FREE ON YOUTUBE Ingmar Bergman Vargtimmen

FREE ON YOUTUBE (DU FINDEST DEN GANZEN FILM FREI AUF YOUTUBE) Vargtimmen, a very personal film by Ingmar Bergman, who still has to find his own audience today. I'm afraid that the normal moviegoer will reject the work in 2016 just as he did in 1968. Vargtimmen is difficult and not very successful. Bergman is giving us a creative act to use our own imagination. His film - we distrust him. When I last showed him at the film club, only a few were willing to do so. Most of them whispered to each other, didn't get into the work. Bergman makes use of Gothic legends. It is the story of an artist (Max von Sydow) who lives isolated from the world on an island with his wife (Liv Ullmann). On the other side of the island is the castle of the Baron and his circle of perverse friends. The artist is plagued by paranoid nightmares and insomnia at night. Vargtimmen plays mainly at dusk, the hour of the wolf. The darkest time of our soul when most people die and our most terrible dreams come true. Demons and spirits grow enormous powers during this hour. Obviously the artist is slowly going mad. Night after night he stays awake, telling of his dreams (or are they memories?). Reality, for him only a tightrope act. Where does it begin and where does it end? His dreams come true creepingly... There is this scene in which the artist fishes with a boy (is it his son?). It seems as if the child pushes him into the water. As if the child has a distorted face. The artist freaks out, kills the boy. Really? Bergman doesn't give us the answer. Finally the woman is afraid of her husband. The inhabitants of the castle crowd into the couple's lives, try to break them apart. Evil condenses during one of the baron's dinners. Something happened in the life of the artist. Some dark secret in the past. The inhabitants of the castle seem to know this and prepare a cruel joke at his expense - which Bergman presents in surrealistic pictures. The limits of logic are left behind. Bergman penetrates into the depths of consciousness. Vargtimmen could unfold into a great melodrama. But I don't want to anticipate. The best thing is to try to see the film in Bergman's sense.