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INDEPENDENT CINEMA IN WORCESTER, MA
  • Film Screening Calendar
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  • Surreal Cinema
  • Student Short Film Fest
  • 'truth' at 24 Frames
  • about cinema-worcester
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The iconic French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard expressed in his 1963 film Le Petit Soldat that: "Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 frames a second." Obviously inspired by this quote, this blog will hopefully be a space to explore thi…

The iconic French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard expressed in his 1963 film Le Petit Soldat that: "Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 frames a second." Obviously inspired by this quote, this blog will hopefully be a space to explore this enigmatic idea. While by no means intending to express my insights as being the "truth" of cinema, it is the goal of this project to seek to understand and explicate different aspects of art house cinema--its filmmakers, its movements, its theories, etc. 

- Jared Wagner

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A Medieval Fresco Worked Out in Time

October 01, 2018

By the mid 1950’s Ingmar Bergman had become fairly well established and respected in the film world. The French Cahiers du Cinema critics were heavily influenced by Summer with Monika (1953) while his Shakespearean-like Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was hailed at Cannes film festival winning the Jury Prize award. Interestingly, it was the success of the latter that convinced Bergman’s producer, Carl Anders Dymling, to approve the script for The Seventh Seal (1957). For years, he had rejected it as a result of its heavy and potentially alienating subject matter. This would prove to be quite a good business decision for the Svensk Filmindustri producer as the film would go on to receive extremely high praise internationally. French New Wave director and critic Eric Rohmer called it “one of the most beautiful films ever made” while American critic, Andrew Sarris, called it an “Existential masterpiece”.

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Tags: Ingmar Bergman, existential, the seventh seal, antonius block, Death, cinema, swedish, the black plague, max von sydow, gunnar bjornstrand, gunnar fischer
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Bach on a Foreign Radio

September 18, 2018

One of the disappointing and unfortunate inevitabilities of being an Ingmar Bergman fan is the fact that he gets pigeonholed as nothing but “the depressing director”. To be fair, his films bend towards the melancholic side of the cinematic spectrum. Despite this however, it is always confusing for me to hear this because when I think of his films I see a bright, poignant beauty rather than depression. He was a man with a complicated but deep, passionate love for humanity and it is this foundation which is necessary for such deep philosophical and psychological excavation. The contrast between light and dark is necessary to balance out and emphasize both sides: the darker the dark, the lighter the light.

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Tags: Ingmar Bergman, existential, the silence, cries and whispers, the seventh seal, strawberries and milk, depressing, chiaroscuro, philosophical, psychological, communication, communicating bergman, bach, johan sebastian bach, scenes from a marriage, marc gervais, birgitta steene
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Introduction to a Series: "Communicating Bergman"

September 02, 2018

The influence of Ingmar Bergman is pervasive. Though perhaps first praised internationally by many French critics and filmmakers--e.g. Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer--his influence soon reach other international giants such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Satyajit Ray, Akira Kurosawa, and Federico Fellini. Additionally, one can find the influence in American filmmakers such as David Lynch, Ridley Scott, Francis Ford Coppola, and perhaps most explicitly Woody Allen.

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Tags: cinema worcester, cries and whispers, cinema, film, existential, Swedish, art, communicating bergman, liv ullman, European cinema, local, arthouse, scenes from a marriage, max von sydow, the hour of the wolf, classic, series, communication, Ingmar Bergman, the seventh seal
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