Why Ingmar Bergman Mattered

The Colbert Report has an occasional segment called “Cheating Death,” which is introduced by the image of Stephen facing the hooded figure of Death over a chessboard. That’s a reference to the 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a medieval morality play written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Colbert, who switches chess pieces while Death is distracted, parodies the role of a knight (Max von Sydow) who puts his soul on the line to save a few lives during a season of plague.

But Bergman wasn’t kidding. Most of his 60-some films, from his 1944 screenwriting debut with the schoolroom drama Torment through his swan song Saraband, released in the U.S. in 2005, were about the plague of the modern soul — the demons and doubts, secrets and lies that men and woman evaded but were forced to confront, to their peril. This agonized Swede was a surgeon who operated on himself. He cut into his own fears, analyzed his failings, perhaps sought forgiveness through art. He may never have found that expiation; he lived his last years alone on remote Faro island, speaking only rarely with his old friends and colleagues. But when he died today at 89, Bergman left behind him a worldwide colony of devotees, and a collection of spare, severe dramas unique in their intensity and impact.

Bergman must have been surprised at the acclaim for works so personal, they seemed like primal screams, picking at the scabs of his psyche. “The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times and create panic and terror,” he said in a 2001 interview. “But I have learned that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.” Through his unforgiving artistry, the interior monologues of a tortured intellectual achieved an international impact. His films spoke not just to the self-absorption of the therapy generation, but to the human quest to discover the worst and the strongest about ourselves, to make that journey into the darkness with no guide but our need to know.

THE BERGMAN GENERATION

For a good quarter century — beginning with his burst into world movie prominence in the ’50s and extending until his official “retirement” after making Fanny and Alexander in 1982 — Bergman defined serious cinema. He earned consecutive Academy Awards for best foreign film in 1961 (The Virgin Spring) and 1962 (Through a Glass Darkly), another in 1984 (Fanny and Alexander). Three times, he was Oscar-nominated for best director (Cries and Whispers, Face to Face, Fanny and Alexander); five times, as author of the best original screenplay (Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, Cries and Whispers, Autumn Sonata and Fanny). The Academy also gave him the Irving G. Thalberg Award for career achievement — the only foreign-language filmmaker to receive it. In 1960 he received a still higher honor: he graced the cover of TIME, the first foreign-language filmmaker to do so since Leni Riefenstahl in 1936.

At the time, the foreign films that made an impact with the cognoscenti were mainly from France, Italy and Japan. Bergman, though, was a one-man film movement; his instant eminence created a cottage industry of Bergmania. Janus Films, with U.S. rights to most of his pictures, ran Ingmar Bergman festivals in theaters around the country. Full-length studies of his work appeared in English, French, Swedish. In 1960 Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician). For a generation of budding cinephiles, that settled it. Film was literature. Movies were art. And Bergman was the Shakespeare of the cinema.

They certainly launched a generation of film critics, this one included. Dozens of us have the same story of teenage revelation: of seeing a Bergman movie, usually The Seventh Seal, and saying, “This is what I want to study, devote my life to.” Here, we saw, was no mere director, collaborating on scripts with other writers, but a full-service auteur. Except for The Virgin Spring, written by Ulla Isaksson, and The Magic Flute, a faithful rendition of the Mozart opera, all of Bergman’s most famous film stories sprang from his own fertile, febrile brain — from childhood memories and adult adulteries, from his copious trunk of obsessions and grudges.

We scholarly types fell in love with these preoccupations: with his view of men as weak connivers and women as the wise life force; with the trickery of art (in his dark, delightful comedy The Magician); with his studies of sexual alienation (The Silence), his inside investigations of minds tumbling into madness (Through a Glass Darkly) or muteness (Persona); with his trips into the poignant past (Wild Strawberries); especially with his long battle with God, to which he devoted an entire trilogy. Bergman made anguish sexy, emotional neediness a turn-on. We had no reservation in naming him the world’s greatest filmmaker.

In the ’70s, Bergman’s reputation had reached a level so majestic that Woody Allen, fresh from his Oscar-winning Annie Hall, renounced comedy to make Interiors, his first of several dramas in the Bergman style and somber mood. Also in the ’70s, indie director Wes Craven remade The Virgin Spring as a low-budget, highly regarded horror film, The Last House on the Left. Stephen Sondheim brought the stately domestic deceptions of Smiles of a Summer Night to Broadway with A Little Night Music (and its worldly-wise ballad, Send in the Clowns).

A body of work that imposing, that serious, was bound to inspire parody — and did, long before Colbert. Allen, for example, had written a burlesque on The Seventh Seal in The New Yorker. Sometimes whole movies were tongue-in-cheek tributes to Bergman: George Coe and Tony Lover’s 1968 American short De Duva (where “water” is the subtitle for the mock-Swedish “aitch-two-oh-ska”) and the 1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The spin-offs might be serious, they might be farcical, but all paid tribute to Bergman’s unignorable influence.

BECOMING BERGMAN

He was born in Uppsala, on July 14, 1918, to a Lutheran minister and his wife — two figures, one forbidding, the other warming, who inspired many characters in Bergman films, and who appeared with little fictional orientation in his late works Fanny and Alexander, The Best Intentions and Private Confessions. Young Ingmar, we’ll guess, was a broody, moody soul with one artistic passion: the magic lantern he was given as a child, and whose miraculously moving images he would later remake and replace with his own. His autobiography is called The Magic Lantern and is mostly a litany of his loneliness and gaucheries. You would think such an inward lad was trapped in a shell he could never come out of.

Yet he was a sensation right from his college days. Sten Selander, reviewing Bergman’s Death of Punch at Stockholm University’s Student Theater, wrote in Svenska Dagbladet: “No debut in Swedish has given such unambiguous promise for the future.” A budding Scandinavian dramatist, with Ibsen and Strindberg as his models, might devote himself fully to the theater. That indeed would be Bergman’s full-time job, heading stage companies in Malmo and then Stockholm, directing productions that toured through Europe and later the U.S. and won him the reputation as a great and daring interpreter of the classics. (His productions of Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Bibi Andersson, and Miss Julie, with Lena Olin, were triumphs at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) Stage work occupied this indefatigable artist nine months a year; then, on his summer vacations, he would make these movie masterpieces.

The dominant, domineering authorial voice in Bergman’s films was an expression of his own force of personality. He mesmerized actors, his crew, producers, everybody. In the early ’40s he applied for a writing job at Svensk Filmindustri, the main movie studio in Sweden, and was interviewed by Stina Bergman, widow of playwright Hjalmar Bergman and head of the studio’s script department. “He seemed to emerge with a scornful laugh from the darkest corner of Hell,” she later recalled, but with “a charm so deadly that after a couple of hours’ conversation, I had to have three cups of coffee to get back to normal.” She hired Ingmar that day.

Besides, in the decade before his international success, the cinema offered a busy young man with a seductive intensity something he couldn’t readily get from theater: money. “I was very poor at the time, you know,” he said. “I already had a lot of children and a lot of women, and money had to be paid out. A good deal of my filmmaking in earlier days came from lack of money.” The movies’ greatest “woman’s director” was also a great lover and careless discarder of women. Rumor had it that the seven lead actresses in his 1964 comedy All These Women were all former Bergman mistresses.

Over the decades he acquired five wives, nine children (that we know of) and plenty of actress-concubines, some of whom he made stars and who helped shape his work. The smoldering sexual allure of young Harriet Andersson inspired Bergman’s dark, daring dramas of the early ’50s: Summer With Monika and The Naked Night. Bibi Andersson, of the fresh face and buoyant spirit, was his next live-in love; she anchored the mid-’50s films that brought Bergman his international esteem. He met Ullmann in 1964, and wrote Persona — the film that reestablished him as an artistic pioneer — in part so he could be with her. Ullmann became his muse for the next decade, most indelibly in the TV-serial-turned-film Scenes from a Marriage. She would also direct films from two of his late scripts, Private Confessions and Faithless, and star in his last work, Saraband, a sequel of sorts to Scenes from a Marriage.

As Bergman’s reputation grew, so did those of his on-screen company. He exported his actors (notably von Sydow) and actresses (Ullmann, Bibi and Harriet, Ingrid Thulin, Olin) to be glamorous staples of European art cinema and the occasional American film. But though Bergman was frequently financed by U.S. companies, he never went Hollywood; his only English-language movie, The Touch (with Elliott Gould and Bibi Andersson), was filmed in Europe.

A tax dispute with Swedish authorities exiled him to Norway and Germany for a few years, where he made The Serpent’s Egg (with David Carradine), Autumn Sonata (with that other famous Bergman, Ingrid) and From the Life of the Marionettes. But Sweden, love it or hate it, was the home he loved to be estranged from, and he returned there, to Faro and the isolated island of his mind. In TV interviews, Bergman could be a charming, engaging fellow. But his films were truer reflections of “the solemn Swede,” as he was called then.

REDISCOVERING BERGMAN

Or, as he is known now: “Who?”

A filmmaker will naturally lose some of his celebrity when he stops making films. Bergman officially retired from movies in the mid-’80s, though he kept directing plays; and he wrote film scripts that were directed by Ullmann, his son Daniel (Sunday’s Children) and Bille August (The Best Intentions). But the vogue had passed. He’d had a lock on the high end of popular culture, but by the ’80s there was no high end; low was now high. A tribute song by Van Halen, The Seventh Seal (“broken now I can’t help but feel / someone cracked the seventh seal / nothing sacred, nothing left unturned / when nothing’s simple / then nothing’s learned / so take me down to the virgin spring / wash away my suffering, oh”), was itself an anachronism.

The Bergman critical consensus also evaporated. His films were dismissed as stage-bound, not real movies because they talked so much, and morbidly full of themselves. As the cultural climate changed, he didn’t, and the fashion that Bergman had started and flourished in came back to bite him — and then, worse, to forget him. Hardly anyone (except this one) still thought of him as the world’s greatest filmmaker.

To the young, Bergman’s was not a name worth knowing — though they might be expected to connect with the dark, near-suicidal introspection of his films, with their sense of a tortured psyche swirling into the quicksand of its own making. In 2005, when I proposed a TIME feature on Bergman to coincide with the U.S. release of Saraband, none of the college-age interns that summer had heard of him.

Now, though, his name will be in the papers, on TV and the web sites. The Ingmar Bergman brand has a last chance to interest, and addict, those for whom serious foreign films now just sound like homework. If they take a look, they will find the pleasures films can offer: personal dilemmas with universal reverberations; beautiful women suffering deeply and gorgeously; excoriating drama as enthralling entertainment; the ineffable made visible. It’s the right time, and past time, for a new generation of Bergmaniacs. They will find that there’s nothing more invigorating than total immersion in the dark night of Bergman’s soul.