See, if you stick with it long enough, recognition will come. When his commercials for Bris soap were shown in 1951, Ingmar Bergman seemed to be living the admaker's dream: "He had final cut, he had free hands, he could do whatever he wanted," says director Anders Roennqvist. Inexplicably, though, the promising young director soon vanished into ad-biz obscurity; I searched Adwik Svenska's 80-year archives using my mobile phone, but found nothing.
Well, thanks to Mr. Rosennqvist, you can see all these forgotten classics in Bergman's Commercials Preceding the Play, a documentary which provides an "aha-feeling of why and how Ingmar Bergman made soap commercials" (and without that annoying abba-ring around the tub!) The collection is screening this weekend at London's National Film Theatre, along with a bunch of other Bergman-related junk. (At least it is according to the Guardian; I can't find it on the NFT schedule. Why don't you all stop texting for a minute and figure out what the hell's going on?)
In addition to the aha-feeling, seeing it will "make you feel free, well and fresh," just like the Bris brand itself. (Frankly, those were not the qualities I had previously associated with bris, but then I live in New York.)
features | posted by greg at January 6, 2003 10:45 AM