Ingmar Bergman passed away this year. It was not unexpected of course—he was after all 89 years of age—, but time still stopped for an instant. An era died there. Will he ever have an heir? I was curious about the world’s reaction. Not surprisingly, America, alongside Sweden, reacted the most. In the New York Times obituary he was compared not to Welles, Fellini or Kurosawa, but Mozart and van Gogh. An artist had passed away; one of the great artists not just of our generation, but of all time.

“The name Bergman, more than any other, personifies the progress of film from entertainment of the masses to one of the most refined art forms of the 20th century.” Jacques Mandelbaum, Le Monde

Bergman proved that the cinema as an art form could be the equal of literature, music and painting. Gilles Jacob, director of the Cannes Film Festival remarked that “[h]e was a director of the human condition, of the misery of man, of feminine mystery… the last of the greats because he proved that cinema can be as profound as literature.” A Bergman film is more than entertainment. Although, this is not to say that Bergman’s films were not entertaining. They were so much so in fact that a small feud broke out amongst some of the most distinguished American film critics following Bergman’s passing. In a New York Times Op-Ed Jonathan Rosenbaum attacks Bergman because he had what Carl Thedor Dreyer and Robert Bresson lacked, “the power to entertain — which often meant a reluctance to challenge conventional film-going habits”. This led Roger Ebert in his defense of Bergman to ask; “[i]n what parallel universe is the power to entertain defined in that way?” Even the mainstream media took a stance with Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly commenting:

I also don’t know how anyone could think that a movie like Persona, with its naked acting and mind-warp structure, or Scenes From a Marriage, which so captures the music of relationships that I could it watch forever, is lacking in eternal secrets. What’s truly notable about Rosenbaum’s dismissal, however, is the battle line he’s really drawing: between Bergman the middlebrow, an art filmmaker who actually deigned to tell his stories fluidly (how vulgar!), and Rosenbaum’s heroes, such as the arid, oblique Bresson, with his dessicated zombie acting and general lack of forward motion.

One of the reason’s for this issue of the Zahir’s ultimate theme of Identity is a seminar I worked at in Sweden on the topic “What is the West?”. As I arrived on the same flight as some of the British contingent I had as my first task, and good fortune, to take four of the Brits with me on the two hour taxi ride to Avesta, where the seminar was held. The four were Professor Roger Scruton, the philosopher, Edward Lucas, The Economists Eastern Europe and Russia editor, the BBC’s Diplomatic Correspondent James Robbins and John Kelly, publisher of Prospect Magazine. Roger Scruton remarked, and everyone agreed, that a lot of what people in Britain know about Sweden, at least in his generation, was the image provided by Ingmar Bergman. Did I recognise myself in this image? I did not quite know what to respond at first. Did I? I guess I did I said, in a way, yes. The sort of somber individuality, the often quietness, the sparseness, the intimate dinners and the free spirit of people, without the need to talk too much about it. All of that I recognise. But Bergman’s Sweden is still one in which modernity is steadily growing, not knowing where to end up. It is still the clash between traditional values and those of modernity. To watch Bergman’s films is in many ways to watch modern society from the viewpoint of traditionalism. Even though we are said to have choices, to ideally do what we want with our lives, people may feel that their life lack a meaning, a focus. The suggestion has been that it is preciesly because of such choices, of the individual separated from her traditions to ‘choose’ her moral starting point that underlies such feelings. Bergman often looked at the human condition, at faith, interpersonal relations and this percieved lack of meaning from the viewpoint of such traditions that are said to give life such meaning; religion. But his films are also, I dare say, like a living monument to one of the most modern countries in the world. Allow me to adopt a lighter tone for a moment.

After Smiles of a Summer Night (1957), Bergman has said, no one told him what films he could or could not do anymore. Where else could a director get carte blanche to make films like The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1958), Persona (1966), The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960) or Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna, 1963)? “Oh, you want to make a film about a knight playing chess with death to postpone his life, and then everyone dies in the end? OK, go ahead!” Or how about one in which one character is silent almost the entire movie to the point where the other character’s identity so blend with the first that the film, the actual reel, breaks down and then recommences with the parts shifted? Sure. Or how about one in which someone’s daughter simply gets raped and killed, the rapists take refuge at her father’s house, who finds out and swiftly kills them all? Or my personal favourite; how about a film set in a northern Swedish church. One of the parishioners asks the minister for advice. He’s worried about a nuclear holocaust. The minister, beset with his own doubts, irritably asks what he can do about it? How does he know that there’s even a God? The parishioner commits suicide, the minister takes out his frustration on his mistress, whom he then forces to accompany him to a sermon in a nearby village, where she is the only partaker. The End. —Absolutely, No Problem! That sounds like a humdinger.. Nevertheless, Bergman got his carte blanche, and the rest is history. But even though Bergman’s themes seems to resonate almost universally, I don’t believe that they could have been made almost anywhere else. It was precisely the contrast between the old and the traditional, and the post-war shedding in Sweden of almost everything traditional that, at least in part, prompted this response. I believe this is a real strength, and almost certainly one of the reasons for his universal acclaim, especially in this day and age when increasingly countries try to find their identity in an ever more globalised world; when traditions, values and modes of life interlace and clash.

Bergman’s achievement is difficult to measure. Like all great art, I believe, it doesn’t really need interpretation. Although it might require understanding. Bergman’s oeuvre, the sheer size of it, was an achievement in itself. He managed 54 feature length films, most of which he both wrote, directed and often edited himself. This of course in addition to all the theatre he directed. He was nominated for nine individual Oscars, but picked up ‘only’ the Thalberg Memorial Award in 1971 for his lifetime achievement. This before Autumn Sonata, Cries and Whispers or Fanny and Alexander had been made. Cries and Whispers won a grand slam with the New York’s Critics Circle in 1978, the inofficial or ‘alternative’ Oscar if you will. It presented the Oscar jury with a dilemma. Sweden already had a film represented in the category Best Foreign Film; Jan Troell’s The Emigrants. Cries and whispers was therefore nominated as Best Film, an unusual honour, but did not win. Sven Nyqvist’s cinematography is here near perfect. Every frame is a painting, every image an icon. The colours change with the characters and mood of course, but red flows through the film and encloses the viewer in what Bergman thought of as the membrane of the soul. The New York Times writes in its review; “it will reduce anything else you are likely to see this season to a small cinder.” Bergman’s collaborators incidentally would require, and deserve, whole articles themselves. I will therefore in passing merely mention the two great cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist. Their style is immediately recognisable, but only when compared of course. Bergman’s early successes came with Fischer, who uses light to produce sharp contrasts; like the later paintings of Caravaggio. Sven Nykvist, who became the true master of light, is instead firmly within the Dutch and Flemish traditions, to continue the analogy; a glowing Rembrandt or a starker Vermeer . Some years after Cries and Whispers, in 1983, the film that would end Bergman’s cinematic career (voluntarily retiring to the theatre), Fanny and Alexander, was released. It spans almost every theme he explored, and Nykvist’s camera captures everything from the warm lush colours of the home of Isak Jacobi to the bleak world of the bishop, in which every trace of loving life seems to be seared from the screen. At the Academy Awards, it was nominated in eight categories, picking up four Oscars, and Bergman’s third for Best Foreign Film. Out of 72 individual nominations for his films in major film festivals or national film awards, he picked up 58. In 1999 he was awarded the “Palm of Palms” at Cannes. All testament to his ability to entertain as much as, or perhaps even more, than to his artistic achievement.

However, for me two achievements stand out especially. One is that remarkable 18 month period between the summer of 1956 and the end of 1957 when he made Smiles of a Summer Night (his first major award; Best Poetic Humour at Cannes), The Seventh Seal (the Jury Prize at Cannes, Golden Palm nominee) and Wild Strawberrys (the Jury Prize at Cannes, Golden Palm nominee) in rapid succession. All masterpieces in their own right. The last tells the story of an old Professor travelling by car from Stockholm to Lund to pick up a jubilee doctorate. His daughter-in-law accompany him and through her contemplation of her failed marriage with his son he looks back at his life; of how it ended up, what he could have changed, what he would have wanted to change. When I read Michael Wood’s piece in the London Review of Books, I immediately recognised myself. “Wild Strawberries, …, a film for which I felt admiration but no affection, absolutely bowled me over this time. Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström), a distinguished doctor aged 76, travels to Lund to receive an honorary degree and relives his life as he does so. The film mixes dreams and memories and the present moment, and the beauty of the thing is that every instance is morally ambiguous, an accusation of lifelong selfishness which is also half an exoneration, since Isak, from his youth, seems to have been kept out of the lives of others just as much as he has carefully kept others out.” The second (in that stretch in the 50’s), The Seventh Seal, hardly needs an introduction. It has become an icon of modern cinema, or art-house cinema, not least because of the less than subtle subject of death and Max von Sydow’s knight Antonius Block challenging him to a game of chess in the futile hope of postponement. And the first, Smiles of a Summer Night, might well be, alongside Fanny and Alexander, the best film to start with if you are one of those many, many people I’ve met who find Bergman ‘difficult’, ‘gloomy’ or downright ‘boring’. It is not difficult to understand these sentiments, because Bergman’s films are not there to give pleasure. At least not as what we are taught these days to think of something as pleasurable; they are not ‘entertainment’. A pause from life. They are a part of life, they expand on life. They afford new perspectives, and they let us reflect on issues we might not have known we had. Like all great works of art they resonate within us and stirs feelings both difficult and pleasurable. The ancients thought this a great question; how come we derive a special sort of pleasure from tragedy? It’s become known as the Aristotelian Principle. Hume called them ‘higher’ pleasures.

I have one personal, if remote, tie to Bergman. It is my relation to the late director Victor Sjöström, who starred as Isak Borg in Wild Strawberrys (he was my great-great uncle!). Sjöström was something of a mentor to Bergman, and one of his first great film experiences. Said Bergman; “It must have been 1933. I’d already been to the cinema a lot, but The Phantom Carriage [Körkarlen, 1921] was the first really big cinematic experience. Even now I can’t really make out what is was that captured me so utterly. […] The Phantom Carriage is still one of my great film experiences. I see it in my cinema every summer.” But in another interview his influence becomes even more pronounced, he admired “[Victor Sjöström’s] incorruptible demand for truth, his incorruptible observation of reality. His way of never for a moment making things easy for himself, or simplifying or skipping things or cheating or succumbing to mere brilliance.”

One cannot help but thinking that Bergman had prepared his whole life to die. Quite like the Plato of Phaedon teaches us that any true philosopher must; a philosopher’s task is to, in as high a degree as possible, remove his soul from the body. ‘Pleasure’, Eudaimonia, is achieved when body and soul are in balance, and that requires the body to abstain from material pleasures. Bergman’s first real confrontation with death was The Seventh Seal, after which, he has said, he was no longer afraid to die. In Cries and Whispers he looks at it from another angle. The minister presiding over Agnes’ dead body, teared up, asks:

If it be that you gathered our suffering in your poor body and have borne it with you through death. If it be that you meet God there in that other land. If it be that He turns His face towards you. If it be that you will know the language of Our Lord. If it be that you can speak to the Lord, if it be so: then pray for us. Agnes, dear child, listen to what I tell you now. Pray for us who are left on this dark and dirty earth beneath and empty and cruel sky. Lay your burden of suffering at the Lord’s feet and ask Him to pardon us. Ask Him to set us free at last, from our anxiety, our weariness and our profound doubt. Ask Him for a meaning to our lives. Agnes, you have suffered so inconceivably and so long, you must surely be worthy to plead our case.

Here it is despair over injustices—who dies, and how—, despair over having to live here on this ‘dark and dirty earth beneath and empty and cruel sky’, and the hope for reconciliation in death. However, in a recent interview on Swedish television the tone was different. Ever since Ingrid died, he had been curious about death and had often wanted to die. But from his words and his way of uttering them, one got the feeling that he was grateful, more than anything else. Indeed, it could have been the end of Cries and Whispers, where Anna is reading from Agnes’ journal:

Wednesday the third of September. The tang of autumn fills the clear still air but it’s mild and fine. My sisters, Karin and Maria have come to see me. It’s wonderful to be together again like in the old days, and I am feeling much better. We were even able to go for a little walk together. Such an event for me, especially since i haven’t been out of doors for so long. Suddenly we began to laugh and run toward the old swing that we hadn’t seen since we were children. We sat in it like three good little sisters and Anna pushed us, slowly and gently. All my aches and pains were gone. The people I am most fond of in the entire world were with me. I could hear their chatting around me. I could feel the presence of their bodies, the warmth of their hands. I wanted to hold the moment fast and thought, Come what may, this is happiness. I cannot wish for anything better. Now, for a few minutes, I can experience perfection. And I feel profoundly grateful to my life, which gives me so much.

Testament to the power, insight and nuance of Bergman’s philosophy.

Bergman on Godard: “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a fucking bore. He’s made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculin/Féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring.”
- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Bergman on Antonioni
“Fellini, Kurosawa and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.”
- The Magic Lantern ”

He’s done two masterpieces, you don’t have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I’ve seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that’s mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don’t feel anything for L’Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.”
- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Bergman on Fellini
”We were supposed to collaborate once, and along with Kurosawa make one love story each for a movie produced by Dino de Laurentiis. I flew down to Rome with my script and spent a lot of time with Fellini while we waited for Kurosawa, who finally couldn’t leave Japan because of his health, so the project went belly-up. Fellini was about to finish Satyricon. I spent a lot of time in the studio and saw him work. I loved him both as a director and as a person, and I still watch his movies, like La Strada and that childhood rememberance - what’s that called again?
The interviewer has also seen the movie several times, but just now the title slips his mind. Bergman laughs delightedly. Bergman: Great that you’re also a bit senile! That pleases me. (Later the same day, several hours after the interview, the phone rings. It’s Bergman. ‘AMARCORD!’ he shouts.)”

- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Bergman om Kurosawa
”Now I want to make it plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It’s touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa. At that time my admiration for the Japanese cinema was at its height. I was almost a samurai myself!”
- Ingmar Bergman in Bergman on Bergman, 1970

Bergman on Sjöström

“It must have been 1933. I’d already been to the cinema a lot, but The Phantom Carriage was the first really big cinematic experience. Even now I can’t really make out what is was that captured me so utterly.”
[…]
“The Phantom Carriage is still one of my great film experiences. I see it in my cinema every summer.”
- 20th Century (Ed. Gunnar Bergdahl, Göteborg Film Festival, 2000)

“Have you seen Ingeborg Holm? It’s one of the most remarkable films ever made - 1913!”
“Above all Ingeborg Holm, as I’ve said, and The Phantom Carriage, but also The Executioner, The Outlaw and His Wife, too, a marvellously well-narrated film.”
[…]
“His incorruptible demand for truth, his incorruptible observation of reality. His way of never for a moment making things easy for himself, or simplifying or skipping things or cheating or succumbing to mere brilliance.”
“[T]ime has left Stiller’s films behind much more than it has Victor’s. Ingeborg Holm is still true and gripping; remarkably modern. If run at its proper speed, which is 16 frames a second, it is photographic and scenically quite perfect.”

- Ingmar Bergman in Bergman on Bergman

Bergman on Tarkovsky
”When film is not a document, it is a dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. What should be explained anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media.”

”Late one evening in 1971, Bergman and his friend and director Kjell Grede by pure coincidence stumbled upon a copy of Andrei Rublov in a screening room at Svensk Filmindustri. They saw it without any subtitles. He ranks it to be one of his most startling and unforgettable movie experiences ever.”

- Ingmar Bergman in The Magic Lantern

Bergman on Welles
”For me he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s not interesting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of - is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. The amount of respect that movie’s got is absolutely unbelievable. Aghed: How about The Magnificent Ambersons? Bergman: Nah. Also terribly boring. And I’ve never liked Welles as an actor, because he’s not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that’s when he’s croaks. In my eyes he’s an infinitely overrated filmmaker.”

- Jan Aghed, “När Bergman går på bio”, Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 12 maj 2002.

Woody Allen: “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

Guardian, Peter Bradshaw

“The great, gaunt magus of European arthouse cinema, Ingmar Bergman, who has died at the age of 89, finally declared that even he found his own films too depressing to watch. But his passing doesn’t leave us any more cheerful. On the contrary: there’s a horrible sense that the world has lost the last film-maker willing or capable of explicitly taking on the big themes: the nature of God and the nature of humanity.

Guardian, Obituary

[A]n undisputed colossus of world art cinema. From the 1940s into the 21st century, he directed more than 60 films, wrote even more and created some, like The Seventh Seal (1956-57), Wild Strawberries (1957) and the autobiographically inspired Fanny and Alexander (1982), that were stunningly successful. He astonished people with his willingness to recognise cruelty, death and, above all, the torment of doubt.

Guardian, Leader

Bergman belonged to an era which took the cinema seriously as an art form, and which thought it was the obligation of the cinema to tell difficult stories and to address troubling issues. … Bergman’s career is a reminder that artists are not judged solely by their technique or their ability to shock but by their inner moral honesty and by their inspiration. Bergman understood that the deepest questions about life and death, youth and age, selfishness and kindness, can be answered as well in a single room or on a windswept island as they can in the hubbub of a city. Like Mozart, whom he revered, he knew how to say profound things with great simplicity. Bergman was pessimistic in many ways, but his films have an inner light of humanity that stands as a reprimand to too many of his successors.

NYT, Woody Allen

Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality, and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.
And yet the man was a warm, amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”

Geoffrey McNab, The Independent
In some quarters, there will be relief at Bergman’s passing. The Swedes, who sometimes gave the impression of being embarrassed by this monumental figure in their midst, will be able to honour him without reservation. The old spats - the battle with the tax authorities that led him to live in exile, the debates about his stifling effect on younger film-makers - will be forgotten. He will take his place in the list of their major cultural figures, at least the equal of his beloved Strindberg.
His achievements are indeed remarkable - more than 50 films, over 120 major theatre productions, the radio plays, the TV dramas and the books. In sheer volume and consistent quality, it is hard to think of anyone who matches him.

Jacques Mandelbaum, Le Monde, France:

”It’s no secret: the passing of Ingmar Bergman marks the disappearance of an era within film making. His magnificent work get it’s validity through the constant dialog between the European culture and the high thoughts he had about his art. The name Bergman, more than any other, personifies the progress of film from entertainment of the masses to one of the most refined art forms of the 20th century.”