Searching for Ingmar Bergman

Bergman fans will love this film, but the great thing about Searching for Ingmar Bergman is that budding cineastes who are curious about his work will find much value in it as well.

Margarethe Von Trotta’s many personal connections to Ingmar Bergman lend a fresh, distinctive flavour to Searching For Ingmar Bergman. The documentary explores and champions Bergman’s artistic legacy but also captures a very human portrait of a complex man.

As a leading feminist voice in post-War German cinema, Von Trotta’s devotion to Bergman, the archetypal self-absorbed male genius, seems unfashionably but refreshingly forgiving.

Although Von Trotta skips around Bergman’s filmography a bit haphazardly, and touches upon his romantic proclivities in a frustratingly brief manner, there’s little room to go wrong when a film is seemingly 50 per cent composed of Bergman’s own footage.

A chatty and enjoyable but decidedly nondefinitive look at one of the cinema’s most acclaimed, influential auteurs.

Margarethe von Trotta's documentary reminds us of the reasons for Bergman's continued influence on cinema today.

Ultimately, the search here isn’t so much for Bergman as it is for a thesis and conclusion. Those who know nothing about the subject will learn a little. Those who know a lot will learn very little.