The School for Wives (Hustruskolan). Ingmar Bergman. 1983. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.
This play was rehearsed by Alf Sjöberg (the director), but he died and Bergman decided (as a tribute) to film the piece for TV.
So it’s the usual kind of Molière farce. It’s funny, of course and the actors are great. It’s very filmed theatre, though. Not that that’s a bad thing.
I almost didn’t recognise Stellan Skarsgård. He’s so young here! And very funny.
This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.
Fanny & Alexander. Ingmar Bergman. 1982. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.
Bergman’s final “real” film, and like some of the preceding ones, there’s a TV series version and a shorter theatrical release. I’ve seen the TV version a couple of times before, so this time I’m watching the theatrical edit.
And it’s restored gloriously by Criterion on Bluray. I should have gotten the Criterion releases of some of the previous films, too, instead of just relying on the DVD collection. Which is nice and all, but it’s, like DVD.
Bergman certainly ended this part of his career on an up note: It’s his most beloved film; the only film of his that has become a sentimental staple on (Scandinavian) TV.
The poor reception of From the Life of the Marionettes appears to have acted as a spur to Bergman, inspiring in him the necessary energy to carry through the biggest film project Sweden had ever witnessed. He had been on the verge of calling it a day as a filmmaker, but found himself unable to do so. ‘When you’re young’, he observed, ‘you can tell yourself that if it goes to hell, then you can always do something else. But the older you get, the more afraid you become. Afraid of not being able to live up to your own quality demands, of not coming up to the mark.
Well, he found the right film to go out on. Despite winning all the Oscars, it’s a wonderful film.
Gunn Wållgren is amazing. And the girl playing Fanny. And Harriet Andersson as the char lady! Wonderful. And Stina Ekblad! Wow!
Max von Sydow was originally cast as the eeeeevil bishop (but that didn’t happen due to him wanting a higher fee, something he later described as his life’s worst mistake). And I just don’t see that at all. He couldn’t be that eeeevil!!!
I can see why Bergman semi-disowned the theatre version: It’s really abrupt and kinda devolves into a Gothic horror story. The TV series version is better, but it’s still awesome.
This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.
I have my music on an USB3 RAID5 consisting of three external disks connected to one of these, which isn’t a bad little computer: It’s has a 1.7GHz i7-3517UE (Ivy Bridge) CPU, so it’s small, but not horribly slow.
But then one of the disks went AWOL and I thought that perhaps it was time to upgrade the disk array. It’s about seven years old, after all, and surely things have gotten better in the meantime.
My main use case, is, well, it’s a file server that I play music off of:
That’s not a very strenuous task: It basically has to feed out FLAC files over NFS faster than my stereo machine (pictured above) can play them, and basically no machine made after 1987 is too slow for that task.
But my Emacs-based music player doesn’t do any caching of metadata, so if I ask it “show me all the 8K records I have in chronological order”, it has to read eight thousand files, and that takes a while if the disk is slow. This is a problem that has grown year by year, of course, so it’s another reason to explore faster disks.
(I mean, I could add a caching system to my music system, but to quote what Leonard Nimoy said in The Empire Strikes Back: “Meh.”)
So I got a couple of USB3 SSDs. Splurge! I connected them up to the Intense PC and started copying things over. I wondered how slow the original RAID was, and it turned out to be 50MB/s, which is very slow, indeed. With the new disks, I should get like, er, more! MORE!
Copying finished, I did indeed get higher speed. 100MB/s. Which is pitiful. The native speed of the SSD should be 500MB/s, but given USB3, it should be slower, but not 20% of the speed.
So after much head-scratching, I noticed that the CPU was pegged to 100% whenever I read intensively from the disks. Is it possible that USB is such a crappy system that a 1.7GHz Xeon CPU from some years ago would be the bottleneck here?
So I extended a USB3 cable to the other server I had in the same closet, which I had bought a month earlier to do the RAID for my film collection:
It has a i5-7260U CPU @ 2.20GHz, so not much difference in Hurtzes, but it’s a 7th gen Intel CPU, and the other machine has a 3rd gen.
And… Wow! 320MB/s reading speed! 3x faster than the older machine, with the same SSDs, USB3 hub and everything.
I quickly rejuggled my setup and made that machine do the /music array, too, and sighed a breath of relief.
Now I can play music six times faster than before! Whoho!
But then!
The RAID went AWOL, always with the same messages about “tag#0 FAILED”, “USB disconnect” and “I/O error” on various /dev/sdx-es.
I first suspected the USB3 hub, so I got a new one… A couple of days later, the same thing. Tried a different USB3 cable (it’s always the cable!); same thing.
Of course, after each time this happens I have to rebuild the RAID, things get inconsistent and stuff.
Finally, I move the USB from the port on the left there to the right…
And two weeks later, still haven’t had a single disk brown-out.
So: The takeaway here is: 1) USB is a janky thing. It’s not quite like SCSI in olden days (no goat sacrifices needed), but it’s janky. 2) If your USB is slow, get a faster CPU.
The good thing about USB setups like this is that, in my experience, once you get them going satisfactorily, they’re pretty stable. Unless you do something crazy like insert a new USB device. Then all bets are off.
Of course, having a machine with room for plenty of SATA disks internally would be better, but I’ve never seen one that’s a) small and IV) allows easy access to disks that have failed and have to be replaced.
But look!
I can now display all the albums from 1975 by the snap of your fingers! If your fingers snap really slowly. But still!
And since the /dvd disks spin down automatically, my computer setup is now 100% without anything mechanical moving around normally, and I can walk past that closet without hearing any humming sounds.
Well, beyond my tinnitus, that is.
From the Life of the Marionettes (Aus dem Leben dem Marionetten). Ingmar Bergman. 1980. ⭐⭐⭐⭐★★.
Bergman called this his only real German film: Conceived, written and filmed while Bergman was in his German exile. And it certainly feels like an outlier in Bergman’s career. For one, the audio quality is way beneath Bergman’s usual standards.
Not only does this have none of Bergman’s usual cast; it has very few of his normal crew. Sven Nykvist (behind the camera) is on board, though, so things aren’t completely new.
I’ve seen some people say that it’s their favourite Bergman film, and it’s probably just something they say to sound interesting. It’s not a bad film, but it’s like Bergman had a fever fantasy about German people. It’s a bit overwrought and exploitative.
But there’s some very nice scenes here. Like… when Tim’s talking to Katarina in Tim’s flat.
This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.
Fårö Document 1979 (Fårö-dokument 1979). Ingmar Bergman. 1979. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐★.
This is Bergman’s second documentary film about the island he made his home and workplace: Fårö. (Which doesn’t mean “sheep island” even if it looks like it.) Most of his most successful films were filmed on the island, and he did two documentaries about people living there. He apparently goes around with a camera and asks people things and they tell him things.
I haven’t seen the first one (couldn’t find it anywhere), and this is a followup ten years later. So we get to see kids who tens years ago insisted that they’d leave the first chance they could, and then here they’re still living on the island.
Their dialects are so weird. I mean, all dialects are dialects, but it’s a mixture of sounds I haven’t heard before.
Hm… where is it, anyway?
Ah, it’s a tiny island to the north of Gotland in the middle of the Baltic sea (halfway between Sweden and Latvia), and it’s apparently a holiday destination for Swedes. So the documentary juxtaposes the local farm life (no soundtrack) with the tourists lounging on the beach (with a pumping disco/rock soundtrack).
It’s a good documentary, although a bit confusing chronologically. Wasn’t Bergman in self-imposed exile at this point? Or was it over already?
Anyway, they ended up with fourtyfour hours of raw footage:
We started with spring and ended with winter, using that method to compile the film. It turned out to be two hours long, quite lengthy for a documentary. But it takes time to create the right gravitas and power. You shouldn’t just rush past these people.
But the version I had on this DVD was just ninety minutes, so I guess it was further edited for international distribution?
Anyway, it’s hugely enjoyable, especially the long scenes where we’re just watching people work (at hauling logs or butchering a pig (very amiably and humanely)).
The film ends by announcing that they’ll return in ten years time with the next documentary, but that didn’t happen? I think?
I guess we’ll find out.
This post is part of the 87 Bergman Things series.