The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman

Presented by The Swedish Club and Greg Olson Productions

When Swedish writer-director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) was a boy he traded his toy soldiers for a movie projector. Seeing a human figure magically move on the screen, “I was overcome with a fever that has never left me. Shadows turned their pale faces towards me and silently spoke to my most secret feelings.” The feelings, the life, within all of us. Shortcomings and intimacy, loneliness and love, despair and grace. Sometimes a miraculous illumination within darkness. Creating for over sixty years, Bergman was hailed as an influential giant of film history, and revered by visionary, deeply personal filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Michael Powell, Luis Bunuel, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Jean-Luc Godard. Andrew Wyeth, genius American painter and cinema lover, watched Bergman’s films countless times and felt kinship with this fellow soul-searching existential explorer. Both artists understood the beauty of the human face and it's eloquence in conveying inner states of being, thoughts and feelings, doubts about spirituality, humanity, and the self. The physical revealing the metaphysical.

Individual Tickets: $15
Passes: $132 | $92 SIFF, SAM, Swedish Club, National Nordic Museum, Cornish, UW Cinema Studies, NWFF, SFI, TheFilmSchool, Festa Italiana, Alliance Francaise de Seattle, Scarecrow Video, & KING FM members
Pass provides access to all in-person Magic Lantern screenings, February 25–April 30 at SIFF Cinema Uptown.

SIFF year-round passes and vouchers are not valid for this screening.

This series of ten films, restored by Svensk Filmindustri and the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, in Swedish with English subtitles, presents the first wave of masterpieces, one film each week at the SIFF Uptown Theater in the heart of the lower Queen Anne restaurant district. Bergman delves deep, and offers exhilarating artistic rewards for the eye, mind, and spirit. The great pictorialist director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, A Matter of Life and Death) felt Bergman’s films were composed of “powerful images from start to finish,” and The New Yorker characterized their power as “the grip of a thriller and the elegance of a waltz.” Stina Cowan, Cultural Director of the Swedish Club and Bergman expert, will introduce some of the films.