Review of Ingrid Bergman Doc, "In Her Own Words"

[beth]

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words: A Full Picture of a Life

By Jeanine Basinger

Stig Björkman’s remarkable 2015 documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words is one of the most unusual films ever made about a major Hollywood motion picture star. It is the story of the legendary Swedish actor, who won three Oscars, performed in five languages, starred in movies across six decades and six countries, forged a theater career, conquered television, and also managed to marry three times, survive a notorious scandal, and bear four children. These facts are enough to create an interesting documentary, but facts are not what make Björkman’s movie exceptional. Instead of relying only on interviews with coworkers and scholars—although such things are included—In Her Own Words focuses primarily on the private story of Bergman as a woman, wife, mother, and, surprisingly, filmmaker and diarist, weaving around it the public story of her career as an internationally acclaimed actor. The audience is shown excerpts from the many interviews she gave but also sees into her personal world through the home movies she made throughout her life (with her own camera), hears intimate words read from her diaries by actor Alicia Vikander, and listens to her children talk about happy times (and sad ones too) with “Mama.” In Her Own Words provides an insight into the complete life of a major movie star. It is a documentary of a sort that is seldom possible to make.

To accomplish the goal of presenting such a full picture of Bergman, In Her Own Words makes intelligent use of materials from the actor’s personal archive, lovingly accumulated by her children and entrusted to the Wesleyan Cinema Archives in Middletown, Connecticut. As the original curator of this material, I am well aware of the accuracy of Bergman’s saying, as she often did, “I’ve always saved everything . . . So I’ll always have my memories with me.” Over the course of four decades, she moved from Sweden to Germany to America (both Rochester, New York, and Hollywood) to Italy to France to Sweden again, and on to England, always taking her treasures along with her. She was a professional international wanderer, but a wanderer with baggage. And her baggage wasn’t jewelry and clothes and furs—the usual star trappings—but the emotional baggage of memory: little gifts, letters, photographs, remembrances, school papers, locks of hair, valentines. Her true home was never geographical; it was archival. She held things close because she couldn’t always hold people close. Björkman understands this Bergman as well as he understands Bergman the actor. His film is not an external documentary but an internal, emotional one, combining Bergman’s private thoughts and personal images to confirm the words heard on the soundtrack right at the beginning: “I am Ingrid. This is my story.”

The public Ingrid Bergman is, for most viewers, a familiar image. On the screen, she is well remembered for such iconic moments as the one in Casablanca (1942) in which she softly tells Dooley Wilson to “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’” And audiences recall her unadorned (by Hollywood standards), virginal beauty and tender strength as a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), a role those who saw it at the time believed in so totally that they were scandalized a few years after its release when she undertook a very public extramarital love affair with the Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. Also memorable are her touching portrait of a young bride manipulated toward madness by a ruthless husband in 1944’s Gaslight, her flirtatious con woman drinking peaches in champagne (and wearing a black wig) in 1945’s Saratoga Trunk (“You are very beautiful,” says an observer. “Yes,” she replies. “Isn’t it lucky?”), and her breathless scene with Cary Grant in which they kiss as they move through space followed by a voyeuristic camera in 1946’s Notorious. In Her Own Words contains these familiar film clips to remind viewers why Bergman matters. It also showcases footage from her original Hollywood screen test to show how she came to matter. In the test, she wears a minimum of makeup, has a simple hairstyle, and sits calmly and confidently under the hot lights. A star has already been born. (“I always knew I was going to be famous,” Bergman once told her daughter Isabella Rossellini.)

That Ingrid Bergman was and is a star is not exactly news. What In Her Own Words reveals is Ingrid Bergman as a prime example (although an extraordinary one) of the twentieth-century woman. She personified the female who both wants and needs love, wants and needs children, will follow her heart even into dubious decision-making, and unapologetically wants and needs significant work that matters to her, a career of her own. In her time, she was not perceived this way, but the documentary clearly shows her attempts to integrate these often incompatible elements, which she undertook without guilt or remorse, and which were acted out publicly and with courage—“I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime,” she once said—and although her life is seldom held up as an example of feminist struggle, that is, in fact, what it was.

Bergman’s career could easily have died many times for many reasons. She made potentially disastrous decisions—leaving her European success behind to take her chances in Hollywood; surrendering to the tight control of David O. Selznick, who rented her out to other moviemakers; abandoning a major American career in mainstream movies when she fell in love with Rossellini (she received a public denunciation on the floor of Congress for that decision)—any one of which would have erased a lesser talent. The story of this Ingrid Bergman, the movie star, is present in In Her Own Words, but the excitement lies in the behind-the-scenes Bergman who can be discovered there.



all the rest
www.criterion.com/current/posts/4185-ingrid-bergman-in-her-own-words-a-full-picture-of-a-life

[Deleted]

Aug 23, 2016 18:16:55 GMT -5 beth said:

Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words: A Full Picture of a Life

By Jeanine Basinger

Stig Björkman’s remarkable 2015 documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words is one of the most unusual films ever made about a major Hollywood motion picture star. It is the story of the legendary Swedish actor, who won three Oscars, performed in five languages, starred in movies across six decades and six countries, forged a theater career, conquered television, and also managed to marry three times, survive a notorious scandal, and bear four children. These facts are enough to create an interesting documentary, but facts are not what make Björkman’s movie exceptional. Instead of relying only on interviews with coworkers and scholars—although such things are included—In Her Own Words focuses primarily on the private story of Bergman as a woman, wife, mother, and, surprisingly, filmmaker and diarist, weaving around it the public story of her career as an internationally acclaimed actor. The audience is shown excerpts from the many interviews she gave but also sees into her personal world through the home movies she made throughout her life (with her own camera), hears intimate words read from her diaries by actor Alicia Vikander, and listens to her children talk about happy times (and sad ones too) with “Mama.” In Her Own Words provides an insight into the complete life of a major movie star. It is a documentary of a sort that is seldom possible to make.

To accomplish the goal of presenting such a full picture of Bergman, In Her Own Words makes intelligent use of materials from the actor’s personal archive, lovingly accumulated by her children and entrusted to the Wesleyan Cinema Archives in Middletown, Connecticut. As the original curator of this material, I am well aware of the accuracy of Bergman’s saying, as she often did, “I’ve always saved everything . . . So I’ll always have my memories with me.” Over the course of four decades, she moved from Sweden to Germany to America (both Rochester, New York, and Hollywood) to Italy to France to Sweden again, and on to England, always taking her treasures along with her. She was a professional international wanderer, but a wanderer with baggage. And her baggage wasn’t jewelry and clothes and furs—the usual star trappings—but the emotional baggage of memory: little gifts, letters, photographs, remembrances, school papers, locks of hair, valentines. Her true home was never geographical; it was archival. She held things close because she couldn’t always hold people close. Björkman understands this Bergman as well as he understands Bergman the actor. His film is not an external documentary but an internal, emotional one, combining Bergman’s private thoughts and personal images to confirm the words heard on the soundtrack right at the beginning: “I am Ingrid. This is my story.”

The public Ingrid Bergman is, for most viewers, a familiar image. On the screen, she is well remembered for such iconic moments as the one in Casablanca (1942) in which she softly tells Dooley Wilson to “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’” And audiences recall her unadorned (by Hollywood standards), virginal beauty and tender strength as a nun in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), a role those who saw it at the time believed in so totally that they were scandalized a few years after its release when she undertook a very public extramarital love affair with the Italian neorealist filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. Also memorable are her touching portrait of a young bride manipulated toward madness by a ruthless husband in 1944’s Gaslight, her flirtatious con woman drinking peaches in champagne (and wearing a black wig) in 1945’s Saratoga Trunk (“You are very beautiful,” says an observer. “Yes,” she replies. “Isn’t it lucky?”), and her breathless scene with Cary Grant in which they kiss as they move through space followed by a voyeuristic camera in 1946’s Notorious. In Her Own Words contains these familiar film clips to remind viewers why Bergman matters. It also showcases footage from her original Hollywood screen test to show how she came to matter. In the test, she wears a minimum of makeup, has a simple hairstyle, and sits calmly and confidently under the hot lights. A star has already been born. (“I always knew I was going to be famous,” Bergman once told her daughter Isabella Rossellini.)

That Ingrid Bergman was and is a star is not exactly news. What In Her Own Words reveals is Ingrid Bergman as a prime example (although an extraordinary one) of the twentieth-century woman. She personified the female who both wants and needs love, wants and needs children, will follow her heart even into dubious decision-making, and unapologetically wants and needs significant work that matters to her, a career of her own. In her time, she was not perceived this way, but the documentary clearly shows her attempts to integrate these often incompatible elements, which she undertook without guilt or remorse, and which were acted out publicly and with courage—“I’ve gone from saint to whore and back to saint again, all in one lifetime,” she once said—and although her life is seldom held up as an example of feminist struggle, that is, in fact, what it was.

Bergman’s career could easily have died many times for many reasons. She made potentially disastrous decisions—leaving her European success behind to take her chances in Hollywood; surrendering to the tight control of David O. Selznick, who rented her out to other moviemakers; abandoning a major American career in mainstream movies when she fell in love with Rossellini (she received a public denunciation on the floor of Congress for that decision)—any one of which would have erased a lesser talent. The story of this Ingrid Bergman, the movie star, is present in In Her Own Words, but the excitement lies in the behind-the-scenes Bergman who can be discovered there.



all the rest
www.criterion.com/current/posts/4185-ingrid-bergman-in-her-own-words-a-full-picture-of-a-life

That must be Isabella at the bottom of the photo. She still looks the same!