Alf Sjöberg

Torment

Torment

Ingmar Bergman's first produced screenplay was for the great Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjöberg's Torment, a dark coming-of-age drama about a boarding-school senior, Widgren, terrorized by his sadistic Latin teacher. When Widgren falls for a troubled local girl, Bertha, he finds himself caught up even further in a web of emotional mind games.

Film Info

  • Sweden
  • 1944
  • 101 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.33:1
  • Swedish

Available In

Collector's Set

Eclipse Series 1: Early Bergman

Eclipse 1: Early Bergman

DVD Box Set

5 Discs

$55.96

Torment
Cast
Stig Järrel
Caligula
Alf Kjellin
Jan-Erik Widgren
Mai Zetterling
Bertha Olsson
Olof Winnerstrand
Headmaster
Gösta Cederlund
Pippi
Stig Olin
Sandman
Gunnar Björnstrand
Teacher
Credits
Director
Alf Sjöberg
Producer
Harald Molander
Producer
Victor Sjöström
Assistant director
Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay
Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography
Martin Bodin
Music
Hilding Rosenberg
Set designer
Arne Åkermark

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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.