Years & Movies: 1958
According to FilmGourmand, the best film of world cinema of 1958 was recognized by Ingmar Bergman's "Ansiktet (The Magician)".
The premiere of the film "Ansiktet (The Magician)" took place in Sweden on December 26, 1958.
The script of the film, which was written by Bergman himself, is inspired by the play “Magic” by Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the genre of which the author defined as “fantastic comedy”. The main character of the film - the wandering magician and hypnotist Albert Emanuel Vogler - Bergman appropriated his own character traits. And to Vogler’s main rival, Dr. Vergerus, Bergman appropriated the character traits of Harry Schein, a constant critic of Bergman's work.
In 1959, Bergman's film participated in the Venice International Film Festival, where it was nominated for the main prize - the Golden Lion. But the jury of the film festival, chaired by the Italian cinematographer Luigi Chiarini, preferred two other, again, Italian films: "Il generale Della Rovere" by Roberto Rossellini and "La grande guerra (The Great War)" by Mario Monicelli. By the way, the jury also included the Soviet film director Sergei Bondarchuk.
However, three other awards to the Bergman's film became a kind of compensation for the defeat in the dispute for the main prize: the Special Jury Prize (or Silver Lion), New Cinema Award for the Best Picture, and the Pasinetti Award for the Best Foreign Film.
The next year, 1960, Bergman's film claimed the British BAFTA Award, but, together with 14 other nominees, lost to William Wyler's film "Ben-Hur". Among the 14 applicants who made up company for the film "Ansiktet (The Magician)" were Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder", Andrzej Wajda's "Popiól i diament (Ashes and Diamonds)", Billy Wilder's "Some Like It Hot", and Fred Zinneman's "The Nun's Story". The company is what you need!
Professional film critics in America and in Russia praised this picture of Bergman. So, Bosley Crowther from The New York Times wrote in his review, written literally the day after the premiere of the film in New York: "Mr. Bergman is offering in this a mystical contemplation that could well have wide popular appeal. For he is dealing with magic, spiritual manifestation, spells and "animal magnetism," which are more exciting when they're not fully understood.And it's a safe bet that very few viewers are going to understand everything that Mr. Bergman here levitates and puts forth in his bewitchingly imagistic style....The important thing is that this picture is full of extraordinary thrills that flow and collide on several levels of emotion and intellect. And it swarms with sufficient melodrama of the blood-chilling, flesh-creeping sort to tingle the hide of the least brainy addict of out-right monster films.Is it something supremely contemplative of the marginal regions between reality and unreality that you would care to cogitate?"
But if the American critic was more enthusiastic about the visual range of the picture and its mysticism, then the famous Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev, who rated the film at 9.5 out of 10 possible, saw a very deep subtext in the film: "the key to unraveling the parable in the style of black humor is contained in a kind of ironic fraud. He makes fun of critics, who sometimes ruthlessly dissect a work of art, and at the same time, of spectators who often identify the artist with his heroes ... According to Bergman, the creator is always more than his art and does not fit into any framework of definitions. In the end, he is incomprehensible, like God."
Despite the fact that, according to the assumptions of Bosley Crowther, few viewers will understand the film, the rating of this film by the audience is very high: 60% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10.
Based on the above indicators, the rating of the film "Ansiktet (The Magician)" according to FilmGourmand was 9,145, which made it the 136th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
In the USSR, this film, like many other films by Ingmar Bergman, was not shown.
In addition to Ingmar Bergman's film "Ansiktet (The Magician)", the following films were included in the "top ten" of the best works of world cinema of 1958 according to FilmGourmand:
- Kakushi-toride no san-akunin 隠し砦の三悪人 (The Hidden Fortress). Director Akira Kurosawa, Japan. Movie's Rating - 8,670; 260th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- Vertigo. Director Alfred Hitchcock, USA. Movie's Rating - 8,550; 297th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street). Director Mario Monicelli, Italy. Movie's Rating - 8,548; 300th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- A Night to Remember. Director Roy Ward Baker, UK. Movie's Rating - 8,476; 332nd Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- The Defiant Ones. Director Stanley Kramer. Movie's Rating - 8,125; 461st Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Director Richard Brooks, USA. Movie's Rating - 8,198; 470th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- Nära livet. Director Brink of Life, Sweden. Movie's Rating - 8,144; 531th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- Room at the Top. Director Jack Clayton, UK. Movie's Rating - 8,128; 554th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
- La legge è legge (The Law Is the Law). Director Christian-Jaque, Italy. Movie's Rating - 8,036; 661st Rank in the Golden Thousand.
10 most "cinegenic"*, in our opinion, events of 1958:
- Second Crisis in the Taiwan Strait. There was an armed conflict between China and Taiwan. The United States sent aircraft to help Taiwan, the USSR provided diplomatic support to China.
- The bombing of the village Sakiet Sidi Youssef. The Air Force of France bombed the village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef in Tunisia for supporting the national liberation movement in Algeria.
- The first International Tchaikovsky Piano and Violin Competition. In the USSR, the first International Tchaikovsky Piano and Violin Competition. Van Cliburn (USA) and Valery Klimov (USSR) won.
- Persecution of Boris Pasternak. In the USSR, the campaign of persecution of Boris Pasternak began for the novel Doctor Zhivago, which forced the writer to abandon the Nobel Prize.
- Tragedy of "Manchester United". During the third takeoff attempt from Munich airport (Germany), a British Airways plane crashed, on which the Manchester United football team was. 21 people died, including 8 team players.
- Explorer-1. The first successful launch of the artificial Earth satellite Explorer-1 took place in the USA. The satellite existed in orbit until 1970. (The satellite launched in the USSR in 1957 fell to Earth and burned up 3 months after launch.)
- Collision over Tybee Island. As a result of a collision between a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter of the US Air Force over Tybee Island, the bomber crew had to accidentally drop a Mark 15 hydrogen bomb weighing 3.4 tons into a swamp. The bomb has not yet been found so far. Another bomber accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on an apartment building 6 miles outside Florence. The explosion created a crater 20 meters in diameter and 10 meters deep, six people were injured, and several structures were destroyed.
- Typhoon Ida. Typhoon Ida, which struck Japan, claimed the lives of 1,269 people, wounded and maimed 1,138 people, destroyed 244 bridges, and left 12 thousand people homeless.
- The beginning of the Great Chinese Famine. Reforms in agriculture, carried out according to Soviet patterns (collectivization, "Lysenkoism"), as well as natural disasters (floods, droughts) led to the beginning of the Great Chinese Famine, as a result of which, according to official data, 15 million people died in three years, according to unofficial data - 36 million person.
- Guerrilla war in Cuba. In Cuba, popular protests against American protégé Batista intensified. The protests were attended by supporters of the most diverse, sometimes opposite, political trends. Most of the protesters were forced to take refuge in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Batista's army brutally bombed the forests in the Sierra Maestra, but this only contributed to the growth of the authority of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary army, waging a guerrilla war against Batista forces, supported by the United States. Fearing that communist forces would come to power in Cuba, the US government decided to replace its protégé. Batista, learning about this, fled the country, taking $ 300 million from the state treasury.
Besides Tim Burton and Michelle Pfeiffer were born.
* -With "cinematic" in the present context, we mean events that either have already found their reflection in world cinema, or deserve to become the basis of the plot of a future film.