The thing about the film that is curious is, given Bergman’s penchant for wildly bizarre opinions on the films of others (he rips on the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, whose aesthetic he shares much with, while praising the treacly schlock of Steven Spielberg, or he rips on the great films of Orson Welles and the dull, imitative tripe of Jean-Luc Godard with the same distaste, as if they were in the same league with each other), little is done in terms of opining about the art of film, save his own. He’s simply not a born raconteur, the way a Werner Herzog is, so one wishes Nyrerod would have put more effort into bringing Bergman into areas he was uncomfortable with. Hagiography simply is not that entertaining. Also, while it might seem cool to show Bergman strolling about his home on Fårö island in the Baltic Sea, it means little since rarely is the island and its geography shown to have been an influence on the man’s films. Given the preponderance of the island’s physical presence in the films Bergman released in the 1960s, certainly the equal of the Italian countrysides Antonioni used, it’s curious that Nyrerod makes almost nothing of this in her film, save to have the director mouth the banality that he finds the island "magical."
Overall, this is a DVD that the true Bergmaniac may find superfluous; indeed, if he has updated his DVD library with the latest version of The Seventh Seal this will literally be true. But even without having done that, there’s little this DVD has to offer. Its real value is as an introduction to the works of Bergman, many titles of which are also available from Criterion. As such, and to this audience, I recommend this DVD, and even more so the extra than the feature. I said it was an odd thing.
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