Where to look: Rent it on Apple TV, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
1969
“Anna’s passion”
The last part of an informal trilogy that started with “Hour of the Wolf” and “Shame”, “Anna’s passion” by Bergman embodies von Sydow as a recently divorced loner who finds himself mixed up in a pair of complicated relationships – one with a misleading widowed relationship (Ullmann) who lost her husband and son in a car accident, the other with a married woman (Bibi Andersson) who lives nearby. Meanwhile, someone in their rural community mutilates animals. Bergman presents this disturbing juxtaposition through a semi-experimental lens, commenting on the action through a voiceover narration and sometimes breaking the fourth wall. At one point, von Sydow even stops to think about the challenges of playing his own character.
Where to look: Post it on the Criterion Channel; rent it on Apple TV, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
1971
“The emigrants”
In the first of director Jan Troell’s two epics of more than three hours, shot up close, von Sydow and Ullmann once again joined forces as a couple from rural Sweden in the mid-1800s, faced with too much cruel harvest to feed their families. , who is up to four children and counting. Thus, they and other members of the family decide to emigrate to a farm in the territory of Minnesota, a trip that Troell documents with meticulous ardor. Although they arrive in Minnesota at the end of the film, “The Emigrants” focuses mainly on their stay in the Swedish province of Småland, where they suffer from drought and hunger, and on their long passage through the ‘Atlantic, where they are beset by spoiled food and an epidemic of lice and disease. Troell emphasizes difficulty and authenticity above all, but there is no denying that the sunny beauty of his images too.
Where to look: Rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play and YouTube.
1972
“The new land”
“The Emigrants” ends with the promise of a Swedish family who will finally arrive in the Chisago Lakes region, where the soil is rich and deep, but the miseries they face in America are just as intimidating. Beyond the linguistic and cultural barriers, their new house nevertheless rests on an unstable territory, full of false promises, such as the gold rush which attracts some to the west and the hostilities of the local Sioux. The cumulative impact of Troell’s two-part epic rubs shoulders with the first two films “Godfather” when immigration stories are very important, but “The emigrants” and “The new earth” are the only ones in their austere realism . When the Sioux come to call “The New Land”, for example, it is not treated as a mass movement, but as an intimate and heartbreaking element of a more global terror.
Where to look: Rent it on Apple TV and Amazon.
1973
‘The Exorcist’
For his horror classic, based on the novel by William Peter Blatty, director William Friedkin seized the religious gravity of von Sydow’s performances in the film by Ingmar Bergman to make him a girl corner possessed (Linda Blair) and the Devil incarnate. As Father Merrin, von Sydow plays an exorcist who is essentially responsible for putting an end to an evil which he inadvertently summoned during an archaeological excavation, joining a young priest in order to expel the demon who has elected home in Washington, DC Friedkin’s technical mastery is much of the reason “The Exorcist” is held in such high esteem, but performances like that of von Sydow add a human dimension to the shocks.
Where to look: Rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
1975
“Three days of the condor”
One of the hallmarks of the post-Watergate political thrillers of the 1970s, like “All the President’s Men”, “The Conversation” and “The Parallax View”, is that ordinary people are faced with faceless, inexplicable conspiratorial forces, who cannot be identified or defeated. However, von Sydow proves the exception in “Three Days of the Condor”, appearing as a Fedora hitman who leads a daytime massacre at a CIA office that kills everything but the fearless code breaker of Robert Redford. But just because he makes himself known doesn’t mean he can be arrested: von Sydow’s calm and relentless villain frighteningly shows that escape is impossible.
Where to look: Rent it on Apple TV, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
1986
“Hannah and her sisters”
Woody Allen’s admiration for Ingmar Bergman made it inevitable that he would cast the favorite actor from Bergman in one of his films, and he chose one of his best, sophisticated comedy drama over brothers and sisters whose family ties are strained by their love life. Praising Auschwitz and the degraded value of American culture, the aging artist of von Sydow has exhausted his former student who has become a lover (Barbara Hershey), who wants to leave him while she still has a bit of romance. The dyspeptic intellectual of Von Sydow speaks like an Allen spokesperson, but he also evokes the deep suffering and rage of an older man who has lost his fountain of youth.