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FILM: Ingmar Bergman, a "Mighty Force", Dies at 89

Mark Weisenmiller

TAMPA, Florida, US, Jul 31 2007 (IPS) - Great film directors are invariably linked with their home countries and the places where they made their artistic and commercial successes.

On that point, Jean-Luc Godard is associated with France, Martin Scorsese with the United States, and Ernst Ingmar Bergman, who died on Jul. 30 at the age of 89, will forever be identified with Sweden.

Bergman, who dropped the Ernst early in life, died on the Swedish island of Faro, on the Baltic Coast of Sweden, where he had lived since 1966. The announcement of his death was made by Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation. The direct cause of Bergman&#39s death was unknown at press time.

In a profile of the Swedish director in The New Yorker magazine, John Lahr wrote "Before Bergman, film was mostly about what could be seen and depicted in the external world. Very little of important cinema was psychological: it was wars, chases, situation comedy. Bergman was the first filmmaker to build a whole oeuvre through the exploration of the internal world – to make visible the invisible drama of the self."

Lahr&#39s point is correct: the director (who was just as prolific at stage and radio drama direction as movies) was the first to receive international recognition for creating films for adults about serious matters. One theory of movie industry executives is that film plots must primarily be about fluffy entertainment to guarantee box office success. Ingmar Bergman, with his films that frequently explored the topic of death and other serious issues, obliterated that theory.

Movie audiences around the world flocked to theatres to watch Bergman&#39s films, but this did not mean that they necessarily understood what they were seeing. Bergman, who began work in the Swedish film industry as a screenwriter, wrote screenplays that rarely followed a simple, straightforward narrative format. As a result, viewers were sometimes confused.

For example, "The Virgin Spring" (1960) seemed to be about the story of a rape of a young woman. Yet after the attack, the plot became disjointed. Such was the way of the over 50 screenplays that Bergman wrote. With many of these scripts, he also produced and directed the films.

"The Virgin Spring" was one of three Bergman films to be awarded the Best Foreign Language Academy Award. The others were "Through A Glass Darkly" (1961), and his final film, the surprisingly funny and emotionally warm epic of a middle class family in Sweden in the early years of the 20th century entitled "Fanny and Alexander" (1983).

In 1971, he received the Academy&#39s Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. Bergman&#39s films were honoured at the Berlin, Venice and other major international film festivals.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Bergman was often flattered in his lifetime. Notable directors like Woody Allen and Robert Altman of the U.S., France&#39s Bernard Tavernier and Francois Truffaut, Japan&#39s Akira Kurosawa, and Russia&#39s Andrei Tarkovsky all publicly praised Bergman and one can see elements of Bergman&#39s artistic influence in their films.

In a 1988 interview, Allen remarked that Bergman was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera" – a declaration that puts Bergman above the U.S.&#39s D.W. Griffith and Alfred Hitchcock, France&#39s Jean Renoir, German&#39s Fritz Lang, India&#39s Satyajit Ray, Japan&#39s Yasujiro Ozu, and Russia&#39s Sergei Eisenstein, in Allen&#39s estimation.

Contrary to popular belief, Bergman was not an "overnight success." In 1944, when he was 26, Bergman had his first big hit screenplay filmed in Sweden with the release of "Torrent," based on an incident in Bergman&#39s final year in school, in which he fell in love with a woman who also happened to be in love with Bergman&#39s Latin teacher. Bergman then wrote, directed, and produced films for the next decade, but few of these films were commercial and artistic successes.

Amazingly, during this fertile period of Bergman&#39s career, he was simultaneously involved in directing plays in a number of theatres in Sweden. Bergman thought that he became a major movie director with "Sawdust and Tinsel," (1953), which told the story of a traveling circus owner.

Then, with the release of "Smiles of a Summer Night" (1956), which earned him a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, "The Seventh Seal" (1957), and especially "Wild Strawberries" (also 1957), Bergman found his forte: stories about men seemingly lost in society and unsure about just where they fit into the overall scheme of the universe – if, indeed, they did at all. In these and most of Bergman&#39s films, the female characters are less afraid of life than the male characters.

Yet the female characters express metaphysical angst as well. The character of Marianne in "Wild Strawberries" says: "And then I thought there was only coldness and death, and death and loneliness, all the way."

Such grim thoughts and words from movie characters in the 1950s were startling to audiences. "The Seventh Seal" had a memorable scene of a knight (played by Max Von Sydow) playing a game of chess against a pale, black-robed character representing Death. By the end of the 1950s, Bergman was considered one of the most influential film directors in the world.

During the 1960s, audiences tended to be divided into pro- or anti-Bergman camps. His fans thought that he was a genius; his detractors thought that his films were pretentious. Yet he still created masterpieces in this turbulent decade: "Winter Light" (1963) and "Persona" (1966) certainly would qualify. In "Persona," a nurse (Bibi Andersson) and a mute actress (Liv Ullmann) exchange personalities. "Persona" defies categorisation: depending on one&#39s beliefs, it is either existentialistic or purposefully hip.

Bergman would not have another universally recognised success until "Cries and Whispers" (1973) which, as the noted U.S. movie critic Roger Ebert wrote in a review, "is like few movies we&#39ll ever see. It is hypnotic, disturbing, frightening."

On the film&#39s simplest level, it is about a female servant and two sisters waiting for their third sister to die of cancer. In 106 minutes, Bergman shows us how all three women related to the dying woman earlier in her life. He dares to end the film in a flashback scene bathed in golden sunshine which, theoretically, should go against the earlier bleak atmosphere of "Cries and Whispers." Instead, this flashback scene somehow becomes a coda for all four women.

Women were attracted to Bergman and vice versa. He was married five times, had in-numerable mistresses, and fathered nine children. In "Fanny and Alexander," his final major film, again the female characters are more resilient than the males.

Yet the male characters get the more memorable lines. One, Bishop Vergerus, tells Alexander that: "Imagination is something splendid, a mighty force, a gift from God. It is held in trust for us by the great artists, writers, and musicians."

Death has now taken Ingmar Bergman, which is ironic as he spent most of his life thinking about it, and the imagination that perpetually burned in this proud Swede is no more. However, it will remain immortal by way of his numerous films.