Ingmar Bergman
Aweary knight and a black-hooded figure called Death meet on a rocky shoreline and sit down for a game of chess. Two women’s faces merge to become one, so similar that it’s impossible to divide them. Caught between life and death, a woman is soothed by the pietà-like embrace of her maid. These images from three of Ingmar Bergman’s most celebrated films – The Seventh Seal (1957), Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1972) – are as indelible to the Swedish filmmaker’s legacy as they are to the history of cinema. Multiple interpretations have attached to them. But like many of Bergman’s images, they also instigate a powerful emotional response. As he explained, ‘I don’t want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them.’1
While Bergman’s cinema is undeniably intellectual, it’s also a cinema of sensations. His films emerge from a deeply personal place. Born in 1918 in Uppsala, Bergman was raised under the strict eye of his father, a Lutheran minister who would later become court chaplain to the King of Sweden.2 Within this severe environment, the young Bergman experienced a crisis of faith, a doubt in the existence of God that he would wrestle with for much of his adult life. His agnosticism was expressed in many of his films.
Bergman took refuge in his imagination, with literature and then the theatre, where he would make his first artistic home. Early films like Summer with Monika (1953) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) explore a tension between dreams and reality, escape and compromise. From the start of his career, Bergman was an auteur – not simply the writer and director of his films, but visibly their author, each film advancing his lifelong investigation into human nature.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bergman’s films posed increasingly metaphysical or spiritual questions. The Seventh Seal was a breakthrough, both in terms of its global audience and in relation to Bergman’s developing visual style. A film of intense religious inquiry, it wouldn’t be Bergman’s final word on faith and doubt. The filmmaker’s canvas darkened further: the world that appears in Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Winter Light (1963) is bleak and spiritually barren. Within this meaningless landscape, Bergman’s characters seek salvation but rarely find it.
Bergman’s interest in faces saw him explore the close-up shot with a rigour and intensity previously unseen in cinema. In Bergman’s hands, the close-up is a shot of bold psychological significance and great beauty.
Bergman made over forty films – his first, Crisis, in 1946, and his final, Saraband, in 2003, for television – before his death on 30 July 2007 on Fårö, the island where he had lived since 1966.3 To explore even a small portion of his extraordinary output is to embark, as the filmmaker himself said, on ‘a hell of a walk’.4 There are farces, metaphysical meditations and lush historical period pieces. Films like Shame (1968) and Hour of the Wolf (1968) create societies pushed to the point of collapse that reflect the times in which they were made. Later films like Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and Autumn Sonata (1978) dissect human relationships with a sharp, unforgiving eye.
What strikes a newcomer about Bergman’s filmography is how far it pushes film forwards as an aesthetic form. With their frequent concern with death, Bergman’s films are profound meditations on the meaning of life. But they are also stunning works of visual art. Persona is a bold experiment, as memorable for its visual poetry as it is for its complex psychological fabric; The Seventh Seal looks like no other film of its time.
From 1953, Bergman began to work with the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and together they developed the visual aesthetic of on the other Bergman’s interest in faces saw him explore the closeup shot with a rigour and intensity previously unseen in cinema. In Bergman’s hands, the close-up is a shot of bold psychological significance and great beauty.
