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Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman Quotes

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Famous Ingmar Bergman Quotes

“Minus: Papa, I'm scared. When I was hugging Karin in the boat, reality burst open. Do you understand? David: I do. Minus: Reality burst open, and I tumbled out. It's like a dream. Anything can happen. Anything. David: I know. Minus: I can't live in this new world. David: Yes, you can. But you must have something to hold on to. Minus: What would that be? A god? Give me proof of God. You can't. David: Yes, I can. But you have to listen carefully. Minus: Yes, I need to listen. David: I can only give you a hint of my own hope. It is to know that love exists as something real in the human world. Minus: A special kind of love, I suppose? David: All kinds, Minus. The highest and the lowest, the most absurd and the most sublime. All kinds of love. Minus: And the longing for love? David: Longing and denial. Trust and distrust. Minus: Then love is the proof? David: I don't know if love is proof of God's existence, or if love is God himself. Minus: To you, love and God are the same thing. David: That thought helps me in my emptiness and despair. Minus: Tell me more, Papa. David: Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and despair into life. It's like a reprieve, Minus, from a death sentence. Minus: Papa... If it is as you say, then Karin is surrounded by God, since we love her. David: Yes. Minus: Can that help her? David: I believe so. Minus: ... Papa, would you mind if I go for a run? David: Off you go. I'll make dinner. See you in an hour. Minus: ... Papa spoke to me.”

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Book:همچون در یک آینه
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“There are moments when I can wander through my childhood's landscape, through rooms long ago, remember how they were furnished, where the pictures hung on the walls, the way the light fell. It's like a film - little scraps of a film, which I set running and which I can reconstruct to the last detail - except their smell.”

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Book:Film & dreams: an approach to Bergman
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“I know that I shall have lost to the jungle if I take a weak moral standpoint or relax my mental punctiliousness. I have therefore come to a certain belief which is based on three powerful effective commandments: THOU SHALT BE ENTERTAINING AT ALL TIMES. THOU SHALT OBEY THY ARTISTIC CONSCIENCE AT ALL TIMES. THOU SHALT MAKE EACH FILM AS IF IT WERE THY LAST.”

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Author:Ingmar Bergman
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“Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.”

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Author:Ingmar Bergman
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“When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.”

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Author:Ingmar Bergman
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“No other art-medium–neither painting nor poetry–can communicate the specific quality of the dream as well as the film can. When the lights go down in the cinema and this white shining point opens up for us, our gaze stops flitting hither and thither, settles and becomes quite steady. We just sit there, letting the images flow out over us. Our will ceases to function. We lose our ability to sort things out and fix them in their proper places. We're drawn into a course of events–we're participants in a dream. And manufacturing dreams, that's a juicy business.”

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Author:Ingmar Bergman
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“When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - The Serpent's Egg, The Touch, Face to Face and so on.”

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Author:Ingmar Bergman
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“Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness.”

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Author:Ingmar Bergman
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