Serious film lovers talk about their “first Bergman film” the way other people talk about their first rock concert, or their first kiss — the way you talk about a life-changing event.
My first Ingmar Bergman film was Sawdust and Tinsel, which is also called The Clown’s Evening except when it’s being called Naked Night. I was far too young to grasp what I was watching, but I was old enough to be shaken by the wash of conflicting emotions, the bold images and what certainly helped keep a young teenager’s attention — the unpredictable, high-voltage sexuality that could erupt from a straightforward scene. The sadomasochistic confrontation between Frans, the two-bit traveling actor, and Anne, the voluptuous circus performer — a conquest and seduction in which the participants exchange roles of dominance and humilation — was a premature glimpse into the swampy backwoods of adult relationships, never to be shaken off. Later on I saw Persona, Bergman’s most radical film, and Bibi Andersson’s monologue about an orgy on the beach demonstrated how an intensely erotic atmosphere could be built from nothing more than a face and a voice.
There have been other Bergmans since, and the news of his death earlier this week sent me back to some of them. He really was pretty amazing, and I doubt we’ll see anything like him again. Bergman’s fame, like that of Bob Dylan, owed much to an accidental, never-to-be-repeated confluence of events. Bergman enjoyed the unique position of being able to work with complete freedom within Svensk Filmindustri, which allowed him to follow his muse wherever it took him. (Bergman’s occasional forays outside the Swedish film industry resulted in misfires like The Touch and The Serpent’s Egg.) Along with Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini, Bergman was one of the Four Horsemen of the Arthouse who benefitted from the rising American interest in foreign films that started in the late 1950s and flourished through the 1960s, giving them something like mass-market distribution and inspiring innovative work from young American filmmakers. General interest magazines were still flourishing, giving a platform to ambitious critics who wrote (usually) for a wide audience, spreading the word about the new releases. That platform no longer exists: The New Yorker is the only survivor of the days when mass-market magazines like Saturday Review and even Esquire would run serious film criticism. Journals like Film Comment and Cineaste are strictly for specialists. During his heyday, Ingmar Bergman’s name was known even to people who hardly ever went to the movies. Bergman’s successors will never enjoy that sort of cultural impact.
Bergman brought a unique set of influences to his films. He was steeped in theater, particularly the “chamber plays” of Strindberg, and built up a troupe of actors and artisans who helped give his films an unusual consistency of moods and themes. Most important of them was the master cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose contribution to Bergman’s greatest films elevated him to the status of co-auteur. Some of Bergman’s favorite actors — notably Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann — were launched into worldwide fame, though they never found roles as challenging as the ones Bergman wrote for them. Bergman’s love of theater was complex, and his films are full of this love-hate relationship. The simple pleasure of watching the performing troupe in The Seventh Seal is undercut by sly jabs at the vanity of a womanizing actor, who upon meeting black-clad Death whines, “Isn’t there an exemption for actors?” When the circus players of Sawdust and Tinsel borrow costumes from a local theater, the impresario treats them with contempt: actors, he says, create art by risking nothing more than their vanity, while circus players risk their bodies and their health simply to create diversions — an observation that draws blood no matter which way you hold it. When the dowager mother in Smiles of a Summer Night learns that her daughter has invited some guests to her country estate, she snaps: “If they’re your actor friends then they must eat in the stables!” And the drama of Persona is sparked when an actress, tired of a lifetime of pretense, decides to stop speaking rather than tell any more lies.
Despite his theatrical background, Bergman (and Nykvist) created some of the most celebrated images in film. The figure of Death in The Seventh Seal (and the accompanying chess match) has survived decades of merciless parody, from Woody Allen’s Love and Death to the game of Twister in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. The merging of bodies and faces in Persona — targeted by this brilliant parody from the glory days of SCTV — remains striking. So does the film’s running commentary upon itself as a film: at one point, an act of cruelty literally stops and melts the film stock, matching the violence of the emotions.
Not all of Bergman’s films are great — some, in fact, are every bit as bad as his detractors say. During my first viewing of Cries and Whispers I had to fight to keep from giggling. Though his highly personal canon inspired some of the best American work of the 1970s, Bergman has also been a malign influence on filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, whose work I find unendurable, and Woody Allen, who switched from iconoclast to idolator with Interiors and has since aped Bergman so closely that at times his dialogue seems to have been transcribed from bad subtitles. (Allen has, however, matched the maestro in his eagerness to write big, challenging parts for women.)
I would recommend the bedroom comedy Smiles of a Summer Night to anyone looking for an easy entry into the Bergman canon; also The Virgin Spring, a rape and revenge melodrama heavily influenced by Kurosawa’s Rashomon, adapted from the medieval ballad “Tore’s Daughter at Vange” (it also served as the unlikely model for Wes Craven’s grimy exploitation film, Last House on the Left). Sawdust and Tinsel is puzzlingly unavailable on DVD, but The Seventh Seal is there for the viewing, as is Persona in an acceptable but hardly stellar release from MGM. (Fortunately, most of Bergman’s crucial films exist in superb Criterion editions — pricey, but loaded with enough scholarly extras for years of study.) Bergman’s famous early ’60s trilogy — Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence — is the definitive showcase for his preoccupation with the silence of God. I still think Wild Strawberries is overrated, but I wouldn’t want to argue my case on its merits. It’s taken me a long time to come around to Fanny and Alexander, the 1983 magnum opus that marked his semi-retirement from filmmaking, but that’s one of the hallmarks of great art. It keeps working on you even after you’ve dismissed it after the first encounter, and eventually you give it another say.
There are damned few filmmakers that can manage that trick even once. Ingmar Bergman pulled it off many times. Fortunately for us, the rise of DVDs means it has never been easier to open ourselves up to that magic.
