Ingmar Bergman: New Edition

By Robin Wood and Richard Lippe

At a time when few reviewers and critics were taking the study of film seriously, Robin Wood released a careful and thoroughly cinematic commentary on Ingmar Bergman's films that demonstrated the potential of film analysis in a nascent scholarly field. The original Ingmar Bergman influenced a generation of film scholars and cineastes after its publication in 1969 and remains one of the most important volumes on the director. This new edition of Ingmar Bergman, edited by film scholar Barry Keith Grant, contains all of Wood's original text plus four later pieces on the director by Wood that were intended for a new volume that was not completed before Wood's death in 2010.

In analyzing a selection of Bergman's films, Wood makes a compelling case for the logic of the filmmaker's development while still respecting and indicating the distinctiveness of his individual films. Wood's emphasis on questions of value (What makes a work important? How does it address our lives?) informed his entire career and serve as the basis for many of these chapters. In the added material for this new edition, Wood considers three important films Bergman made after the book was first published-Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, and From the Life of the Marionettes-and also includes significant reassessment of Persona. These pieces provocatively suggest the more political directions Wood might have taken had he been able to produce Ingmar Bergman Revisited, as he had planned to do before his death.

In its day, Ingmar Bergman was one of the most important volumes on the Swedish director published in English, and it remains compelling today despite the multitude of books to appear on the director since. Film scholars and fans of Bergman's work will enjoy this updated volume.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9780814338063

Robin Wood

Robin Wood was a founding editor of CineAction! and author of numerous works, including Personal Views: Explorations in Film (Wayne State University Press, 2006) and Howard Hawks (Wayne State University Press, 2006). He was professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema Studies. Barry Keith Grant is a professor in the Department of Communications, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author or editor of many books, including Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Wayne State University Press, 2011) and Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Wayne State University Press, 1998) and has served as editor-in-chief of the four-volume Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film.

Book preview

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND MEDIA SERIES

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu.

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant

Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne

University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming

University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng

University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer

University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward

California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning

University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch

University of Delaware

Walter Metz

Southern Illinois University

INGMAR BERGMAN

New Edition

Robin Wood

Edited by Barry Keith Grant

WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DETROIT

New edition © 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

17 16 15 14 13       5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wood, Robin, 1931–2009.

Ingmar Bergman / Robin Wood ; edited by Barry Keith Grant — New ed.

p. cm. — (Contemporary approaches to film and media series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Filmography: p.

ISBN 978-0-8143-3360-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) —

1. Bergman, Ingmar, 1918–2007—Criticism and interpretation. I. Grant, Barry Keith, 1947– II. Title.

PN1998.A3B469 2012

791.4302′33092—dc23

2012010812

ISBN 978-0-8143-3806-3 (e-book)

To Göran Persson, who taught me to think about Bergman

CONTENTS

Foreword by Barry Keith Grant

Preface by Richard Lippe

Acknowledgments

Notes

Introduction: Journeys: För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor

Parents and Victims: Frenzy, Prison, Port of Call

Innocence and Experience: Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, Waiting Women

Broken Dreams: Sawdust and Tinsel, Journey into Autumn

Lessons in Love: A Lesson in Love, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries

Doubts and Fears: The Seventh Seal, The Face, The Devil’s Eye

The Isaksson Films: So Close to Life, The Virgin Spring

The Trilogy: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence

Intermezzo: Now About These Women

The World Without, The World Within: Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame

Moments of Release: Cries and Whispers (1973)

Call Me Ishmael: Fanny and Alexander (1983)

Persona Revisited (1994)

From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me (2000)

Notes

Filmography

Index

FOREWORD

Ingmar Bergman is the third book by influential film critic Robin Wood to be republished by Wayne State University Press within its Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series. Like Wood’s other early auteurist studies, Ingmar Bergman was an influential milestone when it was first published in 1969. At a time when few reviewers and critics were taking film study seriously, Wood’s careful and thoroughly cinematic commentary demonstrated the potential of film analysis in a nascent scholarly field. It influenced a generation of students and cineastes.

Wood’s great contribution as an analyst of Bergman’s films is to make a compelling case for the logic of the filmmaker’s development over a period of some twenty years while still respecting the distinctiveness of each individual film. Wood constantly compares and contrasts the Bergman movies under discussion, pointing out similar themes, motifs, symbolism, and narrative strategies. He is especially insightful on how Bergman utilized a stock company of actresses for multiple appearances in different films. The astuteness of Wood’s insights into Bergman’s work is clear when one considers how well they apply to the films Bergman made after the book was published.

It is not only the book’s insights into Bergman’s films but also its style and distinctive voice that make it an important work of film criticism. Ultimately Wood’s greatest achievement as a writer is to communicate a passion for films and their seriousness—a message that is, alas, at least as pressing today as it was in 1969. Back then, no one seriously interested in movies read this book without feeling an equally passionate response, nor will readers today. Wood’s voice is unmistakably his own, and his tone is wont to provoke. Because Wood is both dogmatic and transparent, the cruxes in his critical terminology so obvious, it is more productive, and certainly more exhilarating, to disagree with him than to be persuaded by most other writers on film. In short, as a work of criticism, Ingmar Bergman is exemplary in eloquence and insight.

From the vantage point of today, however, over forty years since the book’s appearance and the successful establishment of film studies in academia, it might appear to some that the book is, as they say, dated. After all, Wood completed it before Bergman made such important later films as The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, From the Lives of the Marionettes, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander. A significant part of Bergman’s career, which included many of his films for television, was still to come when the original book, which ended with a perceptive discussion of Bergman’s great 1968 film Shame, was published. This incompleteness is perhaps most poignant in Wood’s comment that Bergman was interested in mounting a production of The Magic Flute, a project the filmmaker did indeed successfully bring to the screen in 1975.

It is unfortunate that Wood did not get to revise the book as part of a projected plan to revisit several of his early monographs for Wayne State University Press on the model of what he had already famously done with his work on Alfred Hitchcock. The only one he had managed to do before his death was the volume on Howard Hawks, which was published by the Press in 2006. At one time Wood told me that he wanted to revise his Bergman and Satyajit Ray volumes next, and he looked forward excitedly to doing so. Undoubtedly, the astonishingly and always perceptive Wood, by incorporating new ideas from his own subsequent development as a critic, a development quite as remarkable in its way as Bergman’s, would have offered new insights on the director’s important later films as well as on such ill-conceived projects as The Touch and The Serpent’s Egg.

Thus one might think of Ingmar Bergman as an incomplete account of one of the world’s most protean filmmakers from one of the world’s most resourceful critics, with much of each one’s future development uncharted here. The book noticeably lacks anything resembling what became accepted as Theory in film studies for decades after its publication. Throughout its pages Wood offers pronouncements on the western cultural tradition with complete assurance, in a manner that contemporary scholars would not dare since such terms have become, in the postmodern era, far more hotly contested. Wood’s commonsensical defense of that tradition, and his framing of Bergman as a fellow-defender, may strike some contemporary readers either as surprisingly conservative or as quaint Leavisite piety.

Yet it would be incorrect to conclude that Ingmar Bergman lacks a critical stance. Indeed, one of its central values is that it is perhaps the best elucidation of what is regarded as Wood’s early humanist perspective. The critic’s deep knowledge of Bergman’s films and his unerring sense of their place in a larger cultural conversation impart an enviable authority even to his seemingly casual remarks. It is true that the book was written before Wood’s transition to his Marxist/feminist/gay liberation position, but it is apparent to anyone who has paid close attention to his work that the popular notion of these two phases of Wood’s career is simplistic if not fallacious. Wood’s emphasis on questions of value (What makes a work important? How does it address our lives?) informed his entire career, and in Ingmar Bergman it surfaces perhaps most explicitly in Wood’s anguish, along with Elizabeth’s in Persona, over the horrors of the Vietnam War.

In later years Wood’s own view of Bergman became mixed. Toward the end of his life, he felt Bergman’s art to be too insulated, too naïve about ideology, and too caught up in personal neurosis. Yet Wood felt Bergman’s work still central enough to his experience of art that he would return to it periodically. The four succeeding essays, also included in this edition, address the later films Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, and From the Life of the Marionettes and offer a significant reassessment of Persona. These pieces provocatively suggest the more political directions Wood would have taken had he been able to produce Ingmar Bergman Revisited.

Ultimately, the fact that Robin Wood’s Ingmar Bergman has been out of print for nearly forty years is less a comment on the book’s value and importance than on our collective cultural priorities. In its day, Ingmar Bergman was one of the most important volumes on the Swedish director published in English, and it remains so today despite the multitude of books that have appeared on the director since. It confirms Wood’s place as one of the preeminent critics of the cinema. Although written decades ago, I see no contradiction in including it in Wayne State University Press’s Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series.

BARRY KEITH GRANT

PREFACE

In August 2006, Robin signed a contract with Wayne State University Press to reprint the monographs The Apu Trilogy, Ingmar Bergman, Claude Chabrol, and Arthur Penn with the idea that he would update each of the books. I don’t remember if it was suggested that he begin the project with the Bergman book; in any case, although he considered doing so, Robin decided against it. Instead, he chose to begin with the Satyajit Ray book and began watching the director’s films he was less familiar with. Robin’s decision to write on Ray was based on his concern that Ray, whom he regarded as a major filmmaker, had been neglected critically through the years and deserved contemporary recognition. The decision was also based on his feeling that the project would genuinely engage him. When considering writing on Bergman, Robin came to the conclusion that he couldn’t face up to the idea of systematically watching the numerous films that followed Shame (1968), the last film he wrote on in Ingmar Bergman. I think he also felt that since the publication of the Bergman monograph, he had made clear, beginning with Responsibilities of a Gay Film Critic, Film Comment 14, no. 1 (January– February 1978 [reprinted in Personal Views, rev. ed., by Wayne State University Press (2006)]), his rethinking of the director’s work. In that article Robin addressed his problems in accepting Bergman’s inability or refusal to recognize that the human condition isn’t a given but is shaped, to a significant extent, by ideology that produces cultural and political dictates that can be changed.

As it turned out, Robin never got beyond watching Ray’s films. In 2006, he taught a graduate-level summer course at York University, was still actively involved with CineAction, and occasionally wrote for Artforum and Film Comment; however, his health was becoming a more serious problem. He abandoned the Ray project in favor of concentrating on Michael Haneke’s work with the idea of publishing a book on him. Robin felt that the director, like Patrice Chéreau and Tsai Ming-Liang, was a master filmmaker who intelligently addressed political life in our present-day civilization. Sadly, he never managed to do more than make a few introductory notes on the Haneke book project. By the spring of 2008, Robin was too often ill to write regularly although, at the time, he wasn’t fully aware of the severity of his condition. It wasn’t until late in the year that he was made aware of the critical state of his health.

In May 2005, Robin went to Stockholm to deliver a presentation at a Bergman symposium. According to our friend in Sweden, Olaf Hedling (see CineAction, no. 84 2011), the presentation received a mixed reaction. There were several participants who felt that Robin’s manner was somewhat unprofessional, citing his casual approach (such as the reliance on small pieces of notepaper while lecturing) and attire (his usual choice of a T-shirt and sweatpants). In addition, the lecture included the showing of an extract from The Passion of Anna (1969), which he considered the best of Bergman’s post-Shame films, and an extract from Marleen Gorris’s Antonia’s Line (1995). His point essentially was that in contrast to Gorris’s feminist film, which celebrates life, Bergman’s doesn’t allow any of his characters to move beyond their respective neuroses, dooming them to isolation and/or self-loathing. Robin’s qualified endorsement of Bergman and his work also may have added to a disapproval of the lecture.

While some of his colleagues may have been disappointed with Robin’s presentation, he was delighted by Liv Ullmann’s response. After the lecture, she introduced herself to Robin and told him that she agreed with his comments on Bergman’s absolute insistence on having a personal vision. (The DVD of The Passion of Anna includes several extras including On-Camera Interviews with Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Erland Josephson; Liv Ullmann says that Bergman, after soliciting her improvised comments on how she interprets Anna, the character she plays, didn’t use most of what she said in the final cut of the film. In her concluding remarks about Bergman, Ullmann says, Ingmar is a great director of his own life. And maybe that’s where he’s done his best direction. His life has not been directed completely by God. It’s been directed by Ingmar Bergman himself.)

As Olaf Hedling mentions in his CineAction article, Robin used notepaper (actually, 4 x 6 sheets of notepad paper) in giving his lecture. For some time he had been using notepads both for his lectures and to jot down thoughts he had for an article he was planning. At the time of Robin’s death, there were stacks of notepaper sitting on a table in his room. In preparation for this preface, I looked through the papers and found a number that dealt with Bergman. They weren’t dated but were written in the course of the last few years of Robin’s life.

Below, I am directly transcribing several of the comments he jotted down.

[(1) The Passion of Anna]

Speaking for myself, however, I was relieved when Bergman at last dumped God . . .  which brings me to L182.

Bergman: L182—The title unique in all of B’s films. Testament film? In retrospect, this seems to me very much to be the case. Roles for the actors/actors for the roles?

Whose passion?—the old man—Von Sydow? Existentialist island (Faro). Without anything beyond—he’s just discovered Existentialism, perhaps for himself in private?

The film stands out from the other late works for its perfection, which is also its limitation.

Bergman essay—Faro & humiliation.

Humiliation as Existential reality (central to L182). All the 5 characters are humiliated, but respond to this in different ways. Ullmann clearly believes that dropping the bowl was an accident, just as she believes that the car crash when she was driving, that killed her husband and child, was an accident. Her sense of self (the good, devoted wife and mother in a happy family) depends upon this belief.

[On Patrice Chéreau and, I assume, Gabrielle]

Chéreau’s film has been (misguidedly, if understandably) seen as a Bergmanesque psychodrama, like for example, the film Bergman called L182 (its number in the Svensk Filmindustri catalog) but in America was retitled The Passion of Anna, inevitably linking the wrong character to the wrong kind of passion. But that is to deny the film (Gabrielle) its most important dimension, the sociopolitical, the dimension Bergman’s film, set and shot on his beloved isolated island of Faro, totally lacks.

[(2)] The two Bergman films I really love were among the first I ever saw, and remain today as fresh as ever: Smiles of a Summer Night and Wild Strawberries to which I would add The Virgin Spring and Brink of Life, the only two of Bergman’s narrative works that he directed but didn’t write—he was a marvellous director of actors—or, more specifically, of actresses.

Ten years from now there will be a Bergman resurrection, a rediscovery, which will reestablish him as one of the giants of cinema. And I think quite rightly. Today we are still too close to him, and people like myself are looking for the angry, revolutionary filmmakers who are going to overthrow our present governmental systems, save our civilization and save our planet . . . . at least I can hope.

[(3) On the 2008 deaths of Bergman and Antonioni]

As we all know, Bergman and Antonioni died on the same day. We also know that there has been in the wake of their deaths, led by Jonathan Rosenbaum, a general dismissal of Bergman, who had, apparently, been cheating us all these years—I think the crime of which he should be convicted was that he made far too many films, a number of them quite bad, whereas, Antonioni made only a few. Those few, for me, include one masterpiece, L’Avventura, which really stands alone. Of its predecessors, Le Amiche is of interest, and of its successors, Blow-Up. I hope I never have to sit through La Notte again, and I have little interest in L’Eclisse.

Bergman certainly, over his long and prolific career, made quite a large number of moderately or extremely dreadful movies, in the course of which he also gave us about a dozen that merit a place somewhere in anybody’s Pantheon. But, leaving aside the masterpieces for a moment, have we really already forgotten—in its blow your nose, cast it aside, pocket handkerchief age, the pleasures of Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, A Lesson in Love, Women’s Waiting (NOT "Waiting Women"), Smiles of the Summer Night (the summer night has three smiles; definitely the, not a—the latter suggesting ooh la la among the haystacks), Wild Strawberries.

Readers will of course object that I have omitted most of Bergman’s most problematic films from his late period. I do not intend this to be read as denigrating most of the films for which he has become famous. They are of course his most important films, as they deal directly with all our contemporary (and eternal) metaphysical problems of meaning, reality, identity, the existence or non-existence of God, etc. . . . problems we all face and never resolve (unless we fall back on some belief that we choose and adopt). And it’s easy to see why these have become the films which are regarded as important (which, one assumes, Smiles of the Summer Night, a film of which I never tire, is not).

In the above notes, the Bergman films that Robin singles out as important to him were made in a period in which the director tended to display a generosity toward and affection for his characters. As his career progressed into the 1960s, this occurred less frequently. Perhaps Robin valued the earlier films because of their deeply felt humanity and more fully rounded response to human existence.

The final essay Robin wrote on Ingmar Bergman is "From the Lives of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me, and it is something of a testament to the director. In it he says: My book on Bergman, written in the period of his strongest influence on me, of course is deeply indebted to him. It is fitting that a director who was from the beginning committed to a personal voice should be celebrated by a critic who, like Bergman, most valued the personal" response. In both cases, as their respective careers developed, each delved deeper into giving greater expression to the inner self.

In this context Robin’s most perceptive piece of writing on Bergman and his work is, arguably, Call Me Ishmael, his review of Fanny and Alexander.

It is an honor to write the preface to this new edition of Ingmar Bergman. As Barry Keith Grant’s forward to the book illustrates through his discussion of Robin and his critical practice, Ingmar Bergman was relevant in 1969 and remains so in the present day.

RICHARD LIPPE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Ingmar Bergman was originally published in the United States in 1969 by Praeger Publishers. © 1969 by Movie Magazine Ltd. Moments of Release appeared originally in the Times Educational Supplement (March 2, 1973). Call Me Ishmael appeared originally in Canadian Forum 41 (November 1983): 41–42. "Persona Revisited" appeared originally in CineAction 34 (June 1994): 59–67 and was revised for Sexual Politics and Narrative Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), pp. 248–61. The latter version is included here. "From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me" appeared originally in Swedish in Filmhäftet 28, no. 111 (2000): 12–20.

This new edition would not have been possible without the assistance of Richard Lippe, Robin Wood’s partner of many years and executor of his estate, in granting permission to reprint the material included in this book. Annie Martin, senior acquisitions editor at Wayne State University Press, was a staunch supporter of the project from the beginning and throughout. Michael Tapper, film critic for the Swedish daily Sydsvenskan and the former editor of Filmhäftet, along with the help of Olof Hedling, assistant professor in film studies at Lund University, Sweden, managed to unearth the original English version of "From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me," which was translated into Swedish and originally published in Filmhäftet. Tom Leitch, Department of English at the University of Delaware, and Christopher Sharrett, Department of Communication at Seton Hall University, were eloquent supporters of this book, and with their permission some of their thoughts inevitably have worked their way into the preface. Malisa Kurtz, doctoral student in English at Brock University, Canada, and Fredrik Gustafsson, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland, helped track down some of the references. Daniel Barnowski applied his computer skills to the manuscript once again, and Stephanie Clayton prepared the index. Both are students in Brock’s interdisciplinary MA program in popular culture. Dr. Tom Dunk, Dean of Social Sciences at Brock University, generously provided a research grant to help in the preparation of the book.

NOTES

The principle of dynamic drive on which most of Bergman’s best films are constructed, and which expressed itself most typically in the form of a journey, is equally apparent on a much wider scale in the development of his work as a whole. For this reason it seemed inevitable that the following survey should respect chronology. At the same time, an artist never develops in a perfectly straight line, work by work. A main line of development may seem to disappear for a time, like a stream going underground, then reemerge in a new form; there are likely to be cross-currents and an occasional backwater. In Bergman’s work, for example, both Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) and Wild Strawberries (1957) develop out of A Lesson in Love (1954); between the two earlier films comes Journey into Autumn (1955), which has strong links with Sawdust and Tinsel (1953); before Wild Strawberries came The Seventh Seal (1957), which in certain important respects is more clearly connected with The Face (1958) than with either of its immediate neighbors. I have not hesitated, therefore, while preserving an overall chronology, to depart from it in detail in order to trace a particular line of development. Usually, these lapses from chronology will be made clear by explicit reference; any momentary confusion the method may cause can be cleared up by a glance at the filmography at the end of the book.

Many of the British and American titles of Bergman’s films are inaccurate, ranging from total substitutions to subtle distortions. It seems worth pointing out the following:

Fängelse means Prison, not The Devil’s Wanton.

Sommarlek means Summer Games, not Summer Interlude. The film is not about an interlude but the transience of the joyful innocence of youth.

Kvinnors väntan means Women’s Waiting, not Waiting Women. It is the waiting that the film is about.

Gycklarnas afton doesn’t mean Sawdust and Tinsel but (approximately) Night of the Clowns; the American title, The Naked Night, is rather good if one overlooks its sensationalistic overtones, as the metaphorical stripping of the characters is a main theme.

Kvinnodröm means Women’s Dreams; Journey into Autumn has a loose relevance but a wrong emphasis—it would be a more appropriate title for Sommarlek.

Sommarnattens leende means "Smiles of the Summer Night. To point this out is not mere pedantry. The reference is to Åke Fridell’s speech about the summer night having three smiles for different kinds of lovers. Smiles of a Summer Night" has an oh-la-la quality not present in the Swedish.

Nattvardsgästerna means The Communicants, not Winter Light: curious that the English title furthest removed from the original should be (as an alternative) the most acceptable of all these.

För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor, rendered in English as Now About These Women, should really be Not to speak about all these women. Besides directly contradicting the original, the translation lacks its delightful prolixity.

For the sake of clarity and convenience I shall use the English titles (apart from a refusal to call Prison anything but Prison); but readers might as well have the nuances of the originals clear in their minds.

Introduction

Journeys: För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor

The first mental images that the name Ingmar Bergman conjures up are probably of the bizarre, the outlandish, the extreme, the abnormal, the picturesque; the apparitions of Death, the chess game, the flagellants, the witch burning in The Seventh Seal; the dream sequences of Wild Strawberries; the horribly detailed rape and revenge of The Virgin Spring; Harriet Andersson’s vision of God as spider in Through a Glass Darkly; masturbation, sodomy, and dwarfs in The Silence. Certainly Bergman has given us some of the most startling images in the history of the cinema. From this has arisen a composite image of the director: morbid, sensational, neurotically obsessed with cruelty, horror and abnormality, but with a certain intensity and power and a gift for striking compositions. Except for those who think that cinema is a matter of picturesque images, or those who think the ability to create a coherent personal world is sufficient to make anyone a great artist, this is a terribly limiting description; it is also a travesty.

The presence of the extreme, the bizarre, the horrific in an artist’s work does not necessarily mean that he is not centrally concerned with universal human experience: it would be easy to find as many sensational situations and images (both dramatic and verbal) in Shakespeare’s plays as in Bergman’s films; there are scenes in King Lear that are at least as outlandish and, by rational standards, as overburdened as anything in Bergman. What matter are the quality and nature of the experience we feel has provoked the images.

One can easily demonstrate that most of Bergman’s films deal with themes or concerns absolutely central to human experience, themes that are either the most fundamental or the most banal, depending on the artist’s response to them: transience and mortality (Summer Interlude); marriage and family (A Lesson in Love); the varieties of love (Smiles of a Summer Night); the shadow of death (The Seventh Seal); old age and the need for self-knowledge (Wild Strawberries). And Bergman’s recent work, especially The