Fridays, 10 – noonish or so | April 5 – May 24 & Beyond

      Location: Baker Free Library in Bow

      Leader: Don Melander   Facilitator: Paul Hague

Like Akira Kurosawa, the great auteur Ingmar Bergman’s films are difficult to watch, because of both their psychological depth and their being spoken in Swedish, so that we have to read subtitles while watching cinematically intense black and white movies. We will screen 13 Bergman films: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), The Virgin Sprins (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Silence (1963), Persona (1966), Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame (1968), The Passion of Anna (1969), The Serpent’s Egg (1977), and The Magic Flute (1975 in color). If Scenes from a Marriage (1974) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) are available on TV, we may add these movies to the list. Before starting this course, you may wish to screen Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), which is available on YouTube.

Don Melander developed and taught a course at NEC called “Literature as Film, Film as Literature”. In the 1980s, he and a colleague in history team-taught period courses in American culture in which they explored the possibilities of using movies as cultural “texts”. During the last decade of his career at NEC, he taught the film course for the Communications program.