No way! I’m not writing a review of a Bergman film. This post is just to share my experiences of how I got drugged to this master filmmaker. I’m a firm believer in the statement that watching a good movie is a feeling, a sensation that can never be described completely through words no matter how hard you try.
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
- Ingmar Bergman
Bergman is such a sensation. Ingmar Bergman’s mature cinema provokes the viewer into an intimate engagement in which a range of uncomfortable feelings are opened up, shared and laid bare. And this often occurs, quite literally, face-to-face. Recently I watched six of Bergman’s films in a span of three days and the kind of feeling all those movies gave me was breathtaking. After every movie I used to sit in the dark trying to get over these haunting experiences. Ingmar Bergman had his own unique way of telling his stories (which are mostly autobiographical) with collaborations with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer in the 50s and Sven Nykvist in the 60s. The latter and Bergman remained together for decades going on to produce magic on the celluloid with disturbing and arresting imagery. There is a definite transition in Bergman’s narrative style from the late 50s to his post modernist films starting from the 60s. Below listed are six of his most important films which transformed him from a good director to a great auteur and gave me a wonderful viewing experience lately.
WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)
Wild Strawberries
This is my favourite Bergman film not just because of the reason that this was my first Bergman film or maybe because I watched it before THE SEVENTH SEAL. Wild Strawberries makes you sit glued right from the opening dream sequence. Wild strawberries tells the story of a professor and the hallucinations of his childhood days as he drives to receive his honorary university degree. Helped with some excellent performance from Bergman’s idol Victor Sjostrom (who was a director himself) the movie is a wonderful blend of realism and surrealism. Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson constantly remind the old man about what he is and he discovers himself in his dreams. Berman visited his childhood home once and was hallucinated with memories and thought that it would make a good film so he wrote the screenplay when he was hospitalised in 1957 along with the screenplay of THE SEVENTH SEAL. The film won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 8th Berlin International Film Festival, “Best Film” and “Best Actor” at the Mar del Plata Film Festival and won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film in 1960. It was also nominated for an Academy Award for Original Screenplay.
THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957)
The Seventh Seal
KNIGHT: Who are you?
DEATH: I am Death.
KNIGHT: Have you come for me?
DEATH: I have been walking by your side for a long time.
KNIGHT: That I know.
DEATH: Are you prepared?
KNIGHT:My body is frightened, but I am not.
DEATH: Well, there is no shame in that.
Who can forget this conversation!!!
The Seventh Seal is Bergman’s most famous work. It’s beautiful high-contrast images of medieval Sweden and von Sydow’s anguished performance made for icons of a new existentialist cinema that resonated deeply with a world at the height of the Cold War. To late-’50s audiences it asked what metaphysical schemas and values humanity can possibly live by in a time when apocalyptic death is a daily threat, and when structures of belief seem to bring only regression, blindness and servitude. Set in the 14th century when the plague was causing Black Death a knight and a squire return home and the knight suddenly has an encounter with death. The knight asks death to play chess with him and at last death wins through a tough competition. This movie reminded me of a short story by Tamil writer Pudhumaipithan’s “Kaalanum kelaviyum” written in the late 40s in which an old lady has an encounter with death and outsmarts it through her wit. The seventh seal is considered a major classic of world cinema. It helped Bergman to establish himself as a world-renowned director and contains scenes which have become iconic through parodies and homage. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.
THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960)
The Virgin Spring
The virgin spring is a gruesome tale set in medieval Sweden when Christianity was just in the ascendancy over Paganism, about the rape and murder of a girl and her father’s quest for revenge. A huge success, winning the first of Bergman’s three Academy Awards for ‘best foreign film’, it is nevertheless in many ways his least interesting work from the period. However, it does mark the beginning of the filmmaker’s collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, replacing Gunnar Fischer (whose richly textured, densely lit images were so important to Bergman’s ’50s work). This would turn out to be one of world cinema’s most important and productive director-cinematographer partnerships, continuing to the end of Bergman’s filmmaking life.
THE SILENCE (1963)
The Silence
Bergman made ‘The Faith’ trilogy - Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963) – set the tone for the increasingly harsh explorations of the human condition. THE SILENCE started Bergman’s minimalistic narrative approach with a lot of visual language and very limited verbal conversations. Bergman has commented in numerous interviews that the film marked a point of final exit from a set of religious problems that had been dominating his films since The Seventh Seal. The plot focuses on two sisters— one a fledgling woman with a young son, and the other, a terminally-ill literary translator— and their tense relationship coming to a surface whilst staying at a Central European hotel during a culminating war. Rather than philosophical explication, The Silence’s almost wordless images generate our experience and reading of a very open film, concluding the loose trilogy in an unexpected way. The complex combination of an uneasy realism with stark formalism makes for clean and complex deep-focus shots matched with hyper-diegetic sound. The formal affect of Bergman’s sound-image compositions are given space to speak louder than ever.
PERSONA (1966)
Ingmar Bergman Persona
Perhaps the best of Bergman and his most personal work. Right from the first few shots of film projector, an erected penis and a boy trying to touch a blurred image the movie is enigmatic and to be very frank I did not understand it fully until the revelation came in the last scene. This was a movie that kept on reminding me that I’m just an 18 year old wannabe filmmaker watching the magic of a great auteur on celluloid. The film explores an encounter between two women. The women’s lives to some extent run parallel to each other: one has aborted a child, and experiences grief, while the other tried and failed to abort her son and now experiences guilt over her lack of affection for him; the first is engaged to a man who criticizes her, and the latter is married to a man extremely devoted to and almost worshipping of her. The character’s names translate to Soul and Birdly (birds being associated with coldness and winter in Swedish), and symbolize the themes of the film: young and naive Alma encounters bitter and cold Elisabeth, triggering existential crisis. Persona is considered as one of the major works of the 20th century by essayists and critics who referred to it as Bergman’s masterpiece. Other critics have described it as “one of this century’s great works of art”. Out of a genuinely avant-garde prologue emerges a story in which an actress refuses to speak, while a nurse is assigned to her ‘recovery’. Most of the film takes place in and around a beach-house. But the women’s experience of space and time, along with the viewer’s grasp of these forms and Persona’s narrative, suffers increasing interruptions as it builds into one of the most difficult, open and generative feature-films ever made. Liv Ullmann’s silent portrayal of an artist confronting and performing her own ontological lack is dominated by twitching lips, ambivalent gazes and vampyric desire. Bibi Andersson plays the chatty nurse whose perfectly adaptive nature leads to being sucked into her companion’s showdown with negativity – so that she too is made to examine what, if anything, lies behind her own socially-ordained mask. This was one of the earliest films to introduce fast cutting .Well this would be a definite film in my repeated viewing list as it calls for multiple viewings to understand its genius.
HOUR OF THE WOLF (1968)
The Hour Of The Wolf
An artist in crisis is haunted by nightmares from the past in Bergman’s only horror film, which takes place on a windy island. During “the hour of the wolf” – between midnight and dawn – he tells his wife about his most painful memories. Hour of the Wolf originated from a manuscript with the working title “The Cannibals”. Bergman began work on it in the spring of 1965, during which time he suffered a minor nervous breakdown. In the end, the manuscript resulted in not one but two movies, Persona and Hour of the Wolf. Together with the former work, Hour of the Wolf is probably one of Bergman’s most personal films, though almost all of his films have autobiographical elements. It is filmed as if it were a true story about an artist who has disappeared. The story of the artist and his life just before he vanishes is based on interviews with his wife, and on his diaries. The film features lots of intentionally overexposed shots giving the creepy gothic feeling along with the expressionistic performance from Max von Sydow . This film is much like its predecessor persona in its theme of two souls experiencing the same feeling. Liv Ullmann shares the screen space once again as one of the troubled soul. A horror film unlike the modern ones which focuses more on the characters and their emotions. Berman establishes his triumph in this genre too!!!
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