Friday, April 13

Autumn Sonata from the section “Bergman: 100 Years” was screened at Beyoğlu Sineması, and director Yeşim Ustaoğlu presented the film. Ustaoğlu explained her choice: “I gladly picked Autumn Sonata. There are two amazing actresses: Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann. Both of them deliver incredible performances in this film. There’s one particular scene that among so many films, I still can’t get it off of my mind: It’s the scene where the mother and the daughter play a composition by Chopin. It’s an extraordinary form of humiliation, blaming, anger and rage… It’s a non-verbal scene where the emotions are about to explode. I like especially Liv Ullmann in that scene. Bergman says that he wrote this scene in 1976 when he was having trouble with sleeping in a very stressful time. He says he decided to write it in a very short time like a dream-explosion and finished it in a few weeks. It is possible that he looked at his own relationship with his mother and with his children. He wrote it really fast and filmed it in Norway. We can think of Autumn Sonata as a chamber film. It’s mostly shot indoors. It’s definitely a film of confession based on two actresses. There are such emotions as hatred, disconnectedness, lovelessness, dependence, attachment, conscientiousness, mourning etc. This limitlessness in human relations is something that Bergman tackles very well.”

Photo: Benek Özmez