Ingmar Bergman Film Quotes & Sayings

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. — Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman's film The Seventh Seal (1957). — John Eliot Gardiner

I have always appreciated the honest brutality of the international film world. One need never doubt one's worth in the market. Mine was zero. — Ingmar Bergman

Sometimes I work on film sets. I've done this for 40 years. I always wanted to photograph on the set of an Ingmar Bergman film. Unfortunately, I never had the opportunity. — Mary Ellen Mark

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. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. — Ingmar Bergman

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 — Ingmar Bergman

A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it. — Ingmar Bergman

Order and surprise: these are two intertwined elements that make for any great library or collection. — Michael Dirda

My parents were incredibly strict, almost military style. — John Leguizamo

I dream about doing a film about once a week. — Ingmar Bergman

I once had a dream, or a vision, and I imagined that dream to be of importance to other people, so I wrote the manuscript and made the film. But it is not until the moment when my dream meets with your emotions and your minds that my shadows come to life. It is your recognition that brings them to life. It is your indifference that kills them. I hope that you will understand; that you when you leave the cinema will take with you an experience or a sudden thought - or maybe a question. The efforts of my friends and myself have then not been in vain ... — Ingmar Bergman

An Ingmar Bergman film would probably owe a sizeable bulk of its import and its direction and its quality to the directorial end and to the director because it's uniquely a Bergman film. But that again is not the general - no, that's much more the exception than the rule. — Rod Serling

Future shackled is when uncertainty is the enemy that must be beaten into submission. — Bill Jensen

There hasn't been anyone with whom I can discuss my scripts. Even when the film is done, there is no one I can show it to who gives his sincere opinion. There is silence. — Ingmar Bergman

The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress. — Ingmar Bergman

My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle.
Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.
I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.
Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream. — Ingmar Bergman

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. — Ingmar Bergman

I know, of course, that by using film we can bring in other previously unknown worlds, realities beyond reality. — Ingmar Bergman

Divine sovereignty entails four biblical truths: (1) God knows all things, (2) He controls all things, (3) He is free from all things, and (4) He is holy and righteous in all things. — Kenneth Keathley

From that day, whether I could articulate it satisfactorily or not,' Day says, holding the knee of the leg just crossed, 'I understood on an intuitive level why people killed themselves. If I had to go for any length of time with that feeling I'd surely kill myself.'
'Time in the shadow of the wing of the thing too big to see, rising. — David Foster Wallace

You will surely succeed in life with great passion and desire for self-study. — Lailah Gifty Akita

To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe. — Ingmar Bergman

I think Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut - all these people created images in my mind, beautiful pictures, I loved what was known at that time as the foreign film. — Jackie DeShannon

The film medium is some sort of magic. I think also it's a magic that every frame comes and stands still for a fraction of a second and then it darkens. A half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn't that fascinating? That is magic. — Ingmar Bergman

When you finish a film, you never want to see it again. — Ingmar Bergman

I'd been out of the movies for years, I had had a wonderful stage career, yes, in musicals and so on, but you don't really make any money in the theater. — Angela Lansbury

All of the books, all of them, stay within the same place, the same realm. I read and read and read and I don't find anything that even considers what actually happened to us. — Andrew Miller

I have such unmanageable thoughts,' returned his sister, 'that they will wonder.' 'Then — Charles Dickens

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible. — Ingmar Bergman

There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. — Ingmar Bergman

Everyone makes their own path, and I must make mine. The Bhagavad Gita - and ancient Indian Yogic text - says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life perfectly. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly. It is mine. — Elizabeth Gilbert