Once more, with feeling

My Mirror column:

On the centenary of Ingmar Bergman’s birth, it’s worth thinking about what made him one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

A still from Persona (left).  Ingmar Bergman (right).

Ingmar Bergman, who would have turned hundred on July 14, has a super-serious image. To someone who has never seen a Bergman film, just the names that make up the great Swedish director’s filmography can come off sounding a tad intense. To wit: the first feature he helped write was called Torment and his own directorial debut in 1946 was called Crisis. Future titles included It Rains On Our Love (1946), Prison, Thirst (both 1949), This Can’t Happen Here (1950), Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), The Devil’s Eye (1960), Hour of the Wolf, Shame (both 1968) and Cries and Whispers (1972).
Alright, I’m cherry-picking a bit here: Bergman’s 60-odd films (many made for television) did also include Smiles of a Summer Night and Summer with Monika. (The summer allusion, in a Scandinavian country with long dark winters, isn’t too complicated). There was even a film called To Joy. But those are the exceptions. Roll around on your tongue the names of the 1961-1963 films in his ‘trilogy’: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence and you imagine an austere world, with depressing things unfolding in a bleak, wintry, black-and-white landscape. And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

Titles, of course, are the least of it. Perhaps best known outside film-nerdistan for The Seventh Seal, in which a man conducts a chess game with Death to stave off his demise, Bergman’s films returned again to again to existential subjects. His themes were the great themes of human life: mortality and ageing, faith, identity and loneliness, the meaning of life and the fear of death. He did not shy away from the terrifying things that might scare off more superficial artists: being a parent, grappling with desire, or with disability.


And yet Bergman was rarely ponderous. He was too personal to be that. His films plumbed the depths of the human soul with an excavatory zeal, with the family often emerging as the stage on which sexual and other longings were dramatically played out. So Through a Glass Darkly, in which a troubled young woman envisions god as a spider, is also about her flirtatious, eventually incestuous relationship with her brother, while the fraught relationship between the sisters in The Silence is founded on a comparison of their fundamentally different approaches to sex. Cries and Whispers, which might be among the most intense cinematic portraits ever made of relationships between sisters, is also a powerful film about sex and shame.



“The manifestation of sex is very important... for above all, I don’t want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them,” Bergman told Playboy in a 1964 interview. Many of Bergman’s characters, especially women, spoke of their sexual yearnings with a candour that was unprecedented in the cinema of his time — and might be unequalled even today. If he created some women with repressed inner selves, his films could also function like therapists’ couches: places where these characters found themselves unburdening themselves of secrets.


In his affecting, inscrutable 1966 film Persona, for example, a young nurse called Alma (Bibi Andersson) is appointed to take care of a famous actress called Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) who has suddenly stopped speaking. The slim, almost boyish Alma is clearly struck by the uber-femme, full-figured Elisabet, while Elisabet somehow manages to make her silence welcoming enough to draw out increasingly confessional monologues from Alma, including a description of a transformative erotic threesome she once entered into with perfect strangers on a beach.


Persona is also a good entry-point into the genre that was, for many years, Bergman’s métier: a psychological unravelling that could take you to the brink of horror. Exploring the inner workings of the human mind, through dreams and fantasies, can often reveal our ugliest selves. Bergman’s cinema is an unforgiving mirror, making us see how we are most cruel to those we love. And sometimes, of course, we cannot love at all. In films as varied as Persona, Wild Strawberries and Autumn Sonata, Bergman produced brutally precise portraits of parents who cannot give of themselves, who hide from the neediness of their children. His own father was a Lutheran minister with harsh ideas of parenting; his ideas may have made their way into the figure of the stepfather in Fanny and Alexander, a bishop who constantly tells the children that he is “punishing them out of love”.


That bishop is as close to a villain as Bergman ever created. Made in 1982, Fanny and Alexander’s rather performative contrast between the pleasure-seekers and the self-punishers was a shift of register for him. Bergman’s cinema showed again and again how thin the line was between attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain. The point, he seemed to suggest, was while knowing that, to continue to seek out experience; to feel whatever one did with passion.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 15 July 2018.