Critic Reviews

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.

Enthusing over an effect Bergman used in his great 1983 “Fanny and Alexander,” the director Olivier Assayas concludes, “Art defines truth.” Just about every minute of this movie shows how that’s true.

It’s an investigation in the form of a highly personalized meditation.

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.

(The verb in the title is not superfluous. If this movie resembles anything, it’s "Citizen Kane" — structure-wise, if not remotely aesthetically.)

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.

With so many documentaries on Bergman already in existence, that von Trotta has made her own uniquely inviting tour of his triumphs, anguishes, and longstanding themes — in essence a roomy portrait of the artist as an engaged, fallible searcher — is its own gift of sorts, from one acolyte of cinema to another.

Once she gets out of her own way, von Trotta provides a generally breezy overview, appreciation and dissection of one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.

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.

Von Trotta comes closest to the object of her search when she looks at images from his movies. Especially images of the seashore.