Remembering Bergman

Ingmar Bergman changed the face of filmmaking -- and may have been the 20th century's greatest artist.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Movies, Arts & Entertainment

Photo: (AP/Scanpix)

Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman drinks a cup of tea while shooting "Smiles of a Summer Night" in this file photo dated 1955.

July 31, 2007 | Sometime in the fall of 1980, I went to see Ingmar Bergman's film "Persona." I can literally say that it changed my life. I had seen other so-called art films, and even other Bergman films, but nothing quite like that ambiguous black-and-white masterpiece from 1966, a critical point of contact between regular narrative filmmaking and the parallel tradition of experimental film.

If you haven't seen the film, it begins as an acutely observed, relatively straightforward story about the tense relationship between two women. One, played by Bergman's former wife Liv Ullmann, is a famous actress who has suddenly fallen mute, apparently in the grip of a psychological or spiritual crisis. The other, played by Bibi Andersson, is the chatty, overly confessional nurse assigned to care for the actress while she heads to the seaside for some rest and relaxation. At a certain point in the story, an act of cruelty ruptures the superficial friendship, and literally seems to destroy the film. The film appears to stick in the projector and burn from the heat of the bulb, and all sorts of fragmentary, unexplained images (many of them snippets of silent movies) erupt onto the screen. "Reality" is eventually restored, but the rest of "Persona" has a troubled, dreamlike quality, as if we're now in a world where old-fashioned narrative clarity is no longer available.

I remember sitting up nearly all night in my dorm room digesting what I had seen, and then going back to see it again the following night. A year or so later, one of my friends who had bought a 16mm projector at a flea market checked out a print of "Persona" from the Baltimore public library. We hung a bedsheet on the wall of his apartment and watched the movie perhaps eight times in two weeks, with various constellations of bored or enthralled or bewildered acquaintances. Wherever those people are today, I know what memories were called up for them by reading of Bergman's death on Monday, at age 89, on Faro, the remote Swedish island where he lived and had set several films.

Those bedsheet screenings exemplified the kind of devotion Ingmar Bergman's movies demanded from their adherents, and against which his detractors rebelled. For better and for worse, Bergman was the high priest of a certain vision of cinema, one that essentially vanished long ago. He made only a handful of films after his official retirement with the Oscar-winning "Fanny and Alexander" in 1983, but his death is still a landmark moment. Bergman was the last survivor among the foursome of legendary directors whose work created and defined the art-film market in the years after World War II, the others being Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa and François Truffaut.

It's misleading and overly narrow, however, to suggest that Bergman or the other art-house lions belonged entirely to the tradition of high art. His films encompass the carnival as well as the cathedral; they include comedies, romances and family melodramas as well as fables of the dark night of the soul. Only a few of them are as self-consciously confrontational as "Persona," and in the 1960s and '70s you could certainly find film buffs -- followers of Jean-Luc Godard, for instance -- who found Bergman to be conservative and conventional. (Compared to the work of his Russian disciple Andrei Tarkovsky, most of Bergman's pictures feel like crackerjack entertainment.)

It's nonetheless accurate to say that Bergman understood himself first and foremost as an artist who belonged to a European tradition stretching back to the Middle Ages, which he evoked so memorably in his first big international success, "The Seventh Seal" (1957). Most obviously, his work borrowed from the Scandinavian theatrical tradition of Ibsen and Strindberg, from various northern European strains of painting and sculpture, from Freudian psychology and severe Lutheran theology and the tormented philosophy of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. On the other hand, Bergman was certainly not immune to popular culture; his sense of craft was shaped by the classic Hollywood films of his youth, especially those of George Cukor, a personal favorite. (One can certainly see, in several early Bergman pictures, the influence of Cukor films like "Dinner at Eight," "The Women" or "The Philadelphia Story.")

In an interview published in 1972, the critic John Simon said to Bergman, "It must be a great responsibility, I was thinking, just to be you; because film is probably the most important art today and I think you're the most important filmmaker in the world. To be the most important man in the most important art is a terrible responsibility." Simon is a contentious and disagreeable fellow, and no doubt the remark struck some people as fatuous even then. But it was not inherently ridiculous to suggest, 35 or 40 years ago, that the director of "Persona," "Smiles of a Summer Night," "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," "The Virgin Spring" and "Cries and Whispers" might be the most important artist in the world.

Bergman struggled to combine the various intellectual and psychological currents that shaped him against a particular context, that of the postwar West traumatized by Auschwitz and the Bomb, in which belief in God was fading but, as Bergman would often observe, fear of God was not. For an entire generation of the European and American intelligentsia (which included my parents), Bergman's wrestling matches with existential doubt and religious guilt, with fractured family relationships and what seemed a civilization in disrepair, came to stand for its own. Max von Sydow's medieval knight playing chess with Death in the plague Europe of "The Seventh Seal" seemed to symbolize mankind on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and the aging professor facing his own death in "Wild Strawberries" (played so marvelously by Victor Sjöström) captured the anxiety of a culture that believed itself crippled by an inability to express or fulfill its emotional needs.

Some of those concerns now seem remote and old-fashioned to us, just as the boundary-smashing impact of the "interrupted" film in "Persona" looks like nothing special to a viewer acclimated to 20 years of music videos and increasingly sophisticated digital editing techniques. The conception that there could be a "most important" artist, or even a most important art, seems alien to the fragmented, niche-marketed, endlessly commodified spirit of the 21st century. Pop culture has become a self-propelling engine that endlessly consumes and recycles its own waste products, increasingly unconscious of anything that predates its own predominance.

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