Ingmar Bergman has never set out to be less than demanding; and as an artist his greatest achievement is in digesting such unrelenting seriousness until he sees no need to bludgeon us with it. The early Bergman worked with the split personality of someone who believed in his own genius. Even his comedies - Waiting Women and Smiles of a Summer Night - were philosophical disquisitions on the nature of love and identity. The latter, especially, was an Ophuls subject denied the warmth and sadness that keeps irony from being cynical and schematic. But looking out at the world from Sweden, Bergman has seen no reason to abandon his faith in a select audience, prepared and trained for a diligent intellectual and emotional involvement with cinema. In many of these early films there is the regrettable flavor of "this is good for you" about what are determinedly bleak neo-realist studies of failed love affairs. Admittedly Bergman never neglected that central topic for such Italian themes as cried out from the strets. He was always fixed on the heart and soul, but with a bristling neatness that was heartless and depressing. The Seventh Seal is the ultimate step in this rather academic way of recording human torment. Its medieval-ism and the wholesale allegory now seem frivolous and theatrical diversions from true seriousness.
But The Seventh Seal, like Elvira Madigan (1967, Bo Widerberg) some ten years later, was the film swallowed by the most people. In England and America it made Bergman the central figure in the growth of art-house cinema. Many people of my generation may have joined the National Film Theatre in London to see a retrospective survey of Bergman's early films after The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries had come to represent "artistic" cinema. The first critical article that I struggled with - as reader and writer - were on Bergman. Inevitably he suffered from being so suddenly revealed to a volatile world. Looking back, it seems no coincidence that those two films are his most pretentious and calculating. Within a few years he was being mocked and parodied for his earnestness and symbolism. The young cineastes led tot he art houses were rediscovering the virtues of the American films that had delighted them as children. The new French cinema endorsed that love of development and replaced Bergman's concentration with improvisation, humor, offhand tenderness, and a non-Northern feeling for the beauty of camera movements as opposed to the force of composition.
By about 1961 Bergman held the unenviable position of a discredited innovator in a fashion-conscious world. That reputation was, I think, deserved. So Close to Life, The Face, The Virgin Spring, and The Silence suffer because the artistic virtuosity seems complacent beside the professed anguish of his work. Far from being moving and engrossing, these films verge on a dreadfully clear-eyed and articulated morbidity. The gap between preoccupation and art was amounting to decadence.
It is worth stressing the dilemma Bergman found himself in at this time because of his response to it. He was not the first figure from Swedish cinema to be invited to more lavish production setups. His international success had made him possibly the best known of living Swedish artists, a spokesman for the rather precious political neutrality and social enlightenment that Sweden embraced, and the prophet of its overriding sense of guilt. What has made Bergman a great director, it seems to me, is the recognition that he was (or had become) his own subject, that the anguish in his films could become central. For that to work, he had to decline attractive invitations and stay in Sweden.
Like Fellini, Ozu, and Warhol, he became the center of "family" cinema. In many ways, the Swedish environment had always fostered that feeling. Bergman had for many years been encouraged by the head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling,who undoubtedly saw the prospect of Swedish cinema being a substantial export item as well as a discreet source of propaganda and prestige. It was possible in Sweden to make films regularly and cheaply; thus, Bergman's productivity has had fewer obstacles than most other great directors must face. Cheapness didnot mean tattiness. Bergman has worked with two fine cameramen, Gunthar Fischer and Sven Nykvist. Most important of all, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, which Bergman headed from 1963-66, was the source of a company of actors who became fixtures in his work.
At first, that was commented on as evidence of the detail and authenticity of his films. But Bergman made that company into a family and saw that the basic human predicament had a marvelous metaphor in the way that an artist treated his subject and his collaborators. It arose naturally from his convictions of the harrowing separateness of people, the intractable privacy of men and women even in love, that everyone was not a solid identity but an actor trying to play the self. Once those realizations were made, Bergman's style underwent a magisteral simplification. Allegory and symbolism were abandoned for the total unity of action and significance in, first, Persona. That was the beginning of a sequence of masterpieces in which the pessimism Bergman had always held to became unaffected, personal, and deeply moving.
In terms of style, these more recent films are strenous close-up investigations of actresses and artists playing actresses and artists. One cannot approach these films without keeping careful check of the names of characters and the interchange of such players as Max von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Gunnar Bjornstrand. Bergman himself had been married six times, he has had a child with Liv Ullmann, and there seems no reason to be disconnected by the completeness of his involvement with his "family". It is essential to the autobiographical resonance that his films now give off. In that context, the artist/actor is his everyman figure, and a more fruitful one than the morality-play knight in The Seventh Seal. Persona is about an actress who has a breakdown. She dries up on stage and becomes speechless in life. Alone on an island with a talkative nurse, she listens and gradually absorbs the nurse - part actress taking up a new role, part emotional vampire. Hour of the Wolf is about a painter living on an island, reviled by outsiders, insecure in his marriage, and about hs descent into insanity. Shame is about a musician and his wife living on a Baltic island at a time of unexplained war. Their brittle love cracks apart when war intrudes on them, and the film concludes with feeble refugees adrift on the Baltic. The Rite deals with a trio of players, incestuously involved, whose performance is being investigated by a provincial magistrate. A Passion is an intricate circular story of one broken marriage being cyclically reenacted. And The Touch, the first of Bergman's films to use American money, is a subtle commentary on modern Jewry and on Sweden's relation to the world, told through an intimate triangle love story.
It is the sense of intimacy that most distinguishes Bergman. Artistically, it involves quite as much frankness as do Warhol's films. Bergman insists on the truths of how people feel toward others they need to love - in his TV play, The Lie, as much as in his films. Neither will he ignore the increasing moral paralysis and mental breakdown that follow from that truthfulness. Thus his films are intimate and extreme at the same time. The close-up examination of the family, in rites or games that mirror the family's own situation, was wonderfully sustained from Persona to Cries and Whispers.
Bergman claims he is retired from directing films: The Best Intentions (1992), was filmed by Billie August. In which case, Fanny and Alexander and his autobiographical books, The Magic Lantern and Images, must stand as his final gifts. Fanny and Alexander may be the gentlest of his great films, and the most intricate restaging of his own past. Bergman has survived his own fashion. His stature is secure, and the films are there for the ages. The very early films are now in need of rediscovery - but that will only prepare fresh generations for the journey through his career. For so many people, Bergman has been the man who showed the way to a cinema of the inner life.
Retirement still left the loophole of television, where Bergman has written and directed three "plays." These include Faithless (2000, Liv Ullmann) shows a genius undiminished, just as Faithless is a vital work in Bergman's harrowed observation of himself.
In later years, Bergman rarely left his home on the remote Swedish island of Faro and earned a reputation as a recluse, a stern old magus locked away from all but his nearest and dearest.
