VIDEO: We Now Remember Ingmar Bergman?s Other Late Cinematographer

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Sad news from Sweden this week as Gunnar Fischer, the cinematographer who shot Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and a fistful of other early-career efforts from the iconic auteur, has passed away in Stockholm. He was 100 and had recently been suffering from “an infection and a fever.” Let’s remember one of his finest screen moments.

To the extent he is known for the dozen films he made with Bergman between 1948 and 1960 — from Port of Call to The Devil’s Eye — a sizable chunk of Fischer’s renown can be attributed to who eventually succeeded him behind Bergman’s camera: Sven Nykvist, whose 22 films and two Oscars with Bergman set a standard for director/DP collaborations that persists to this day. It’s not uncommon for filmmakers to make numerous classics with multiple cinematographers — Francis Ford Coppola had four in his eight-year run from The Godfather to Apocalypse Now — but it’s not often that we see a period as fertile, influential and protracted as the Bergman/Fischer era give way to something even more fertile, influential and protracted. You could argue (and maybe I am) that Bergman owed an enduring creative debt to Fischer, if only because his wariness of the cameraman’s hard lights and rigid black-and-white compositions drove the director to the softer imagery that he and Nykvist explored so exquisitely (and, finally, in color).

I love Fischer’s opening to Wild Strawberries, in which Dr. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) recounts a nightmare only Bergman could conceive: An empty street, sun blazing, clocks without hands, disfigured wraiths, and ultimately a horse-drawn hearse to fill in the blanks on just where, exactly, Borg has found himself. It foreshadows Borg’s journey to collect an academic…

Source: http://www.celebrities.com/celebrities-gossip/video-we-now-remember-ingmar-bergmans-other-late-cinematographer/

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