Ingmar Bergman Films | Ingmar Bergman Filmography | Ingmar Bergman Biography | Ingmar Bergman Career | Ingmar Bergman Awards

Ingmar Bergman's unique international status as a filmmaker would seem assured on many grounds. His reputation can be traced to such diverse factors as his prolific output of largely notable work (40 features from 1946 through 1982); the profoundly personal nature of his best films since the 1950s; the innovative nature of his technique combined with its essential simplicity, even when employing surrealistic and dream-like treatments (as, for example, in Wild Strawberries and Persona ); his creative sensitivity in relation to his players; and his extraordinary capacity to evoke distinguished acting from his regular interpreters, notably Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, and Liv Ullmann.

After an initial period of derivative, melodramatic filmmaking largely concerned with bitter man-woman relationships ("I just grabbed helplessly at any form that might save me, because I hadn't any of my own," he confesses in Bergman on Bergman ), Bergman reached an initial maturity of style in Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika, romantic studies of adolescent love and subsequent disillusionment. In The Naked Night the used a derelict travelling circus?its proprietor paired with a faithless young mistress and its clown with a faithless middle-aged wife?as a symbol of human suffering through misplaced love and to portray the ultimate loneliness of the human condition, a theme common to much of his work. Not that Bergman's films are all gloom and disillusionment. He has a recurrent, if veiled, sense of humour. His comedies, such as A Lesson in Love and Smiles of a Summer Night, are ironically effective ("You're a gynecologist who knows nothing about women," says a man's mistress in A Lesson in Love ), and even in Wild Strawberries the aged professor's relations with his housekeeper offer comic relief. Bergman's later comedies, the Shavian The Devil's Eye and Now About All These Women, are both sharp and fantastic.

"To me, religious problems are continuously alive... not... on the emotional level, but on an intellectual one," wrote Bergman at the time of Wild Strawberries. The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence -lead progressively to the rejection of religious belief, leaving only the conviction that human life is haunted by ?a virulent, active evil.? The crusading knight of The Seventh Seal who cannot face death once his faith is lost survives only to witness the cruelty of religious persecution. In Bergman's view, faith belongs to the simple-minded and innocent. The Virgin Spring exposes the violence of vengeance in a period of primitive Christianity.

Bergman no longer likes these films, considering them "bogus"; nevertheless, they are excellently made in his highly professional style. Disillusionment with Lutheran denial of love is deep in Winter Light. "In Winter Light I swept my house clean," Bergman has said. Other Bergman films reflect his views on religion as well: the mad girl in Through a Glass Darkly perceives God as a spider, while the ailing sister in The Silence faces death with a loneliness that passes all understanding as a result of the frigid silence of God in the face of her sufferings. In The Face, however, Bergman takes sardonic delight in letting the rationalistic miracle-man suspect in the end that his bogus miracles are in fact genuine.

With Wild Strawberries, Bergman turned increasingly to psychological dilemmas and ethical issues in human and social relations once religion has proved a failure. Above all else, the films suggest, love, understanding, and common humanity seem lacking. The aged medical professor in Wild Strawberries comes through a succession of dreams to realize the truth about his cold and loveless nature. In Persona, the most psychologically puzzling, controversial, yet significant of all Bergman's films?with its Brechtian alienation technique and surreal treatment of dual personality?the self-imposed silence of the actress stems from her failure to love her husband and son, though she responds with horror to the self-destructive violence of the world around her. This latter theme is carried still further in The Shame, in which an egocentric musician attempts non-involvement in his country's war only to collapse into irrational acts of violence himself through sheer panic. The Shame and Hour of the Wolf are concerned with artists who are too self-centered to care about the larger issues of the society in which they live.

"It wasn't until A Passionthat I really got to grips with the man-woman relationship," says Bergman. A Passion deals with ?the dark, destructive forces? in human nature which sexual urges can inspire. Bergman's later films reflect, he claims, his ?ceaseless fascination with the whole race of women,? adding that ?the film... should communicate psychic states.? The love and understanding needed by women is too often denied them, suggests Bergman. Witness the case of the various women about to give birth in Brink of Life and the fearful, haunted, loveless family relationships in Cries and Whispers. The latter, with The Shame and The Serpent's Egg, is surely among the most terrifying of Bergman's films, though photographed in exquisite color by Sven Nykvist, his principal cinematographer.

Man-woman relationships are successively and uncompromisingly examined in a series of Bergman films. The Touch shows a married woman driven out of her emotional depth in an extra-marital affair; Face to Face, one of Bergman's most moving films, concerns the nervous breakdown of a cold-natured woman analyst and the hallucinations she suffers; and a film made as a series for television (but reissued more effectively in a shortened, re-edited form for the cinema, Scenes from A Marriage ) concerns the troubled, long-term love of a professional couple who are divorced but unable to endure separation. Supreme performances were given by Bibi Andersson in Persona and The Touch, and by Liv Ullmann in Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage and Face to Face.

Bergman's later films, made in Sweden or during his period of self-imposed exile, are more miscellaneous. The Magic Flute is one of the best, most delightful of opera-films. The Serpent's Egg is a savage study in the sadistic origins of Nazism, while Autumn Sonata explores the case of a mother who cannot love. Bergman declared his filmmaking at an end with his brilliant, German-made misanthropic study of a fatal marriage, From the Life of the Marionettes, and the semi-autobiographical television series Fanny and Alexander. Swedish-produced, the latter work was released in a re-edited version for the cinema. Set in 1907, Fanny and Alexander is the gentle, poetic story of two years in the lives of characters who are meant to be Bergman's maternal grandparents.

After Fanny and Alexander, Bergman directed After the Rehearsal, a small-scale drama which reflected his growing preoccupation with working in the theater. It features three characters: an aging, womanizing stage director mounting a version of Strindberg's The Dream Play; the attractive, determined young actress who is his leading lady; and his former lover, once a great star but now an alcoholic has-been, who accepts a humiliating bit role in the production.

After the Rehearsal was not Bergman's cinematic swan song. He went on to author two scripts which are autobiographical outgrowths of Fanny and Alexander. The Best Intentions, directed by Bille August, is a compassionate chronicle of ten years in the tempestuous courtship and early marriage of Bergman's parents. His father starts out as an impoverished theology student who is unyielding in his views. His mother is spirited but pampered, the product of an upper-class upbringing. The film also is noteworthy for the casting of Max von Sydow as the filmmaker's maternal grandfather. The actor's presence is most fitting, given the roots of the scenario and his working relationship with Bergman, which dates back to the 1950s.

The Best Intentions was followed by Sunday's Children, directed by Bergman's son Daniel. The film is a deeply personal story of a ten-year-old boy named Pu, who is supposed to represent the young Ingmar Bergman. Pu is growing up in the Swedish countryside during the 1920s. The scenario focuses on his relationship to his minister father and other family members; also depicted is the adult Pu's unsettling connection to his elderly dad.?ROGER MANVELL and ROB EDELMAN