Several years ago my sister and I went to the Film Forum to see Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute during a retrospective they were doing of his work. We very specifically went to see The Magic Flute because our mother had shown it to us in our childhood and we remembered really enjoying it. We also felt that it was safe to see from the obnoxious snobby/know-it-all crowd you run into at showings of things like The Seventh Seal.
I should mention at this point that The Magic Flute is an opera. It is filmed as a theatrical event, with Bergman at several points showing you the audience. It's very different from what most people think of when they think Bergman!, which in my experience are his films like Persona, Wild Strawberries and other very personal dramas.
It was a weekday and the theater was mostly empty, presumably because The Magic Flute is not one of Bergman's more famous works. When it started up, a small group of people sitting in front of my sister and I seemed to be shocked at what they were seeing. During the intermezzo they got up and left, and one of them was muttering in a very annoyed tone that they "had no idea it was an opera".
This confused my sister and I, who didn't really understand how you could wind up at a movie at the Film Forum and not have any idea what you were going to see. I have been wondering about this for years because it just does not compute in my brain. I like to know what I'm getting into when I agree to sit down and not make any noise for a long time.
That brings us to tonight--I work around the corner from the Film Forum and am going to see Robert Bresson's Lancelot du Lac on Thursday with my mom. I decided to make a trip over there after work to buy tickets in advance just in case. I am not really a big fan of Bresson but I've never seen Lancelot and it sounds interesting enough to give it a whirl.
The guy in front of me on line walked up to the ticket counter and said "I want a ticket for the Bresson movie tonight. It's good, right?" Oh dear. At least tonight's feature is Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and not whatever the Bresson equivalent of a musical theater piece would be*.
* Probably Lancelot du Lac
