Kevin and I are currently working on a podcast about spirituality in film. A movie I recently saw I really wanted to talk about, which won’t make it into the podcast is Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964), an art house classic recently available through Criterion. A search on Rotten Tomatoes brings up a lot of discussion around this movie, but none I’m satisfied with.

Woman in the Dunes opens with an entomologist vacationing in the desert, collecting insects and he misses his bus. A couple villagers invite him to stay the night. They take him to a house in the bottom of a large sand pit where a woman lives. The man climbs down a rope ladder into the pit and the next morning the ladder is gone. The purpose of his kidnapping: To help the woman shovel sand each night which is hauled up and sold by the villagers above. Some vague reference is made that she must shovel or the sand will overtake her house, then the next and so on, but the science of why she’s stuck there is clearly irrelevant. She chooses to be there. The man does not and his attempts to climb the walls of sand sifting into their hole are futile. …Read more

As promised, here’s a master list of Bergman obits and tributes. Everything I’ve come across today is linked here; if you’ve written or read something I’ve missed, please leave a link in the comments to this post.

Most recent updates follow immediately after the jump.

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Last updated August 7, 2007

“Well, goddamnit.” — Keith Uhlich, The House Next Door

“Non-cinephiles likely have heard of Bergman even if they somehow think that the woman from Casablanca directed a seminal foreign film about death.” — Aaron Dobbs, Out of Focus

“I wonder how many under-35s have even seen a Bergman film. The Bergman art-house aesthetic of the ’50s and ’60s is about as far from the Tarantino film-geek attitude as you can get.” — Jeff Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere

“Dozens of us [film critics] have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, “This is what I want to study, devote my life to.” Here, we saw, was no mere director, collaborating on scripts with other writers, but a full-service auteur.” — Richard Corliss, TIME

“Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films…God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires” — Mervyn Rothstein, New York Times

“His vision encompassed the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, its glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the Baltic islet of Faro, where the reclusive artist spent his last years.” — Louise Nordstrom, AP

“That says it all, really: Bergman offers the penis up, unannounced, but part of an incredible sequence; Fincher promises it, then never delivers.” — Brendan Connelly, Film Ick
…Read more

Any combination of William Wyler, Samuel Goldwyn, and Walter Huston amounts to a classic. Period. Dodsworth endures because it’s a sophisticated piece with a lot going on beneath the surface. A retired automaker goes on a European voyage with his wife of twenty years who’s going through her own midlife crisis. It’s 100 minutes of snappy, intelligent dialogue injecting humor into mature themes of infidelity and marriage.

Dodsworth is a man ready to leap into the chapter of old age and enjoying the fruit of his labor. His wife is terrified of old age and runs into the arms of any man who takes an interest in her. After this film was screened at Telluride 2006, Sam Goldwyn Jr. did the Q&A. When asked why remakes of Dodsworth have been picked up and dropped so many times, he replied there’s little sympathy for this film. We can’t help but view movies from the time we live in. Dodsworth’s wife is unsympathetic for cheating on him. Dodsworth is unsympathetic because, today, nobody understands why he doesn’t just drop her and move on.

Therein lies the beauty of Dodsworth. Much like The Secret Lives of Dentists, underpinning this darkly comic story is a man trying to endure a chapter in his marriage and hang on to the history he and his wife built together. It’s not a decision most couples make today. But it’s a mature and calculated decision reflecting incredible endurance in the man who makes it.