Angus Macdonald takes a look back at the life of one of the world’s most revered directors.
With the death of Ingmar Bergman, an era of film history comes to a close. From the 50s through to the 70s, Bergman was considered as the epitome of the auteur, the director as artist whose work was as celebrated and academically considered as any painter or writer. In fact, his very name was synonymous with art cinema; to think of Ingmar Bergman conjures up the idea of deeply serious, intellectual and anguished films which were the antithesis of “Hollywood entertainment”.
It’s difficult to discuss Bergman without resorting to a hundred clichés concerning Scandinavian angst, Nordic doom and gloom, depression, etc. Bergman himself admitted that he couldn’t watch his own films because they were too depressing; “I don’t watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry … and miserable. I think it’s awful.”
Recently, film critic Joe Queenan wrote a piece for The Guardian in which he watched the director’s entire oeuvre (the 39 films available on either video or DVD over the course of six weeks) and concluded that five days after completing the marathon, he was “still depressed”.
In an angry reply, Ronald Bergen said this was depressing in itself, “to find a so-called film critic discussing one of cinema’s most profound film-makers in such a superficial manner … For some inexplicable, perhaps Super-Size-Me reason, Queenan set out on the marathon task of watching the entire Bergman oeuvre “in rigorous chronological order over the course of six weeks”. It was Queenan who ran out of puff, not Ingmar Bergman”.
But this idea of Bergman’s films being heavyweight depressing therapy sessions was one of the main reasons that during the late 70s Bergman seemed to fall out of fashion and disappear from the high ranks of the cultural radar. A few reasons suggested for this include the arrival of the new kids on the art-house block from Germany (Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, et al) that were getting all of the critical attention.
Another reason was the emergence of the American new wave (Altman, Penn, Coppola, Scorsese, etc.) whose films were also seen as a rebellion against the Hollywood scene, who themselves were gorging on (and liberally and lovingly plagiarising) the art cinema of the 50s and 60s, particularly the French New Wave.
As all of these innovative and groundbreaking filmmakers stole the limelight and rewrote the rulebook, Bergman was considered as old news, stodgy and ripe for parody. As early as 1968 there appeared a short American comedy called De Duva featuring actors talking in made-up Swedish and playing tennis with Death. Woody Allen, perhaps Bergman’s most famous and devoted fan (“the only living genius working in film today,” as his character stated in Manhattan), also parodied his films such as in Love and Death where Death appears in white, not in Bergmanian black.
His overly-angst-ridden explorations of failing marriages, impending death, desolate artists struggling to come to terms with a God-less universe, still had the power to shock but the emerging of the new cinema and postmodernist attitudes to art couldn’t take Bergman seriously enough, which considering how serious his films can be, was only fuel to the fire for the new irony-loving audiences. (Talking of irony, while many of today’s young audiences may not realise the significance of Bergman’s passing, in an advert for a certain multiplex which claims 2007 as “The Ultimate Summer of Cinema”, clips from The Seventh Seal can be seen amongst such glossy but drab Hollywood fare as Die Hard 4.0, 4: The Rise of the Silver Surfer, Rush Hour 3 and Transformers.)
All of which suggests that Bergman had been rumbled or caught out somehow, but this is not the case. While audience and critical tastes may have demanded things his films couldn’t provide (it has to be remembered that the 70s movie brats would go on to invent the summer blockbuster), Bergman’s place in film history is quite simply massive and immovable.
Nominated six times for an Academy Awards (including Best Picture for one of his bleakest and toughest films, Cries and Whispers (1972)) and receiving a special lifetime achievement award especially designed by Cartier at Cannes, Bergman’s reputation had never relied on whether audiences massed to his films or not. Woody Allen expressed his admiration for workman-like approach, “He’d be working quietly … and would make one tiny film and put it out, and then he’d be working on the next one. The work was important. Not the eventual success or failure, the money or the critical reception.”
Looking at a list of his films it’s staggering to think of how important his work is – Summer with Monika (1953), Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Persona (1966), The Hour of the Wolf (1968), Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander (1982), to name but a few, the list reads like a lesson in art cinema history.
Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw writes “No one makes films like Bergman now … there’s a horrible sense that the world has lost the last film-maker willing or capable of explicitly taking on the big themes: the nature of God and the nature of humanity.” As Peter Matthews describes him as the “godhead in the subtitled holy trinity completed by Fellini and Antonioni”, Bergman remains the icon of serious minded, intelligent and grown-up cinema, taking as his source material the passion, the distress, the doubts of the human soul.
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