Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman: The Pastor's Son and the Silent God

A knight comes back from the Crusades to a plague country and finds Death waiting for him on the shore. He challenges him to chess, not because he expects to win but because the game buys him time to ask a question. That image, from *The Seventh Seal* in 1957, made a star of the twenty-seven-year-old Max von Sydow, launched its director internationally, and remains — in the Criterion Collection's phrase — "a benchmark by which all other great foreign films are judged."

The Parsonage

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1918, the son of Erik Bergman, a Lutheran pastor who ran his household on strict discipline and humiliating punishment. The counterweight was a maternal grandmother, who largely raised him and who encouraged the storytelling instinct that the father's regime suppressed. Every element of the mature work is already present in that arrangement: the absent or punishing father, the silent God, the child who watches adults from a doorway, the conviction that the family is the primary site of cruelty.

He enrolled at the University of Stockholm and abandoned formal study for the theatre, which is where he would remain for the rest of his working life — a fact routinely underweighted by people who know him only as a filmmaker.

Theatre First

Bergman directed at the city theatres of Helsingborg, Gothenburg and Malmö before heading Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre from 1963 to 1966, and he went on directing plays, Strindberg above all, long after he had stopped making films. The stage discipline explains the films: the reliance on a repertory company, the tolerance for long scenes of two people talking, the trust that a face held in close-up for a full minute will produce more than a cut.

His entry into cinema was as a writer. The screenplay for *Torment* was written in 1944 and reached screens in 1947. From there he directed at a rate that now looks impossible — roughly fifty films across a career — writing almost all of them himself.

The Breakthrough

*Smiles of a Summer Night* (1955), a comedy of erotic manoeuvre, took him to international attention; *The Seventh Seal* and *Wild Strawberries*, both released in 1957, made him famous. Then came the run that fixed his reputation: *The Virgin Spring* (1960), *Through a Glass Darkly* (1961), *Winter Light* (1962) and *The Silence* (1964) — films about the withdrawal of God, conducted with a bleak formal rigour that would have been commercially unthinkable in any other national cinema.

He worked with a company. From the early 1950s his cinematographer was Sven Nykvist, whose lighting of the human face is arguably the most important single contribution to the Bergman style. Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson returned again and again, and Bergman wrote for them the way a playwright writes for a permanent ensemble.

Persona and After

*Persona* (1966) is the film in which he broke his own instrument: an actress stops speaking, a nurse talks in her place, and the film itself catches fire and ruptures halfway through. It remains one of the most radical works ever produced inside a commercial cinema. *Cries and Whispers* followed in the early 1970s, then *Scenes from a Marriage*, a forensic anatomy of a divorce first made for Swedish television, *The Magic Flute*, and *Autumn Sonata* (1978), which set Ingrid Bergman against Liv Ullmann as a mother and daughter conducting a lifetime's reckoning in a single night.

Exile

In 1976 the Swedish police interrogated him over alleged tax evasion. He suffered a nervous breakdown, left the country, and did not properly return for nine years; he was acquitted in 1979. He spent much of the exile working in Munich, where he directed at the Residenztheater from 1977 to 1984. The episode marked him permanently — the state he had assumed was his had turned on him — and it is a useful corrective to any picture of Bergman as a serenely honoured national monument.

Fanny and Alexander

He returned to Sweden and made *Fanny and Alexander* (1982) as an intended farewell to cinema: an expansive, warm, almost novelistic film about a theatrical family and the tyrannical bishop who marries into it, which is to say the story of his childhood told with the score finally settled. It won four Academy Awards.

The Academy honoured him three times with the award for Best Foreign Language Film — for *The Virgin Spring*, *Through a Glass Darkly* and *Fanny and Alexander* — and gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award; the Directors Guild of America awarded him its D.W. Griffith Award, and France named him to the Legion of Honour in 1985.

Why Ingmar Is Called a Genius

The word is used about Bergman more freely than about almost any other filmmaker, and the most quoted endorsement is Woody Allen's: "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera." The Directors Guild's Michael Apted called him "the epitome of a director's director." What they are describing is a specific and unusual achievement: Bergman wrote and directed roughly fifty films, almost all of them his own material, and used the medium to conduct a sustained philosophical enquiry — into faith, mortality, the failure of language, the violence inside families — that no one had previously believed a camera could carry. He also invented much of the grammar for doing it: the interrogative close-up, the unbroken two-hander, the film that admits it is a film.

The counter-case must be made honestly. Bergman is narrow. He returns to the same wounded parsonage over and over, and a viewer unsympathetic to that obsession will find the films airless, solemn and short on the ordinary comedy of life. His women are frequently vessels for a male artist's spiritual crisis, and his treatment of the actresses who were also his partners has not aged into simplicity. "Greatest film artist since the invention of the camera" is a claim made largely by other filmmakers rather than by any objective measure, and it privileges seriousness over other virtues — invention, generosity, popular reach — in which he was not pre-eminent. What is not seriously disputed is the depth: he took the ordinary equipment of a small national film industry and made it hold questions that had previously belonged to theology and the novel. That is the substance of the claim, and it is substantial enough without the superlatives.

Legacy

Bergman died on 30 July 2007 at his home on Fårö, the bare Baltic island where he had shot some of his hardest films and where he had lived for decades. He was eighty-nine, weakened by an incomplete recovery from hip surgery. He had married five times and left at least nine children, among them the directors Daniel and Eva.

Criterion's summary is the fair one: his work in the 1950s and 1960s made the name Ingmar Bergman "synonymous with European art cinema," and he left "one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema." Sixty years on, the chess game on the shore is still the image the medium reaches for when it wants to say that a film can be about something.

Achievements

• Golden Bear — 1958
• César Award — 1984
• BAFTA Fellowship — 1988
• European Film Academy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1988
• Notable work: The Seventh Seal
• Notable work: Persona
• Notable work: Fanny and Alexander
• Notable work: Autumn Sonata
• Worked as film director, theatre director and screenwriter