Remembering Ingmar

By Michael Kaminski / June 24, 2011

Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman€”and sadly, millions more wondered, €œwho are they again?€ I suppose, in many ways, the popularity and preference for films such as Live Free and Die Hard andSmokin€™ Aces will mean that these two will forever be outside the taste (and perhaps grasp) of your average moviegoer, but to those with enough patience and intellect to sit down and enjoy a quieter and more interior type of film, they will be forever rewarded with the cinematic treasures these two geniuses bequeathed unto the medium. And that€™s not a slight against action films€”every type of film has its place in a way, but sadly beyond film students and serious film buffs that are often considered snobs for their appreciation for films of complexity, these artists are not as recognized as they should be. For me, Ingmar Bergman has always been one of the primary pillars of modern cinema, along with Kurosawa, Fellini and Godard. The films of Bergman were quieter, subtler, slower, so intimate and focused on the interior that they often crossed that elusive threshold of transmutation where the barriers of the screen are broken and the viewer is allowed to step inside the world of the movie itself€”and that made his content all the more terrifying. Like a trek inside the recesses of the darkest reaches of the human psyche, Bergman€™s films exposed the pain, the cruelty, the fear and the confusion of the human condition, stripped naked in stark, simple terms and told through the language of dreams. Bergman€™s films were the cinematic equivalent of our bleakest nightmares, but not the frightening panic that comes from the boogeyman or some kind of hackneyed chase, but from the more profound and quiet terror that comes from discovering something horrible about ourselves. Bergman made this uncovering more direct, more primal, more psychologically horrifying by often portraying his stories with the symbolism, obscure construction, uncomfortable human conflict, and subtle fantasy that can only come from the dream world. In his most famous work, The Seventh Seal, a knight in medieval Britain treks along the shoreline to encounter the grim reaper, who informs him his time has come; the Knight proposes that if he can beat Death in a game of chess, he shall live, and so as he embarks on a discovery of the human condition all the while trying his best to outwit the dark spectre. In Persona, a mute woman is cared for by a nurse, and through their intimate relationship it becomes clear that they may actually be the same mind split into two bodies. In Through a Glass Darkly, the protagonist€™s question of faith horribly manifests God in the body of a spider. Wild Strawberries, about an old man€™s reflection on his forlorn life, opens with a dream sequence wherein a phantom carriage delivers a casket containing his own body. Such imagery and themes could come across as contrived were it not for the stark portrayal and genuine fear and awe with which they were filmed. In his movies, Bergman expressed his own fears and anxiety, he poured out all of his personal psychological demons and troubles with total conviction, and such is what continues to make his films as fascinating and mysterious as the man himself. Born in 1918 in Uppsala, Sweeden, Bergman€™s father was a priest and raised Ingmar in a strict, and sometimes abusive, Lutheran Christian household. By age eight he had lost his faith. He eventually began university where he studied art and literature and quickly found a love of theater and film. He began writing plays, and soon found himself the attention of the local Swedish film scene, where he was offered the chance to direct. He found international success with Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955, following it with even more critical success in Seventh Seal(1957),Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960). He eventually fathered seven children from five wives, was exiled from his home country for a period, and died at the age of 89 in seclusion on the island of Faro. His films dealt with themes of existentialism, alienation, sexuality, and questions of faith, and broke cinematic convention in countless ways. A true form of early avant-garde, he made innovative use of the language of cinema in the way in which he photographed, edited and directed his pictures, which perhaps climaxed with 1966€™s Persona and its self-reflexive awareness of the medium. The film opens with darkness. Slowly a flame fades into view. It is a close up of an arc lamp in a film projector. It ignites and we see reels turning, celluloid unspooling, the obscured flicker of a projector lens, all set to a violent and chaotic soundtrack€”it is the medium itself being birthed in all its unflinching directness and violent mechanical motion. Finally we are inside the film itself as sprocket holes run down the screen and a test pattern counts down, as the grating sound of sprockets grinds on the soundtrack. We see a silent era cartoon being projected for a moment. Then we cut back to outside the film as we see the reels and lens still running. For a few frames we see the hands of a child gesturing, but now intercut within the projector footage€”are we inside or outside the film now? The screen goes white, though we still here the sound of sprockets running. A sting silences the soundtrack as we witness a small image of a silent film of a man being terrorized in his bedroom by actors in skeleton costumes. The screen goes white again, and the image of a crawling tarantula bleeds in, and sound returns with ominous and quiet orchestral music. Fading across the screen is the image of a sheep being bled. The music becomes more topsy-turvy as we see its eyes being cut out and the meat stripped off it. As the music reaches its climax and the screen bleeds white again we smashcut to a close up of a man€™s hand being nailed to a wooden board through the palms. The soundtrack is silent except for the hard smashing of the hammer. We dissolve to a winter forest,and then to an iron fence as church bells are distantly heard. We dissolve to a snow-capped building and finally to the face of a dead woman. We discover we are in some kind of morgue as we see an assortment of other corpses, sheets dressed over them. One of them is a young boy. We hear the sound of a phone ringing as we are shown close-ups of the bodies. Suddenly, an old woman€™s eyes flinch open at the loudening ringing. We see the dead boy again, who slowly rises up. He turns over in his sheet, trying to ignore the sound of the phone, which soon ceases. He finally lays on his stomach and tries to read a book. The ominous music returns and the boy becomes alerted to a presence. He turns and slowly looks directly down the lens, straight at the audience. His hand reaches out, feeling the perimeter of the screen. In a reverse angle we see him touching some kind of out-of-focus image which fills the screen. The music begins to creep ever more unnerving as the image slowly comes into focus, revealing it to appear to be a woman€™s face; for a second it looks as though it changes to another face, but it is hard to tell. The music is blaring by now and it climaxes back to the white screen to the title €œPersona.€ In a cacophonous percussion soundtrack, the titles are intercut with quick-cut images, practically subliminal: a man consumed by flames, dead trees, human faces. So begins Persona. The viewer watching this for the first time has no idea what the images mean€”and yet, undeniably the result is fascinating, haunting and captivating. This title sequences has no immediate connection to the rest of the film, which has an actual plot and characters, but in fact, this title sequence holds the key to one of the film€™s most horrifying subtexts. Its elusiveness is part of its allure; like dreams we may not immediately recognize the meaning of the images, only the direct power of them to move us, but in a Freudian way they often will reveal our deepest fears and secrets. I leave it to you to discover them. Recommended Bergman viewing: -Seventh Seal -Wild Stawberries -Virgin Spring -Through a Glass Darkly -Winter Light -The Silence -Persona -Hour of the Wolf -Cries and Whispers -Fanny and Alexander Rest in peace, Ingmar Bergman. May a new generation of cinema-goers discover your dreams as those before us did.

Ingmar Bergman

1918-2007