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Essential Bergman in Canberra: Talented director still has the power change your life through film
The NFSA's Ingmar Bergman retrospective will show how the filmmaker's childhood led him to create movies where reality clashes with dreams.
By Simon Weaving
David Stratton says Ingmar Bergman changed his life. It was a moment when Stratton, aged 18 and attending a film society screening in England, saw Bergman's erotic comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.
"I found aspects of cinema I'd never experienced before – emotion, truth, pain, lust," says Stratton about the film that was the hit of the 1956 Cannes Film Festival and which launched Bergman's international reputation. (The film's flirtatious narrative has continually inspired other works, including Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music, and even an episode of Desperate Housewives.)
The director Ingmar Bergman on set in 1975.
A year later – in 1957 – Bergman cemented his place as a master filmmaker. It was the year that saw the international release of two of his best-known films: The Seventh Seal – about a medieval knight's search for meaning, and Wild Strawberries, the dream-plagued journey of an ageing professor re-evaluating his life.
All three of these films are being screened at the National Film & Sound Archive this month, as part of a partnership to celebrate Bergman with the Sydney Film Festival and the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. The films appear along with seven other Bergman classics – including The Silence, Fanny and Alexander and his last film, Saraband, made for television in 2003.
Ingmar Bergman's work was filled with dream-like images, as in this scene from Persona (1966).
The selection has been curated by David Stratton, who describes Bergman as "one of the world's greatest-ever film directors". Cris Kennedy from the NFSA agrees: "I see Bergman films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries as Film 101, they are so influential on nearly every other filmmaker to come after."
It's true. The Bergman aesthetic has had long reach. Filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick, Francois Ozon, Jean-Luc Goddard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Lars Von Trier and Francis Ford Coppola, just to list a few – all mention Bergman when asked to name those who influenced their work the most. And Woody Allen is perhaps his biggest fan, rating The Seventh Seal as one of the 10 greatest movies ever made. In an interview, Allen described Bergman's appeal: "He's got a mind, an intellect and the films are about something. They're substantive and philosophical and profound on a human level – of course, that's all great – but he's first and foremost an entertainer, so it's not like doing homework."
For me, there are two significant forces that inform Bergman's work – the first being the influence of his childhood in 1920s Sweden, where he grew up in a deeply religious family in an almost feudal society.
"My education was very tough," said Bergman in an interview in the 1970s. "Life wasn't about freeing up human souls. It was about creating obedient slaves in the hierarchical construction of the society – with god at the top, then the king and then the father. Then came the teachers and the school, and the elder brother [Bergman's brother was four years his senior] and then – under everyone else – the children, who couldn't talk and who had no rights."
A scene from Ingmar Bergman's The Face/ The Magician (1958)
Many observers suggest that Bergman felt oppressed by the restrictive atmosphere, but the filmmaker himself described his childhood, at least until the age of about 10, as being very positive.
"I was very happy because I lived in my dreams. I was very alone, far away from everything, and I built puppets and small theatres and played with them.
"I liked to be alone with my things, and I was very peaceful. But life around me - the darkness, the emptiness of the house, the sunshine - all had a magic that could suddenly make me very insecure.
"Life could suddenly become very strange, hard and cruel. My parents might come to me and say something like, 'Why did you do that' or 'You've been lying' and I didn't know that I'd told a lie because I didn't know whether I dreamed those things or if they existed for real."
This idea of a loose boundary between reality and dreams is clearly apparent in many of Bergman's films – and takes centre-stage in Wild Strawberries, where an old professor (played by Victor Sjostrom) is travelling to receive an honorary award for his life's work. Past memories float back to him on the journey – sometimes as nightmares and other times as flashbacks – blurring the distinctions of fantasy and reality. Bergman was obsessed with this dynamic, with mirrors (it's fun to play spot the mirror in Bergman movies), and with the many ways in which the truth can be distorted.
Bergman referred to himself as "an inveterate fantasy martyr" and his cinema is a playground for this childhood disposition.
The second force that informs Bergman's work is the filmmaking process that he developed with a tight-knit group of collaborators.
Financially independent, he never made a studio film and, from the 1960s onwards, consolidated his creative process on the small and isolated island of Faro, southwest of Sweden in the Baltic Sea, a place where he lived, worked and eventually died.
He wrote his own scripts – often a difficult process for him and one informed by dreams that he would develop tentatively "like winding a thread from somewhere". He used a group of actors who became familiar with his pedantic methods and reputation as the "demon director". Bibi Andersson, Liv Ulman, Max Von Sydow and Harriet Andersson are the best-known of Bergman's players outside Sweden.
He also developed a long collaboration with two-time Oscar-winning cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who softened the theatricality of Bergman's work (Bergman also wrote and directed hundreds of plays in his long career).
The bleak island of Faro provided a backdrop for much of his cinema – which often examines regret, death, faith and the difficulty humans face making authentic connections.
It's a mistake, though, to imagine Bergman's films are overly intellectual or philosophical. His great legacy is that you sense his films rather than merely see and hear them. Like sublime visual poetry, they flow from the screen through your senses – an art often forgotten in today's busy box-office line-up of superhero action.
It was the fact that Bergman had complete control over his work – from concept to edit and from the start of his career to the end – that allowed him to create his distinctive art. It's a luxury that has escaped most other legendary directors. Think of the battles Orson Welles had with studio bosses. Bergman created a space where his delicate combination of sensitivity and self-discipline could thrive.
Yet even the great Bergman was not above admitting the happy accidents that sometimes bring gifts.
He tells a story about the final shot of Wild Strawberries, one of his trademark close-ups, the camera slowly moving in on a besieged subject. It's a shot that Bergman called "one of the most beautiful in my life" and yet it wasn't planned. The actor was Victor Sjostrom who, at 78, had only agreed to appear in the film if he could wrap each day at 4.30pm to get home to a glass of whisky.
Bergman agreed, but for this final shot was running late because of the light. He insisted Sjostrom wait and an argument erupted.
Finally, with both men very angry, they agreed to get the shot – in which Sjostrom had to imagine he was looking at his parents in an idyllic childhood memory. Bergman thought it would be a catastrophe, but when he called "action" Sjostrom gave him something he had never imagined.
"It was as if all the emotion lifted," said Bergman, "what he portrayed had never been used before, and was not rehearsed. It just came. If he had been in a good mood or decided to become sentimental, the shot would have been very bad. But what we have is a face that is very much about experience, about tenderness and an old man's sadness for a life that's going away. I think it's most, most wonderful."
You can see for yourself when Wild Strawberries screens on Friday, June 26, the second of the retrospective series. Bergman may just change your life, too.
Essential Bergman starts at the NFSA on Thursday, June 25.