April 16, 2019

BIBI ANDERSSON R.I.P.

Swedish actress Bibi (Berit Elisabeth) Andersson passed away on April 14th. Best known for her many deep and complex roles, including 13 projects with master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, Andersson reached international acclaim in such classics as The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), and Scenes From a Marriage (1973). I first saw her in Persona (see images below), when I was running a film series in college. My entire aesthetic world shifted on its axis when I became obsessed with the Janus and Kino film catalogs. These guides were both a resource and an education to me as a programmer leasing films, and they opened my eyes to the cinematic renaissance that had been growing internationally during the post-war era. The artistic giants I found inside those pages made camp in my internal landscape and thankfully never left. And Persona... I had never seen anything like it before, yet the layers of the human experience I saw expressed by Bergman, Bibi Andersson, and her co-star Liv Ullmann was intense, troubled, powerful, and yes, even true to life. What a band of creatives. I hate to think what our last 50 years would have looked like without their courage and artistry. Bibi was 83. More info at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

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