Harvard Film Archive celebrates the art of Ingmar Bergman
Autumnal explorations of mortality and desire, and the occasional light touch of summer, make up “Darkness Unto Light: The Cinema of Ingmar Bergman,” a retrospective showing at the Harvard Film Archive, as well as Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Cinema and Harvard Square’s Brattle Theatre, through Oct. 14. Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, called the Swedish filmmaker, who died in 2007, “one of the towering figures of modern cinema,” noting the continued relevance of works ranging from the popular “Wild Strawberries” (1957) to the dreamy and difficult made-for-television “From the Life of Marionettes” (1980). With an instantly recognizable style that combines stark lighting, evocative acting, and often surreal situations, Bergman’s films “deal quite unflinchingly with questions about religious faith, human relationships and their precariousness, as well as human desire and its strangeness at times,” said Guest. “To me films like ‘Through A Glass Darkly,’ ‘Seventh Seal,’ ‘Persona,’ and ‘The Magician’ were...