Mai Zetterling as Bertha Olsson in Torment

Today sees the release of the five-DVD package Early Bergman, the first offering from Eclipse, a new label from the Criterion Collection, purveyors of beautifully packaged and presented cinema on disc for over two decades now. (The label began with the laser disc format, and switched to DVD in the mid-90s.)

Early Bergman, as you might guess from its title, collects five films from the beginning of Swedish master Ingmar Bergman's career. The first, 1944's Torment, is directed by Alf Sjöberg from Bergman's original script; the other four, 1946's Crisis, 1948's Port of Call, 1949's Thirst and To Joy, are directed and scripted by Bergman but are all adaptations from other sources. Hence, this set — and make no mistake, all the pictures contained therein are distinctive, strong works — shows Bergman, and the Swedish film industry of the era, expanding, growing, finding a voice, getting underway in creating a new cinematic modernism. It's engrossing both as film history and film.

It's a quite deliberate opening salvo from the label, as its president, Peter Becker, explains it. "The basic idea of Eclipse is really simple," he says. "When you work at Criterion you get to watch a lot of movies. You also get to learn a lot about movies from people all over the world who know so much more about movies than you do. We began to realize that the canon of film culture had been fixed for quite a long time. Janus [the arthouse distribution company that Becker's father was the co-head of, and the catalogue of which Criterion in a sense emerged from] had had a hand in it in its own way, and Criterion too. So the same core classics would always find an audience, as would the best-known filmmakers. But there was also this risk that lesser known filmmakers would be completely overshadowed or, in the case of the better known filmmakers, their own better-known films overshadowing the larger part of their work." The decision to begin with the lesser-known pictures from the early part of Bergman's career came out of something Becker and the Janus/Criterion people noticed in looking at patterns of attendance during filmmaker rep series at arthouses across the country.

Alf Kjellin as Jan Erik WIdgren and Mai Zetterling as Bertha Olsson in Torment

"More and more what we were noticing is that when you ran a series of a director some of the lesser known films were the most popular. If you ran a Bergman series, some of the things that people would really run off to see were the things that were hardest to find. So we started with Early Bergman because we wanted to draw people's attention to the fact that, here's a major filmmaker who we consider to be the foundation of art house film culture in some ways, and here's a group of films where he's coming into his own. And lots of people haven't seen them, even people who consider themselves big Bergman fans. So I think that's a good way to get across in the first release, the idea that even with filmmakers you think you know, there's still potentially a lot to be seen. When people heard we were working on Louis Malle, one of the things they wrote into us about that they really wanted to see was his documentary Phantom India. Which is very hard to see, in part because it's seven hours long." And indeed, Phantom India will be a part of Eclipse's second package, The Documentaries of Louis Malle.