Warmly appealing, indispensable review of all his films by Swedish filmmaker Bergman as he sits down to look at each one, many of which he's not seen for 30 or 40 years. Bergman begins by dismissing 1973's Bergman on Bergman—in which he answered questions put to him by three Swedish interviewers—as being full of defensive lies by himself. Fans familiar with that work may be put off by the early pages here, as well as by other stretches, which wobble with head-stuff and as writing are inferior to the more keenly detailed verbalizations in the earlier work the director now intends to outstrip. Today's Bergman has less to say about the nuts and bolts of his filmmaking, focusing instead on motives for his screenplays and on how he wove threads of his own character through different characters from film to film. His strongest moments come when pointing out his failures, fears, and shortsightedness in various works, huge humiliations he brought on himself by not following his first instincts—sometimes by settling too quickly for a smooth surface, at other times by deluding himself for years that he'd created strong works (The Serpent's Egg, Shame, and others) that he now joins his critics in dismissing, at least in part—though not without the keenest eye for what went wrong and what seduced him into his delusions. One feels Bergman's pain as he edits his 312-minute Fanny and Alexander, filmed for Swedish TV, down to a three-hour theatrical release for the rest of the world. More amusing: his take on his famous trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. Bergman now finds no reason to call it a trilogy: ``It was a Schnaps-IdÇe...an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol....'' One of the century's greats looks at the bugs under his rocks. All told, stronger than his autobiography, The Magic Lantern (1988). (More than 200 b&w photographs)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-186-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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