The Touch

With his first English-language film, a critical and box-office disaster, Ingmar Bergman delivered a compelling portrait of conflicting desires. In The Touch, a chance encounter between seemingly contented housewife Karin (Bibi Andersson) and David (Elliott Gould), an intense American archaeologist scarred by his family’s past, leads to the initiation of a torrid and tempestuous affair, one that eventually threatens the stability of Karin’s marriage to a respected local surgeon (Max von Sydow). Upon its release, the filmmaker declared this emotionally complex and sensitively performed film to be his first real love story.

Sweden
1971
115 minutes
Color
1.85:1
English

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Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

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Cast & Credits

Cast

Elliott Gould: David Kovac
Bibi Andersson: Karin Vergerus
Max von Sydow: Andreas Vergerus
Sheila Reid: Sara Kovac

Credits

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Producer: Ingmar Bergman
Producer: Lars-Owe Carlberg
Cinematographer: Sven Nykvist
Music: Carl Michael Bellman
Music: Peter Covent
Music: Jan Johansson
Editor: Siv Lundgren
Production design: Ann-Christin Lobråten
Production design: P. A. Lundgren
Costume design: Mago
Costume design: Ethel Sjöholm
Makeup: Cecilia Drott
Makeup: Bengt Ottekil
Assistant director: Arne Carlsson

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Explore

Ingmar Bergman

Director

The Swedish auteur began his artistic career in the theater but eventually navigated toward film—"the great adventure," as he called it—initially as a screenwriter and then as a director. Simply put, in the fifties and sixties, the name Ingmar Bergman was synonymous with European art cinema. Yet his incredible run of successes in that era—including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, haunting black-and-white elegies on the nature of God and death—merely paved the way for a long and continuously dazzling career that would take him from the daring “Silence of God” trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) to the existential terrors of Cries and Whispers to the family epic Fanny and Alexander, with which he “retired” from the cinema. Bergman died in July 2007, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema.