Remembering Ingmar Bergman
Bergman’s influences include artists like Ibsen and Strindberg as well as intellectuals like Freud, Kierkegaard and Tarkovsky.
July 14th marks the 105th anniversary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Bergman’s influences include artists like Ibsen and Strindberg as well as intellectuals like Freud, Kierkegaard and Tarkovsky. And, in turn, his influence and appeal has only grown in the years following his death. Robert Altman, John Cassavetes and Martin Scorcese all cite Bergman as an inspiration to their filmmaking. “"(I)f you were alive in the 50s and the 60s and of a certain age, a teenager on your way to becoming an adult, and you wanted to make movies, I don't see how you couldn't be influenced by Bergman," Scorcese told Stig Björkman. He continued: "I know that he's had a profound impact on many filmmakers around the world, in France in particular, people like Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin and André Téchiné, and then before that Truffaut and, particularly, Godard – people forget that.” So many of those names, unfortunately, have actually been forgotten. I don’t think Ingmar will suffer the same fate.
Ang Lee, the Taiwanese film director, sought an audience with Bergman in 2006, just before he died. The reclusive Swedish director granted the meeting due largely to his admiration for The Ice Storm, which Lee had directed. “At the film festival in Fårö, when asked how he felt now that he found himself in the rocky landscape that he admired in Bergman’s minimalist films of the 1960s Lee responded: ‘I’m still surprised that it’s not in black and white!’ wrote Beth Daley of The Conversation.
It is instructive to note that Ingmar Bergman initially became famous in the early 50s not because of his astonishing existential cinematography or his emotional symbolism, but because of the nudity in the film Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika). The racy cinematography involving Harriet Andersson was far ahead of its time in expressing eroticism on film. Bergman appears to have ridden that zeitgeist at its crest, perhaps the only filmmaker in history to go from softcore porn to auteur du cinema. For an historical frame of reference — Summer with Monica was released in 1953, while Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, also groundbreaking and far more controversial with regards to its depiction of eroticism, was published (in Paris) in 1955. From Variety’s Ingmar Bergman centennial remembrance:
Movies with nude scenes had a difficult time getting past U.S. Customs, but some distributors recognized the marketing value of nudity. U.S. distributor Jack Thomas acquired Bergman’s 1953 “Summer With Monika,” retitling it “Monika, Story of a Bad Girl” and cutting the 96-minute movie to 62 minutes; he also added his own footage of nude swimming.
Its success was guaranteed when the manager of Los Angeles’ Orpheum Theatre was arrested for screening the film. At the sentencing, Judge Byron J. Walter said: “‘Monika’ appeals to potential sex murderers. … Crime is on the increase and people wonder why. This is one of the reasons.’”
There is no record of any crimes inspired by Bergman’s work during the next 60 years, but accolades piled up.
A favorite Bergman film of mine is Cries and Whispers, a crimson-hued work in equal parts stunning and disturbing in its visual originality. Instead of the usual fade to black, however, Bergman went in for fades to red to punctuate scenes. Fades to red, he argued, was a process more organic to the human condition. His reasoning for this innovation in the visual vocabulary of film was that the human eye, upon blinking, breaks up visual sequences in daily life. And the color behind the eyelid is closer to a “membrane red” than to black. So there’s that. Also, Bergman used no artificial light — only candles and sunlight — during the making of the film. The effect, ultimately, is haunting.
And speaking of haunting, I was thinking quite a bit about Bergman this weekend. The dream-like advance of Prigozhin, from the Ukraine to the strategic southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, as well as the oneiric quality of coups d’etats in general reminded me of his film Shame. As someone who lived through the coup that brought Ugandan autocrat Idi Amin low, Shame is something of a masterpiece of political cinema.
The 1968 drama starred Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann as artistic intellectuals caught in a civil war in an unnamed European city. The drama operates in the shadows of Vietnam, but its resonance obviously continues. The impact on the war on their marriage is chronicled in a series of merciless close-ups and detached scenes of military violence. "His vision of how sadism and paranoia fuel martial conflicts and spread from society’s fringes into middle-class living rooms (and bedrooms) permeates Shame, the only Bergman film that could be called primarily political or antiwar,” is how Michael Sragow put it for Criterion. “The relentless, Kafkaesque backdrop of a never-ending war puts a troubled marriage into stark relief, dramatizing the end of fellow feeling and the dehumanization of death.”
My absolute favorite work of Bergman’s is Fanny and Alexander. And all the magicians tricks and recurring themes gained through over 50 years in film are delivered with elan in this magnum opus. The film itself is a sprawling, visually sumptuous turn-of-the century family drama with hints of Shakespeare and Strindberg, Jung and E.T.A Hoffman. The details of a midcentury Swedish childhood — his own? — are lovingly rendered in this 312-minute TV drama, that actually aired on Swedish television. The theatrical Ekdahl family provide him a palette to lavish his love of the stage and its performers completely. Solemn Alexander is, of course, Ingmar; but so, after a fashion, is Fanny, anima to his animus. When the children's kind-hearted father dies after a stroke, their breathtakingly beautiful mother, played by Ewa Froling, marries the cruel Bishop Vergérus, with intimations of Hamlet. There is also a fairy tale aspect to this large and fantastical film, where dreams and nightmares weave in and out of the dramatic narrative with greater artistic proficiency even those displayed in Wild Strawberries. It was Bergman’s last film, because, quite frankly, it is perfect and he had nothing else to prove in the medium of cinema. Here is episode one of the TV drama, if you are interested in watching the master operating at the height of his powers.
The legacy of Bergman continues. "Over the course of his career, between 1944 and 2003, the director and dramatist tackled, sometimes tactfully, sometimes brutally, many of life’s hardships, such as mental health, terminal illness, adultery, unrequited love, the grapple with mortality, spirituality, complicated parenting, war, and abuse," sums up Mona Bassel for Movieweb. His unique Swedish minimalism combined with his deep existential probing of character will not stop fascinating the young. Further, Liv Ullmann, who starred in many of Bergman’s best films and directed Faithless is finally getting her due as something more than the great man’s muse. His long overlooked productivity as a stage director is gaining attention. And so long as filmmaking, as a craft, is coveted by the young, Ingmar Bergman, as an artist, will have a favored place at the table of artists for generations to come.
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