Is it possible for art to offend or be deemed obscene and if so who is it to judge and make such a declaration? Different styles of art tend to cater to different audiences hence why everyone cannot experience art in the same way. Bergman's tale intermixes a investigation into a provocative theater performance on charges of indecency with themes of censorship, judgement, and humiliation.

In many ways the Judge is certainly acting as a middleman for censoring powers investigating the material to see if it is fit for public consumption. His judgement and humiliation of the actors spawns from his irrelevant questions that have to do with their personal lives. He quickly comes to his own assumptions of their…

Confined to a number of indoors locations (Hotel Suite, Church Confessional, Claustrophobic Office) and featuring only four characters--this made-for-TV psychological drama nontheless feels confidently cinematic--fluid and surprisingly dynamic due to Sven Nyquist's cinematography, which conjures up echoes of Persona with the way the characters flow and shift around each other as they talk out their philosophical differences--on one hand, there's the state as arbiter of morality and narratives, as represented by an officious government official played with terrific effectiveness by an actor with the excellent name of Erik Hell--on the other there's a trio of iconic performers led by ya boy Gunnar Bjornstrand (Doing ennui as only he can), Ingrid Thulin as his wife (given my kind of growing antipathy…

What an odd film! Supposedly, Ingmar Bergman developed The Rite as a strong response to his tenure at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater were he was miserable due to the meddling administration there interfering with his productions. The Rite is a chamber piece that focuses on four characters, including three actors who are charged with obscenity (Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Anders Ek), and a judge (Eric Hell) who is assigned to their case and who is trying them. The film is divided into nine sections that alternate between criminal interrogations and interactions between the actors. This leads to a climatic “performance” that is truly bizarre, one of the craziest I’ve seen in any of Bergman’s films. This movie was a…

Project: Bergman100

“The rite is the game the artist plays with the audience, between the artist and the society - all this hodgepodge of mutual humiliation and mutual need for one another. That’s the ritual element.” - Ingmar Bergman

In 1968, Bergman started his own production company called Cinematograph AB. The Ritual was its first production as well as Bergman’s television debut as a playwright. What we got is mostly a chamber play with intense cinematic input and psychological disturbance within characters and the ritual performance itself in the climax. The profound facial close-up by Bergman’s longtime collaborator Sven Nykvist is not an unfamiliar territory amidst Bergman’s oeuvre, still it fit perfectly well here within the nine-act narrative structure centering…

Speechless. I've been a long time fan of Bergman and yet had not only never seen this early, somewhat obscure gem, I'd never even heard of it... To be frank I wouldn't have thought he had something like this in him. Most of his films are pretty bleak but it's usually a darkness of the existential, mental illness variety, often steeped in rigorous formalism and religious sub-text. The Rite on the other hand is a symphony of kink and aggression, full of venom-tongued dialogue, poetry, allusions to reprehensible sex, basically everything that's cool and interesting and good. The central power dynamics between the theater troupe and the censor are fascinating and paint a powerful thesis on the young director's ideas…

To begin with, Happy Birthday to Ingmar Bergman. You're still the master and I adore the effort you put into every film to make me think about life's truest meanings.

With that said, I was in the mood for one of his more experimental titles, and I heard that this one was very good. I love Persona and consider it to be among his finest work. I wanted to believe that he still had plenty of weirdness left in his tank by the end of the decade and would manage to say something interesting with it. I'm not saying that what he created here is bad, but this is one of the few times that I found my appreciation for…