DEEP DIVE: Ingmar Bergman: Part 1

*This is a watch at home, discuss in person event.* For our next two-part Deep Dive, we’re focusing on Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, one of the filmmakers most responsible for establishing cinema as a serious art form capable of exploring the deepest questions of human experience. Through stories of love, faith, loneliness, desire, and meaning, Bergman created films that were as psychologically and philosophically rich as great literature. Part 1 explores the period when many of those concerns began to crystallize. *Smiles of a Summer Night* is witty, romantic, and surprisingly funny. *The Virgin Spring* is dark, brutal, and deeply moral. *Through a Glass Darkly* is intimate and searching, concerned with family, faith, and isolation. Together, these films explore what people want from one another, what they believe, and how they make sense of a world that often refuses to provide easy answers. We will meet to discuss our thoughts on Thursday, July 16, at Edgewater Public Market. We will likely be at a picnic table outside, but please watch the comments for our exact location. Please try to watch all three before attending. * Here is the list of films with instructions on how to find them. SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT (1955, Ingmar Bergman, Sweden)** *Smiles of a Summer Night* follows a group of lovers, spouses, former partners, and would-be romantics whose lives become entangled over the course of a summer weekend in the Swedish countryside. Misunderstandings, jealousies, and shifting attractions set the plot in motion, but Bergman is less interested in who ends up with whom than in the desires and illusions that drive his characters. Beneath the wit and elegance, the film explores the ways people pursue love, avoid loneliness, and convince themselves they know what will make them happy. Often regarded as Bergman’s breakthrough, it reveals a side of the director that can be playful, compassionate, and surprisingly…