Cinema – "To Joy"

Details

Cinema — “To Joy” at Teatro Guiniguada, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Series – Bergman Before Bergman Free admission with prior ticket collection at the box office and online. Before Bergman was Bergman — before the surname became an adjective, before the severe face carved in Nordic granite, before the island of Fårö as a mental homeland — there was a young filmmaker learning how to look. And to look at himself. The series proposed by Filmoteca Canaria for the months of April and May, entitled “Bergman Before Bergman”, is precisely that journey backwards, or rather: inwards. It is not a solemn archaeology, but an opportunity to witness the moment when a voice begins to recognize itself, still insecure, still all too human, still unaware that one day it would be synonymous with metaphysical storm. In “Crisis” (Kris, 1945), “Prison” (Fängelse, 1949), “To Joy” (Till glädje, 1950) and “Summer Interlude” (Sommarlek, 1951), the viewer will not find the already canonized Bergman of abyssal silences, but a storyteller who gropes his way forward, who tries on masks, who argues with theatre, with literature, with God and with love as if they were all sitting at the same table and no one wanted to be the first to get up. These are films that move forward like long letters written in the middle of the night, where melodrama intersects with guilt, faith tumbles down a poorly lit staircase and happiness always appears in the form of a memory, a parenthesis or an unrepeatable mistake. Everything is there, but still in raw form: death as an uncomfortable interlocutor, the artist as a being guilty merely for existing, love as a promise fulfilled precisely when it is already too late. And almost at the end of the journey, closing the series, “Winter Light” (Nattvardsgästerna, 1962) functions as a deliberate anomaly: not so much an ending as a key. Because seeing it alongside the early works makes it clear that Bergman did not move in a straight line, but in a spiral. What seemed like apprenticeship was already obsession; what seemed like youth, an early form of lucidity. “Bergman Before Bergman” is therefore not the prologue to a greater body of work, but the story of an origin that never stopped repeating itself. As if all his later cinema were already contained — in a larval, feverish, dissatisfied state — in these films that do not yet know they are going to outlive us. TO JOY (Till glädje, 1950) Director: Ingmar Bergman Country: Sweden Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn Cinematography: Gunnar Fischer Cast: Maj-Britt Nilsson, Stig Olin, Victor Sjöström, Birger Malmsten, John Ekman Running time: 98 min. Stig and Martha Eriksson are a young couple of violinists who play in the same orchestra. While Stig is rehearsing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the young violinist learns of the accidental death of his wife. Once at home, Stig remembers his meeting with Martha, as well as privileged moments of their past happiness. Recommended age: 16