"Actor: Lars Ekborg"

• Summer With Monika | DVD | (28/10/2002) from £10.35   |  Saving you £9.64 (93.14%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Released in 1953, Summer with Monika, an early Ingmar Bergman-directed melodrama, did much to establish the reputation of Swedish cinema, and perhaps Swedish women in general, as leading the vanguard in sexual liberation. The film attracted the wrath of the censors and one scene of lovemaking had to be cut. While subsequent generations will look at the film and wonder whatever the fuss was about, it retains a vivid and frolicsome sensuality, before submitting to the inevitable, Bergmanesque bleakness. The film tells the story of a young couple, Harry (Lars Ekborg) and Monika (18-year-old Harriet Andersson, with whom Bergman would fall in love) stuck in lousy jobs in Stockholm. Harry is beset by parental responsibility--his mother died young and his father is ill--while Monika is fed up with her drunken, violent father. They escape in a motorboat and to spend a blissful summer on an island in the archipelago. Once Monika gets pregnant and they're forced to steal food, however, the idyll concludes and they return to Stockholm, where the relationship disintegrates. You realise that Monika, from a large and fractious family, yearns for escapism, while Harry, who has never known true family life, longs for domestic stability. It is he who is left holding the baby. But Bergman does not quite condemn Monika, giving her one of his best scenes: in a cafe, estranged from Harry, chatting up a stranger, she stares unwaveringly and directly to camera, as if defying us to judge her. Visually ravishing, this film would have a deep impact on French New Wave cinema. On the DVD: Summer with Monika on disc offers a fine restoration of the original film, and includes notes from Phillip Strick who points out that the film is in part hymn of praise to Stockholm's beauty and was influenced by the documentary "City Symphonies" made during World War II. --David Stubbs

• The Magician | DVD | (24/09/2001) from £7.99   |  Saving you £14.00 (233.72%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A sort of existential horror movie set in what often feels like a darkly imaginary 1846, The Magician is Ingmar Bergman's meditation on the restrictive nature of modern rationalism. Max Von Sydow cuts a suitably melancholy and mystical figure as Dr Vogler, the mute hypnotist who travels with a group of players to Stockholm, only to be examined and humiliated by a team of sceptical inquisitors led by Gunnar Bjornstrand's Dr Vergerus and a hog-like police chief. Dr Vogler exacts his revenge on Vergerus, however, in an extraordinary feat of illusion.With its elaborate, occasionally expressionistic sets and its feel of a scrupulously re-enacted nightmare, The Magician is reminiscent at times of Poe or even The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. However, the "below stairs" characters--including Ake Fridell's ebullient Master of Ceremonies and a host of giggling wenches--add comic energy to what is otherwise a startling and sombre reflection of the nature of art and life. It would prove a turning point in Bergman's career as he moved away from his early, "romantic" period.On the DVD: Presented in the original academy ratio, the mix of soft light and harsh shade for which credit should go to photographer Gunnar Fischer, is well-restored here. In notes from his memoirs included here, Bergman relates how his adventures and privations as part of a theatre company in Malmo provided inspiration for The Magician, while critic Ronald Bergman's notes talk of "the ability of the artist to find truth in both fact and fantasy". --David Stubbs

• The Ingmar Bergman Collection | DVD | (27/11/2006) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £299.99

  This collection brings together all the works of master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. With a jaw dropping 30 features (over 47 hours of film!) plus a limited edition exclusive book reprint of Talking With Ingmar Bergman' - a rare transcript of three seminars Bergman gave in Dallas in 1983 - this monolith of a collection is sure to delight the hard core fans! Features Comprise: 1. After the Rehearsal 2. All These Women 3. Autumn Sonata 4. Cries and Whispers 5. Crisis 6. Dreams 7. Farodokument 79 8. From The Life of the Marionettes 9. A Lesson in Love 10. The Magician 11. Music in Darkness 12. Persona 13. Port of Call 14. Prison 15. The Rite 16. Saraband 17. Scenes From a Marriage 18. The Seventh Seal 19. The Silence 20. Smiles of a Summer Night 21. Summer Interlude 22. Summer With Monika 23. Three Strange Loves 24. Through a Glass Darkly 25. Torment 26. To Joy 27. The Virgin Spring 28. Waiting Women 29. Wild Strawberries 30. Winter Light