Scenes from a Marriage

Bergman originally said this six part series took him six months to write, but thirty years to experience. The largeness of the story eclipses many personal films previously done by Bergman. Typically a ninenty minute filmmaker, Bergman held thematic and structural ambitions in check while he focused on simple stories that would exude the belief that film was able to discover the depths of the soul. In Scenes from a Marriage, Bergman takes the best of his ability there to tackle a subject that has the width and breath of a complete thought for a major subject. Bergman manages to keep the story personal instead of strutural by having the scenes be a series of conversations at different points in the marriage. The scene are charged and dramatic, but they encompass the extent of these characters' lives together that it feels like a larger comment on them.