A trip back to Victorian times

Abbey House Museum, Leeds. 

Photos taken by me. 

Haworth and the Bronte Parsonage Museum

It's my birthday on Sunday (11/6), so my boyfriend and I just had a wonderful early birthday trip to Haworth and visited the Bronte Parsonage Museum. 
The house of the Brontes: 














The scenery:













Lovely lovely trip. 
Some day I'll visit the Jane Austen museum. 

Ingmar Bergman when he's not very much like Ingmar Bergman

What do you think of when you think of Woody Allen? Woody Allen or a Woody Allen character (lately played by Jesse Eisenberg). Lots of talk. Neurotic characters. Failed relationships. References to Russian literature, especially Crime and Punishment. Obsession with death. Jewishness. Ingmar Bergman allusions. Jazz.
Federico Fellini? Rome. Decadence. Parties. Sex, adultery. Large women. Magic. Hypnosis. Clowns. Circus. Dance. Nino Rota. Dreams/ fantasy. Religion. Swift camera movements. Rich images. Long sequences.
What about Ingmar Bergman? Loneliness. Anguish. Guilt. Hatred, mostly between family members. People’s coldness, selfishness and hypocrisy. Sickness. Death. The inner life, the soul. God’s indifference. A knight playing chess with Death. Relationships between men and women. Relationships between women. Close-ups of faces. Juxtaposed faces. Gloomy Swede.
With those preconceptions (I watched Autumn Sonata and The Silence and All These Women and a bit of something a few years ago), I’ve been exploring Ingmar Bergman, because both he and Kieslowski focused on the characters’ inner lives.
Imagine the pleasant surprise when I watched Smiles of a Summer Night—a romantic comedy about mismatched couples and horny servants. Of course, when you know it’s by Ingmar Bergman and take a closer look, it’s him—the affairs, the hidden pain, the melancholy and feeling of emptiness. But it is very different. It is fun. It is hilarious. It is full of verbal wit, reminiscent of Oscar Wilde. It is a lovely lovely film.

2 clips:




This time, I’ve watched Cries and Whispers, Wild Strawberries, Summer with Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night and The Virgin Spring (in that order). Look forward to watching the heavier films.

Another terrorist attack in the UK

I’m in Leeds for another month and will return to Oslo in summer. 
Just on 22/5, there was a terrorist attack in Manchester (about an hour from Leeds by train), killing 23 people, mostly children, and injuring 119. Last night, there was another terrorist attack in London.  
It is depressing. I don’t know what the world has come to. My heart goes out to all the victims and their families.

Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika

There are films that work well largely because of the leading actress, and Summer with Monika (1953) is 1 of them, with Monika played by Harriet Andersson, who was to become 1 of Ingmar Bergman’s leading ladies.
Harriet Andersson’s Monika is so ravishing and beautiful and full of life—there is a youthful innocence about fun-loving Monika, an eagerness for life and adventures, and at the same time, she’s very sensual and has something of a wild animal about her—a seductive charm and recklessness that is destructive to both herself and anyone that falls for her attractiveness, especially someone as sweet and kind as Harry in the film. What would happen to her in the end? I can’t say. Nothing good, I suppose.












This is a fresh and lovely film, and quite different from other films by “the gloomy Swede”.