10: Old & Ingmar Bergman
FORMATIVE MOMENTS, COURTESY OF BERGMAN - Kathleen Norris
I was a horrid teenager. Like the two precocious girls in Booksmart, Olivia Wilde’s delightful comedy about teen friendship, I was an intellectual snob. My peers might like The Beach Boys; I was into Bartok, Bechet, and Frank Sinatra’s Only the Lonely album. I had also stumbled onto Soren Kierkegaard: what cerebral and moony adolescent girl could resist titles like Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death? When I was turning fourteen and my parents asked me what I wanted for my birthday I told them I’d like a subscription to The New Yorker. I had recently discovered The Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and in spending many hours after school at the State Library I’d been thrilled to find great writing in its pages by Joseph Mitchell, Dorothy Parker, John Updike, and E.B. White.
I was a sheltered, naive kid and the magazine’s sophistication was lost on me, but that didn’t slow me down. I first heard of a film director named Ingmar Bergman in its pages, and it sounded like he was making the kind of movies I would like. When one theater in Honolulu (the late, sorely lamented Queen in Kaimuki) began showing his films I was thrilled, and while many of my classmates were surfing on Saturday afternoons I was sitting in the dark watching The Seventh Seal, Through A Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence.
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