INGMAR

Ingmar Bergman just passed away on Monday. A great loss to film and perhaps Woody Allen as he was heavily influenced by Bergman -- sometimes very directly, and much of the time, in flavour. Every film enthusiast has their own story on how they discovered the master filmmaker. My story goes like this: I was watching Second City Television (as it was called in its first incarnation, before it became SCTV) back in late 1976 or early 1977 and in one episode was the spoof film, "Whispers of the Wolf". This piece was more 'interesting' than 'funny' to me at that time... I found the skit, "Mike's Mercenaries" to be more my kinda humour. Obviously, one has to know the source material to fully enjoy the parody of. (As a note, Second City also did a film spoof on 'some French movie' which, as per my young age and very early film-going phase, did not fully appreciate that also.) My all time favourite television show, All In The Family, which I started watching in 1976, had an episode where Mike ("Meathead") and Gloria were leaving the house to see "an Ingmar Bergman film". Edith glows and says to the two, "oh, I love Ingrid Bergman movies". Mike clarifies to Edith, "no Ma, Ingmar Bergman". I knew the filmmaker by name, even before witnessing Edith's confusion, but had yet to see any of his work. As I discovered Bergman, and 'foreign' films in general, everything started to make sense, especially the fact that so many artists would want to parody and be influenced by someone so special. I actually needed a little time to more than like Bergman's film, The Seventh Seal. Its imagery was no doubt vivid and unique -- helped greatly by such a non southern California environment -- but the sensibility was more of an acquired taste. This screening I attended would have been at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto; the year would have been 1986, still relatively early in my film education. I saw Seal again several years later and, as the joke goes, the rest was history. In the mid '90s I watched Wild Strawberries on VHS tape and the magic was complete. Wild Strawberries surprised me in the sense that I wasn't expecting it to be so 'moving'. These are the two important Bergman films in my education as they were of some extreme to each other and convinced me of the director's status. I discovered other Bergman films and will discover more, especially now, but it is now time to revisit these two seminal pictures. Time to be moved and awed by a filmmaker who -- with great aplomb -- actually had something to say! And someone like Woody Allen, for example, will keep on saying it...

AIRING TOM SNYDER

As soon as I fired up the computer this morning, and went 'online', the first headline that grabbed my attention was, "Film Director Ingmar Bergman Dies". The next headline was, "Tom Snyder Dies". I will need more time to collect my thoughts on the great Swedish film director but can reference Snyder now as I saw little of his shows. The Tomorrow Show (with Tom Snyder) was something I first saw in TV Guide back the mid 1970s. It really caught my attention in 1976 when I saw this in said magazine: "(channel 17) 'Tomorrow'... The Star Trek phenomenon." I should mention that our television cable service did not carry PBS at that time. I was a little frustrated as I was an old Trekker, even then. Years later, in 1995, a friend of mine gave me a VHS tape he had compiled of archived television shows. This Trek-themed Tomorrow episode was on the tape so I finally got a chance to watch it. (By this time, I was looking at the show as a historical document... my youth was in the past.) There was Tom Snyder in his flared pants. He was smoking a lot; you don't see that anymore. James Doohan, Walter Koenig, and Harlan Ellison were some of the guests. Harlan occasionally mocked the cast -- right to their faces -- by calling Star Trek "crap", or something to that effect. He was laughing as he dispensed this wisdom. Good 'ol Harlan! Superb writer he is. Snyder let this all happen and, as I remember it, broke out with that great laugh of his. I was just speaking with a friend of mine a few minutes ago. He told me that Suspect Video (here in Toronto) has a DVD which contains four episodes of Tomorrow. This disc is in the music section of the store as the basic theme of the disc is 'Punk, and other such music' -- Snyder had various guests on from this movement. This disc will soon be rented... and I should look for that VHS tape with the Tomorrow episode.