Hello, my name's Justin the Clue, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today, we're going to be talking about Ingrid Bergman.

Some real important cinema.

We just recorded a Patreon episode about the Power Rangers movie, so really shifting gears here.

I've got to tell you.

Now, Ingrid Bergman is an

actress that I knew of more as a kind of mythical figure than I did someone whose work that I

explored. Like, you know she's in Casablanca. You know she's in a movie called Gaslight. And you know

she went to Italy to work on neorerealist films with Roberto Rosalina.

And you knew there was a scandal there, too. Exactly. Yeah. I'd probably see, I don't know, five or six of her movies over the years, just being somebody who's interested in movies, you inevitably run into her, notorious Casablanca, Autumn Sonata, maybe a few others. So the question could be, what makes Ingrid Bergman, Ingrid Bergman? Like what makes her the icon that is just burn into most people's memories?

Well, I was trying to figure it out this week. I watched the documentary, Ingrid Bergman, in her own words, the recent one. Which I recommended to Will, and then he watched and he went, eh, it's not very good. I'm like, woo, Dodge that bullet. Well, I don't know. I was just disappointed because it was

mostly like home video

footage and, uh, or home movie footage and excerpts from her letters and her diaries, which is, you know, fine if you're really interested in her, but not a lot of analysis there. So I was kind of hoping that might, that might guide me to figuring out what her technique was.

You're like, all right, well, that didn't give me much.

Wikipedia, click. might that might guide me to figuring out what what her technique was. You're like, all right, well,

that didn't give me much. Wikipedia, click. But why don't we just start with her face? Yes.

It's a great face. It's, uh, it's sort of a round face. She's got a big lower lip, a small upper lip,

a very trembling lip, I would say. And she's famous that when she started her career, that she didn't wear makeup when she acted.

Well, like, there's something about her face that I think really lends itself to the kind of ethereal, gauzy look of black and white cinema.

In a movie like Casablanca, like, it's almost as if, like, her face fades into the frame.

I don't know. I'm getting, like, pseudo-poetic here. And, but also there's a quality to her face.

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