Bob funk download.jpg” rel=”attachment wp-att-21225″>For the minority of people who don’t follow Scandinavian cinema, let me give you a run-down on who Liv Ullmann is. She was a huge cultural icon in sixties and seventies art-house cinema due to her insanely stoic and moving performances in Ingmar Bergman’s films, and was awarded all kinds of “best actress I’ve ever seen in my life, man” awards by various organizations who like to give out awards like that. She is a pretty big humanitarian and also helped to create Ingmar Bergman’s lovechild while Liv was married to someone else. After continuing on past Bergman’s death to direct her own plays and films, she is directing A Streetcar Named Desire with Cate Blanchette as Blanche over at BAM. Yes, it’s almost entirely sold out, but you can try and get some of the limited availability tickets by calling.

Ullmann gave an Artist Talk at BAM for this play, and even though I haven’t been able to score a ticket, seeing her talk is a performance in and of itself. Unlike any other Artist Talk you’ve ever been to, which have all been retroactively made lame compared to Liv Ullmann’s, this was not a glorified version of Inside The Actor’s Studio with James Lipton. Instead, Liv Ullmann proved that she actually has important things to say or is at the very least passionate about what she has to say. As she sat and spoke on the set of Streetcar, she would get up and illustrate whatever performance she was speaking about by acting it out herself.

The talk was moderated by a film critic, Phillip Lopate, and I’d be the first to tell you, “film critics are terrible, bitter people who will secretly mock everything they deem themselves superior to by hiding their displeasure in verbosity,” but you probably hear that all the time, so I’ll spare you. When the critic mentioned an entirely different interpretation of the play than Ullmann’s, instead of accepting it, she didn’t take his shit and went on to give her very personal and fantastic interpretation of Streetcar. I may or may not have gotten misty eyed at one point during her talk.

She has focused her (and Blanchette’s) conception of the enigmatic Blanche around the idea that being manipulative is just a way of attempting to show people who you are, and to also prove to yourself your own self-worth. In that sense, Streetcar is a play about connecting with each other, and Ullmann believes the nature of connection is undergoing a huge transformation in a digital age with so many social media innovations. I felt bad that I had just tweeted something when she said that.

Photo from Flickr user United Nations Photo under the Creative Commons License