June 12, 2004

• Don Giovanni, Part II
  

  (See entries of June 8, 2004,
  and June  4,  2004.)

  Ingmar Bergman long ago
  “earned the nickname of
  the ‘demon director,’
  such are the demands that
  he makes on his performers.”

  – Anthony Lane in
  The New Yorker,
  June 14  & 21, 2004

  
  AFP/GETTY IMAGES

  
  Ingmar Bergman

  on the set in

  the late 1940′s

  
  

  From the entry of
  
  June 4 last year:

  

  Commentary by Jack Kerouac,
  from an entry of May 21, 2004:

  “So what do we all do in this life which comes on so
  much like an empty voidness yet warns us that we will die in pain,
  decay, old age, horror–?  Hemingway called it a dirty
  trick.  It might even be an ancient Ordeal laid down on us by an evil
  Inquisitor in Space, like the ordeal of the sieve and scissors, or even
  the water ordeal where they dump you in the water with toes tied to
  thumbs, O God– Only Lucifer could be so mean and I am Lucifer and I’m not that mean, in fact Lucifer goes to Heaven– The warm lips against warm necks in beds all over the world trying to get out of the dirty Ordeal by Death….”

  
  Commentary by The New Yorker:

  “… listen to the
  words of Pablo, the servant of Don Juan, who is summoned from the
  underworld in ‘The Devil’s Eye,’ Bergman’s little-known comedy of 1960.
  Pablo seduces the wife of a minister, and then, sorrowful and sated,
  falling to his knees, he addresses her thus:

  ‘First, I’ll finish off that half-dug vegetable patch
  I saw. Then I’ll sit and let the rain fall on me. I shall feel
  wonderfully cool. And I’ll breakfast on one of those sour apples down
  by the gate. After that, I shall go back to Hell.’ “

  • 6:12 pm
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