SWEDEN & INGMAR BERGMAN

Most famous and visible of art cinema directors; a director who took film seriously.  Early in his career Bergman developed the habit of first writing his films as novels, then distilling them into scripts, then audiovisual images.

Also Sweden’s foremost stage director, Bergman assembled a first rate ensemble Between 1945-55: wrote and directed thirteen movies, most of which were somber explorations of themes of loneliness, alienation, and the sheer difficulty of being alive, often dealing with youthful tensions between generations and between lovers. These were constructed around memories that reveal moments of happiness, tranquility, and sensual pleasure.

1956: The Seventh Seal–his first acknowledged masterpiece is a poetic allegory of a medieval knight caught up in a losing chess match w. Death.  Bergman brilliantly evoked Middle Ages and posed the first of a series of metaphysical questions abt. the relationship of man to God. Bergman’s Christianity is cold, austere, and inscrutable.  The characters pray and ask for guidance, for answers.  But except for those of childlike faith and innocence, God is silent.

(NOTE: Bergman himself, in program notes for the film, emphasized that the conflict and dread of the 14th century (the Black Plague) allegorically foreshadowed the fear and trepidation of the atomic bomb and the cold war of the 1950s.  He believed we all know that we will die, but not before we struggle within ourselves abt. the meaning of life.)

In 1960s, work became radically experimental, and he turned his attention to human suffering in a more secular context, usually w. a psychological emphasis. Consequently, he began to emphasize extensive use of extreme CU’s of faces of his characters as means of suggesting psychological torment. “The great gift of cinema photography is the human face,” Bergman has observed.  In this and other films, he employs many close-ups, exploring the human face as if it were a spiritual landscape.

Ex. Persona (1966) Essays the dramatic conflict between two women–Alma (Bibi Andersson), a young nurse, and Elizabeth Vogler (Liv Ullman) her patient, an actress who has withdrawn into silence. The film is essentially about transference of identity between nurse and patient to the point that their two faces merge, w. perfect visual logic, into one. It is one of the most radically experimental movies ever made

…synthesizing most of Bergman’s characteristic obsessions: the relationship of the artist to his or her audience, the futility of communication, the need to humiliate and be humiliated, isolation and alienation, the inscrutability of the human psyche, the need for masks and deceptive poses, unconscious sexual desires, and the ultimate “cancer of the soul”–the inability to love.

Bergman is essentially a religious artist whose films concern the fundamental questions of human existence:

•  the meaning of suffering and pain,
• the inexplicability of death,
• the solitary nature of being, and the question of one’s true identity
• Also, the difficulty of finding love…and the frustration of being unable to find lasting emotional commitment.
• the difficulty of locating meaning in a seemingly random and capricious universe.

WATCH: An Introduction to Ingmar Bergman