AJIT DUARA
By plumbing the mind’s complexity and depth, Ingmar Bergman’s films gave us profound psychological insights into ourselves.
He, more than any other master of his time or after, was responsible for cinema being adopted as an academic discipline and ‘film studies’ being included in the syllabus of major universities.
A blank page is where you begin. And probably where you end. The 1950s, the greatest decade for cinema anywhere in the world, ended nearly 50 years ago and human longevity is such that all its makers, with the possible exception of Francois Truffaut, lived long enough to complete everything that they had to say. The youngster, Jean Luc Godard who was born in 1930, is still working.
The most accessible of these filmmakers is Ingmar Bergman, who died recently aged 89. This is probably because his thinking and reference points were from literature and most viewers drawn to him had literary backgrounds.
Cinema as an art form
In fact many of those attracted to Bergman had not previously recognised cinema as an art form. With films like “Wild Strawberries” and “Seventh Seal”, he converted them to the medium and in this sense he, more than any other master of his time or after, was responsible for cinema being adopted as an academic discipline and, consequently, ‘film studies’ being included in the syllabus of major universities across the world.
In other words Bergman was probably appreciated as an artist for Woody Allen reasons. You could talk endlessly about his films like you could about Henrik Ibsen’s plays, you could adapt a Bergman film into a different language and culture like you could with Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or “An Enemy of the People”. You could make references to scenes from his films in conversation and you could write reams about a Freudian analysis of “The Virgin Spring”.
A filmmaker has to dissect the individual psyche and Bergman was a master, particularly when it came to the female sensibility. His actresses were, at different points of time, his muses. You cannot think of Bergman without the haunting close-ups of Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann and Ingrid Thulin.
Expressions of culture
A filmmaker has to express the character, the nuances and the history of his culture and Ingmar Bergman did this so well that for many viewers the Swedish personality was symbolised by the intense, disturbed and angst-ridden fictional characters inhabiting his films.
One is not too sure whether all Swedes appreciated this and there is a debate about whether it is the Swedish character he was talking about or his own tormented soul trapped in the reserved and withdrawn environment of his society.
The world appreciated Bergman, but did the Swedes? In 1976, he was arrested in Stockholm for ‘income tax evasion’. In the end the charges proved to be simply a case of bad accounting, not fraud, but the incident devastated the filmmaker who suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalised. He then went into exile and vowed never to return to Sweden.
He did return eventually, but the bitterness never left him. The fact of the matter is that his background, his childhood, his youth and his nationality made Bergman the filmmaker he was. When he left the country, he left behind the source of his creativity.
Ingmar Bergman was the son of a Lutheran minister who was as strict with his children as he was with his parishoners. In other words he grew up surrounded by the imagery of the church and with almost obsessive Christian morality.
A lot of his cinema, particularly “The Seventh Seal”, deals with the search for ‘God’ and an inability to find ‘Him’ in this frail mortal world. He then searches for ‘truth’ in human nature and relationships, particularly in marriage and in the man-woman sexual chemistry. But even that eventually fails. Finally, there is “Silence”. But a filmmaker does not live in a social and political vacuum. Sometimes, when we look back at Bergman and his films, we see that he lived primarily in his own head. He does not seem to have any strong political position.
If we examine the work of contemporaries like Jean Luc Godard, Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini or the fine filmmaker who died the same day as Bergman, Michaelangelo Antonioni, you see and recognise the world outside their individual visions. With De Sica and Rossellini, it is post-war Italy and the reality of poverty and unemployment; with Godard it is ideology and the ‘oppression’ of a world dominated by the U.S.; with Antonioni, it is how the architecture of our minds can be reflected in different environments, whether it be a deserted island, a factory in Italy, the Kumbh Mela in India or swinging London of the 1060s.
Inside himself
But Ingmar Bergman lived his whole life inside himself. True, by plumbing that mind’s complexity and depth, he gave us profound psychological insights into ourselves and we must value that.
But sometimes, just sometimes, you look at his films again in 2007 and they are starting to fade. By startling contrast, Antonioni looks modern and acutely relevant. Perhaps it is the disconnect of our consumerist world and the consequent alienation that results in this appreciation of relevance.
Perhaps in another 50 years, Ingmar Bergman will seem the more profound artist. Our debt to Bergman remains in that he made the mid-20th century world of art, intellect and academics recognise him and the medium he spoke in.