Review of Searching for Ingmar Bergman

"Ingmar Bergman - Vermächtnis eines Jahrhundertgenies" or "Searching for Ingmar Bergman" is a new German/French collaboration released in 2018. The director and writer is renowned filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta and she collaborated with her son Felix Moeller in both fields. The subject, i.e. the center of the film, is in the title. These 95 minutes are about late Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who is considered by many one of the best directors of all time, maybe the best that ever came from Europe. So even if I am not too familiar with his works, i must say thatg the man deserves a high-quality documentary about him. This is not what we have here. Some of the interviews are good and that is also the main reason why I give this film 3 stars out of 5 and a positive recommendation. It was a truly close call due to von trotta's self-centered approach and that is really a problem that exists in many of her works I must say. She has a tendency to put herself way too much in the middle of the movie instead of beinf restrained and allowing all the focus and fixation to be projected to the contents, here the subject of Ingmar Bergman. I will mention a few examples. The first one would be how they included von Trotta's Goldel Lion win early on. The second would be how they rushed in her fame doubts if she is the right person to make this film only to let us know that Bergman considered one of von Trotta's works among his top10 favorite movies. And how long she goes on about that. It never feels authentic as if she is humbled and proud, but as if she wants to tell everybody in the audience that her work was appreciate by an all-time great. And closely related to that, we have scenes from "Die bleierne Zeit" that just donät fit in at all in an Ingmar Bergman themed film. It's not like they showed scenes from other films from Bergman''s top10. Also I was never convinced von Trotta's connection with Bergman here was significant enough for her to make this movie, but maybe that's just me. She adds nothing despite being seen on screen all the time and the actually interesting and significant information, even by new rising Swedish filmmakers like Östlund, who have virtually no connection to Bergman, are because they have something of quality to say, not by any means that MvT somehow gets these information out of them. She does nothing really, except being there and taking herself seriously. it was painful to watch. This was also among the main reasons I believe why the interview with Liv Ullmann that really could have been the center of the entire thing fell incredibly flat unfortunately. The only thing memorable there was maybe how MvT got the number of Ullmann's appearances in Bergman films wrong and that says it all. Disappointing. Luckily, to my surprise, virtually every other interview guest had something to say that stayed more in the mind. But yeah, I wish so much that somebody else could have made this film or at least that we would not have to sit through MvT's completely forgettable visual presence here. The last shot being about her and not about Ullmann says it all. Shameful. Also a bit of a pity that Max von Sydow wasn't part of it. Maybe he smelled the direction this was heading. I cannot imagine they did not ask him, also with the most memorable scene they included focusing on him. Good for him I guess. This is really far away from the level it could have been and I only give it a very cautious thumbs-up. Hopefully we get a better Bergman documentary in the next years. There's really a lot worth finding out about the man and his art.