Ingmar Bergman

Autumn Sonata

Autumn Sonata

Autumn Sonata was the only collaboration between cinema’s two great Bergmans: Ingmar and Ingrid, the monumental star of Casablanca. The grande dame, playing an icy concert pianist, is matched beat for beat in ferocity by the filmmaker’s recurring lead Liv Ullmann, as her eldest daughter. Over the course of a day and a long, painful night that the two spend together after an extended separation, they finally confront the bitter discord of their relationship. This cathartic pas de deux, evocatively shot in burnished harvest colors, ranks among the director’s major dramatic works.

Film Info

  • Sweden
  • 1978
  • 93 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • Swedish
  • Spine #60

Special Features

  • New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman from 2003
  • Audio commentary featuring Bergman expert Peter Cowie
  • The Making of “Autumn Sonata,” a three-and-a-half-hour program examining every aspect of the production
  • New interview with actor Liv Ullmann
  • A 1981 conversation between actor Ingrid Bergman and critic John Russell Taylor at the National Film Theatre in London
  • Trailer
  • English-dubbed track
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme


New cover by Robert Hunt

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Blu-ray Box Set

30 Discs

$239.96

Special Features

  • New 2K digital film restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Introduction by director Ingmar Bergman from 2003
  • Audio commentary featuring Bergman expert Peter Cowie
  • The Making of “Autumn Sonata,” a three-and-a-half-hour program examining every aspect of the production
  • New interview with actor Liv Ullmann
  • A 1981 conversation between actor Ingrid Bergman and critic John Russell Taylor at the National Film Theatre in London
  • Trailer
  • English-dubbed track
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic Farran Smith Nehme


New cover by Robert Hunt

Autumn Sonata
Cast
Ingrid Bergman
Charlotte
Liv Ullmann
Eva
Lena Nyman
Helena
Halvar Björk
Viktor
Arne Bang-Hansen
Uncle Otto
Gunnar Björnstrand
Paul
Erland Josephson
Josef
Georg Løkkeberg
Leonardo
Linn Ullmann
Eva (child)
Credits
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Writer
Ingmar Bergman
Director of photography
Sven Nykvist
Editor
Sylvia Ingmarsdotter
Sound
Owe Svensson
Sound
Tommy Persson
Music
Frédéric Chopin
Music
J. S. Bach
Costumes
Inger Elvira Pehrsson
Makeup
Cecilia Drott
Set designer
Anna Asp
Still photographer
Arne Carlsson

Current

Liv Ullmann on Ingrid Bergman
Liv Ullmann on Ingrid Bergman
In a new interview on our release of Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, the great Liv Ullmann delves into the making of the intense chamber drama, discussing what it was like to work with both the director and the legendary Ingrid Bergman, who plays U…
Autumn Sonata: Mothers, Daughters, and Monsters
Autumn Sonata: Mothers, Daughters, and Monsters

Ingmar Bergman plumbs the depths of a fractured family and gives Ingrid Bergman a shocking star role.

By Farran Smith Nehme

Autumn Sonata
Autumn Sonata

As a tour de force of screen acting, Autumn Sonata stands unchallenged as the finest work of Ingmar Bergman’s last few years as a movie director. Fanny and Alexander may have won the Oscars, but Autumn Sonata represents Bergman’s chamber cinema a

By Peter Cowie

Mirrors of Bergman
Mirrors of Bergman

Filmmaker Kogonada, with a little help from Sylvia Plath, reflects on women and mirrors in the films of Ingmar Bergman.

By Kogonada

A Woman’s Voice: Ingrid Bergman in Five Languages
A Woman’s Voice: Ingrid Bergman in Five Languages

Over the course of her five-decade career, one of cinema’s greatest globe-trotters brought her musical, richly expressive voice to an impressive array of cultural contexts.

By Dan Callahan

Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, Sisters in the Art

Ingmar’s Actors

Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, Sisters in the Art

The powerhouse actors at the center of Persona became two of Ingmar Bergman’s most essential collaborators, bringing a remarkable emotional range to their performances.

Explore

Ingmar Bergman

Writer, Director

Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman

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.