As the hipster kleptomaniac at the center of Josh Safdie’s adorable debut feature The Pleasure of Being Robbed, Eleonore Hendricks steals a lot of things, but mainly the audiences’ hearts. The twentysomething actress, despite her newfound indie cinema fame, still works at the video store Cinema Nolita and binges on way too much Lukas Moodysson. After just wrapping Eric Juhola’s short film The Nowhere Kids (a fictional speculation on Gotham Award nominee and Slamdance winner Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa), Hendricks is getting ready to begin production on Safdie’s new project, Go Get Some Rosemary. In the meantime, I caught up with her to chat about Barbara Loden’s Wanda, her extra special week of moviegoing and why she gave up listening to WFMU. …Read more

Liv Ullmann, the recipient of the Sarasota Film Festival’s 2008 Master of Cinema Award and the star or director of a dozen films on the Festival schedule, sat down with Sony Pictures Classics president Michael Barker last night for a chat before a packed and fawning crowd.

Dressed in a low-cut black pantsuit bracketed by diamond earrings and killer heels, quick with self-deprecating quips and eager to offer candid, perfectly paced anecdotes, her faded Noweigian accent occasionally taking on the lilting cadences of a woman a third her age (she’s a big fan of the word “whatever”), Ullmann came off as loquaciously eccentric and yet completely clear-eyed about past, present and future. Paying special attention to Ullmann’s triumphs with Ingmar Bergman and failures in 70s Hollywood, Barker and Ullmann traced the actress/directors career from the making of Persona to the psychic impulse that led her to visit Bergman on his death bed. Highlights after the jump.

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On Monday, I’m heading down to the Sarasota Film Festival, which begins this evening with opening night film, The Deal. A ton of Spout favorites from recent festivals will be screening at Sarasota over the next ten days, including Medicine For Melancholy, Natural Causes, One Minute to Nine, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, and Yeast. The Festival is also premiering a doc (which I have not yet seen, and which will unfortunately not be screening while I’m in town) called All God’s Children, directed by former Reeler TV producers Scott Solary and Luci Westphal. Here’s a look at some of the stuff I’m planning to check out whilst in Florida:

Bergmanmania: The Festival is presenting a sidebar called Face To Face: The Films of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman, through which they’re screening a dozen films, ten directed by Bergman and starring Ullmann, and two directed by Ullmann. I’m going to hit as many of these screenings as I can over my 3.5 days in town, but I’m most excited about Tuesday night’s Conversation with Ullmann, who is the recipient of the fest’s 2008 Master Of World Cinema Award.

Throw Down Your Heart: One of the most talked about films at SXSW that I didn’t get a chance to see, Sascha Paladino’s film tracks legendary banjoist Bela Fleck on a trip to Africa, where he records new music and explores the history of his instrument.

Spine Tingler!: The William Castle Story: I’ve had my eye on this doc about the legendary filmmaker/gimmick peddler since last fall, but haven’t been able to catch up with it at a festival.

I Can No Longer Hear the Guitar (J’entends plus la guitare): Phillipe Garrel’s 1991 ode to Nico is making the rounds of festivals and small screens via Film Desk, a distribution venture spearheaded by BAM Cinematek programmer Jake Perlin. I was in Austin for SXSW and missed its brief stop at New York’s Cinema Village last month, so when I saw it on the Sarasota schedule, I yelped with joy. Read some of the rapturous reviews, and you’ll know why.

A press release arrived today with “highlights” from the lineup for the Sarasota Film Festival, which runs April 4-13. For me, the highlights of the highlights include a program called Face To Face: The Films of Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman, which will include screenings of a dozen Bergman/Ullmann collaborations, and an appearance by Ullmann, who will be presented with the Festival’s 2008 Master of Cinema Award. Also of note: the Independent Visions Competition, which includes four films that we’ve profiled for our SXSW Preview series (Natural Causes, Medicine For Melancholy, My Effortless Brilliance and Yeast) as well as two films that I’ve been looking forward to: Josh Safdie’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed, and Alex Karpovsky’s Woodpecker.

The full Sarasota lineup will be announced on March 11.

About a week after Ingmar Bergman’s death, the filmmaker’s Swedish state-run archive announced that they needed an additional $600,000 over their yearly budget to digitize Bergman’s early papers. At the time, the archive’s rep argued that the Swedish government’s refusal to pony up the funds (roughly three times what it costs to run the archive for an entire year) rendered the state derelict in their duty to preserve the nation’s art history. The next day, the Archive accepted a $10,000 donation from the people who put on the Golden Globes, and we haven’t heard from them since.

Meanwhile, in Northern Italy, a museum housing the personal archives of Michelangelo Antonioni has been closed for renovations for a year, and unless they get an influx of cash and soon, it look like they’re not going to be able to reopen. The mayor of the town of Ferrara says they might be able to save the archive by expanding the museum to include tributes to other filmmakers, but Antonioni’s niece insists her uncle donated his materials under the promise that the museum would be dedicated solely to him. Until the city and the family reach a compromise, Antonioni’s short films, drawings, on-set photographs, and other memorabilia will be stuck in storage.

Say what you will about Hollywood, but the U.S. film industry is extremely good at preserving its own history. What state-funded institutions such as LACMA can’t cover, enthusiastic millionaire movie buffs like Hugh Hefner step in to provide. The sad state of the Bergman and Antonioni archives may owe less to government apathy than to to the current fragmentary nature of the European film industry.

• In response to widespread, well-intentioned but not always on-the-mark outrage from the local DIY film and video communities, the New York Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting has agreed to revise their proposed regulations on public filming. Picture NY is calling it a tentative victory. Variety quotes video producer Lisa Guido: “I think we succeeded in publicizing this issue so that the Mayor’s Office of Film was compelled to respond. We’re well aware that there’s another set of regulations coming down the pipe in the next couple of weeks. It’s exactly what we called for, though.”
• Long live Hollywood nepotism: Harry Warner’s granddaughter Cass Warner has just wrapped a documentary on the history of Warner Brothers, and is looking for a distributor.
• A week after Ingmar Bergman’s death, the filmmaker’s official archive is in danger. The Swedish government foots the archive’s $250,000 annual budget, but the agency needs an additional $600,000 to digitize Bergman’s early papers. “It’s an international scandal that the Swedish state does not seem interested in providing the money we lack,” says archive rep Astrid Soderberg-Widing.

I’m going to add this to the Bergman Obit Master List in a moment, but I just had to excerpt this great quote from Richard Corliss’ interview with Woody Allen about Ingmar Bergman for TIME. With all the inflation of Bergman’s legacy in the past few days, it’s interesting that his greatest (or, at least, most famous) fan seems determined to prove that Bergman was really just like any hack director: nervous about where to put the camera and neurotic about making money and appeasing the studios.

Woody Allen: [Bergman] and I had dinner in his New York hotel suite; it was a great treat for me. I was nervous, I really didn’t want to go. But he was not at all what you might expect: the formidable, dark, brooding genius. He was a regular guy. He commiserated with me about low box-office grosses and women and having to put up with studios.

Later, he’d speak to me by phone from his oddball little island [Faro, where Bergman lived his last 40 years]. He confided about his irrational dreams: for instance, that he would show up on the set and not know where to put the camera and be completely panic-stricken. He’d have to wake up and tell himself that he is an experienced, respected director and he certainly does know where to put the camera. But that anxiety was with him long after he had created 15, 20 masterpieces.

TIME: You knew he was Ingmar Bergman, but maybe he didn’t. He didn’t get to view his reputation from the outside.

ALLEN: Exactly. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses.

In semi-related news, Allen’s latest, Cassandra’s Dream, has been added to the lineup of the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. I’ll be there, and I can’t wait to see it.

While we’re on the subject of Ingmar Bergman, let’s talk about Bergman parodies. To gauge the Swedish’s master’s impact on 20th century culture, one needs to look no further than YouTube, where you’ll find “Bergmanesque” clips from Mystery Science Theater 3000, French and Saunders and an Alamo Drafthouse video contest. Then there’s the above clip, which appears to be an NYU student short. Titled simply Thirst, its YouTube summary reads in part: “What if director Ingmar Bergman did a commercial for Coca Cola? Written and directed by Leslie Chase, the film is set in the late 50’s and follows the thirsty, lonely lives of two Swedish sisters.” It’s tribute, it’s dead-on parody, and it’s genius.

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
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Legendary film director Ingmar Bergman has died at the age of 89. I’ll have an obit round-up later today; to be included, leave a comment or trackback on this post. In the meantime, watch the above clip: it’s the famous chess-with-Death scene from The Seventh Seal.