the first instance. The film came two years after his arrest on income tax evasion charges (later dropped): a case that triggered a nervous breakdown and deep depression in the director, as well as an ongoing, deep animus towards the Swedish government and reluctance to direct films in Sweden. Autumn Sonata was a British-Norwegian co-production, albeit one in which pretty much everything except the financing was Swedish.
The film stars perhaps Bergman’s greatest muse, Liv Ullman, alongside Ingrid Bergman in her only collaboration with the director. They play Charlotte, a successful concert pianist (Bergman), who is invited to visit by her estranged daughter Eva (Ullman). Over a day and a night, Eva challenges Charlotte in increasingly confrontational ways. This is cinematic chamber music, created by artists of the highest calibre - and in the cases of the two Bergmans, near the end of their cinematic careers.
For more on the film, read the essay by Farran Smith Nehme for the Criterion release, but beware that this makes details of the plot explicit.