OPENS JULY 11

The great Swedish director turns 86 on July 11, his reputation as forbidding as ever. After all, this is the man who made many lacerating accounts of marital infidelity and recrimination, notably 1973’s Scenes From a Marriage, which the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is presenting in its original 282-minute, made-for TV version (Part 1 at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 23, and at 1 p.m. Saturday, July 24; Part 2 at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, July 24, and at 1 p.m. Sunday, July 25). Yet Bergman is also the director who invented nudity for the art-film audience with 1952’s Summer with Monika (at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, July 31, at the National Gallery of Art), a movie that may seem innocent now, but powerfully impressed such disparate future filmmakers as Woody Allen and Peter Greenaway. Bergman also made some movies with an appealingly playful touch, such as 1955’s Smiles of a Summer Night (at 2:30 p.m. Friday, July 16, and at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, July 17, at the National Gallery), before passing through the fire of his middle-aged angst to emerge as the crafter of such warm autobiographical films as 1983’s Fanny and Alexander (pictured; daily, July 14–18 at the AFI Silver, and July 19–22 at the AFI Theater at the Kennedy Center). This four-venue survey includes about three-quarters of the 42 fiction films Bergman directed. The National Gallery is presenting mostly early films (1944–1960), the National Museum of Women in the Arts is showing three films with female protagonists, and the AFI is sampling Bergman’s later career. The series opens Sunday, July 11, and runs through Sunday, Aug. 22 (see Showtimes for a full schedule), at the American Film Institute’s Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, $8.50, (301) 495-6700; the AFI Theater at the Kennedy Center, $7, (202) 467-4600; the National Gallery of Art’s East Building Auditorium, 4th Street and Constitution Ave. NW, free, (202) 842-6799; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1250 New York Ave. NW, $6, (202) 783-5000. (Mark Jenkins)