The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (37 page)

Bergman never set out to be less than demanding; and as an artist his greatest achievement was in digesting such unrelenting seriousness until he saw no need to bludgeon us with it. The early Bergman worked with the split personality of someone who believed in his own genius. Even his comedies
—Waiting Women
and
Smiles of a Summer Night
—were philosophical disquisitions on the nature of love and identity. The latter, especially, was an Ophuls subject denied the warmth and sadness that keeps irony from being cynical and schematic. But looking out at the world from Sweden, Bergman saw no reason to abandon his faith in a select audience, prepared and trained for a diligent intellectual and emotional involvement with cinema. In many of these early films there is the regrettable flavor of “this is good for you” about what are determinedly bleak neorealist studies of failed love affairs. Admittedly Bergman never neglected that central topic for such Italian themes as cried out from the streets. He was always fixed on the heart and the soul, but with a bristling neatness that was heartless and depressing.
The Seventh Seal
is the ultimate step in this rather academic way of recording human torment. Its medievalism and the wholesale allegory now seem frivolous and theatrical diversions from true seriousness.

But
The Seventh Seal
, like
Elvira Madigan
(67, Bo Widerberg) some ten years later, was the film swallowed by the most people. In England and America it made Bergman the central figure in the growth of art-house cinema. Many people of my generation may have joined the National Film Theatre in London to see a retrospective survey of Bergman’s early films after
The Seventh Seal
and
Wild Strawberries
had come to represent “artistic” cinema. The first critical articles that I struggled with—as reader and writer—were on Bergman. Inevitably he suffered from being so suddenly revealed to a volatile world. Looking back, it seems no coincidence that those two films are his most pretentious and calculating. Within a few years he was being mocked and parodied for his earnestness and symbolism. The young cineastes led to the art houses were rediscovering the virtues of the American films that had delighted them as children. The new French cinema endorsed that love of development and replaced Bergman’s concentration with improvisation, humor, offhand tenderness, and a non-Northern feeling for the beauty of camera movements as opposed to the force of composition.

By about 1961 Bergman held the unenviable position of a discredited innovator in a fashion-conscious world. That reputation was, I think, deserved.
So Close to Life, The Face, The Virgin Spring
, and
The Silence
suffer because the artistic virtuosity seems complacent beside the professed anguish of the work. Far from being moving and engrossing, these films verge on a dreadfully clear-eyed and articulated morbidity. The gap between preoccupation and art was amounting to decadence.

It is worth stressing the dilemma Bergman found himself in at this time because of his response to it. He was not the first figure from Swedish cinema to be invited to more lavish production setups. His international success had made him possibly the best known of living Swedish artists, a spokesman for the rather precious political neutrality and social enlightenment that Sweden embraced, and the prophet of its overriding sense of guilt. What made Bergman a great director, it seems to me, is the recognition that he was (or had become) his own subject, that the anguish in his films could become central. For that to work, he had to decline attractive invitations and stay in Sweden.

Like Fellini, Ozu, and Warhol, he became the center of “family” cinema. In many ways, the Swedish environment had always fostered that feeling. Bergman had for many years been encouraged by the head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling, who undoubtedly saw the prospect of Swedish cinema being a substantial export item as well as a discreet source of propaganda and prestige. It was possible in Sweden to make films regularly and cheaply; thus, Bergman’s productivity has had fewer obstacles than most other great directors must face. Cheapness did not mean tattiness: Bergman has worked with two fine cameramen, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist. Most important of all, the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, which Bergman headed from 1963–66, was the source of a company of actors and actresses who became fixtures in his work.

At first, that was commented on as evidence of the detail and authenticity of his films. But Bergman made that company into a family and saw that the basic human predicament had a marvelous metaphor in the way that an artist treated his subject and his collaborators. It arose naturally from his convictions of the harrowing separateness of people, the intractable privacy of men and women even in love, that everyone was not a solid identity but an actor trying to play the self. Once those realizations were made, Bergman’s style underwent a magisterial simplification. Allegory and symbolism were abandoned for the total unity of action and significance in, first,
Persona
. That was the beginning of a sequence of masterpieces in which the pessimism Bergman had always held to became unaffected, personal, and deeply moving.

In terms of style, these later films are strenuous close-up investigations of actresses and artists playing actresses and artists. One cannot approach these films without keeping careful check of the names of characters and of the interchange of such players as Max von Sydow, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, and Gunnar Björnstrand. Bergman himself has been married six times, he had a child by Liv Ullmann, and there seems no reason to be disconcerted by the completeness of his involvement with his “family.” It is essential to the autobiographical resonance that his films now give off. In that context, the artist/actor is his everyman figure, and a more fruitful one than the morality-play knight in
The Seventh Seal. Persona
is about an actress who has a breakdown. She dries up on the stage and becomes speechless in life. Alone on an island with a talkative nurse, she listens and gradually absorbs the nurse—part actress taking up a new role, part emotional vampire.
Hour of the Wolf
is about a painter living on an island, reviled by outsiders, insecure in his marriage, and about his descent into insanity.
Shame
is about a musician and his wife living on a Baltic island at a time of unexplained war. Their brittle love cracks apart when war intrudes on them, and the film concludes with feeble refugees adrift on the Baltic.
The Rite
deals with a trio of players, incestuously involved, whose performance is being investigated by a provincial magistrate.
A Passion
is an intricate circular story of one broken marriage being cyclically reenacted. And
The Touch
, the first of Bergman’s films to use American money, is a subtle commentary on modern Jewry and on Sweden’s relation to the world, told through an intimate triangle love story.

It is this sense of intimacy that most distinguishes Bergman. Artistically, it involves quite as much frankness as do Warhol’s films. Bergman insists on the truths of how people feel toward others they need to love—in his TV play,
The Lie
, as much as in his films. Neither will he ignore the increasing moral paralysis and mental breakdown that follow from that truthfulness. Thus his films are intimate and extreme at the same time. The close-up examination of the family, in rites or games that mirror the family’s own situation, was wonderfully sustained from
Persona
to
Cries and Whispers
.

Bergman claimed to be retired from directing films:
The Best Intentions
(92), was filmed by Bille August. In which case,
Fanny and Alexander
and his autobiographical books,
The Magic Lantern
and
Images
, must stand as his final gifts.
Fanny and Alexander
may be the gentlest of his great films, and the most intricate restaging of his own past. Bergman has survived his own fashion. His stature is secure, and the films are there for the ages. The very early films are now in need of rediscovery—but that will only prepare fresh generations for the journey through his career. For so many people, Bergman has been the man who showed the way to a cinema of the inner life.

Retirement still left the loophole of television, where Bergman has written and directed three “plays.” I haven’t seen them, but I would add that his script for
Faithless
(00, Liv Ullmann) shows a genius undiminished, just as
Faithless
is a vital work in Bergman’s harrowed observation of himself.

And then came two more television films—his last, he said. Yet age was not a big enough barrier. The themes and the players remained the same—thus Liv Ullmann was back for
Saraband
, while in
Bildmakarna
, he depicted Victor Sjöström and Selma Lagerlöf (played by Anita Björk). Full circle? A phenomenal career, in which the famous anguish he suffered seems now like a balmy wind keeping him fresh.

Ingrid Bergman
(1915–82), b. Stockholm, Sweden
Ingrid Bergman is something of an enigma, even if she is a great “role.” Yet who could play Bergman? She was crucially unique and her own chosen self: tall, “natural” looking, fluent in English yet unmistakably Swedish in her voice, a chronic actress who always strove to be a “true” woman. There was a time in the early and mid-1940s when Bergman commanded a kind of love in America that has been hardly ever matched. In turn, it was the strength of that affection that animated the “scandal” when she behaved like an impetuous and ambitious actress instead of a saint. Is she an example of the liberated woman, exercising her freedom even to the brink of self-destruction? Or is she a curiously empty life force dependent on the changing personalities of the several men in her life? Was she one of the film world’s martyrs to publicity, or did she nurse a special aptitude for suffering?

The child of a German mother, she was an orphan by the age of twelve. She studied briefly at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and made her film debut in
Munkbrogreven
(34, Sigurd Wallen and Edvin Adolphson). She quickly became the darling of Swedish cinema, guided by director Gustaf Molander and her husband, Petter Lindstrom. She made
Swedenhielms
(35, Molander),
Dollar
(37, Molander), and
Pa Solsidan
(36, Molander) before the crucial appearance in
Intermezzo
(36, Molander).

That film was seen by employees of David Selznick, and then by Selznick himself: remake rights were purchased by Selznick International, and Bergman was brought along as part of the deal. Before going to Hollywood, however, she made
En Enda Natt
(38, Molander) and
En Kvinnas Ansikte
(38, Molander) and visited Germany for
Die Vier Gesellen
(37, Carl Froelich). Indeed, she had to decide between Selznick and a serious German career—something Selznick had to hush up. And so Bergman went to America, leaving her infant daughter, Pia, with Petter Lindstrom.

She starred with Leslie Howard in Selznick’s
Intermezzo: A Love Story
(39, Gregory Ratoff). This was the start of an astonishing impact on Hollywood and America in which the alleged lack of makeup contributed to an air of nobility. Selznick appreciated her, and his wife, Irene, became an important friend and ally. But Selznick loaned Ingrid out more than he ever used her—thus he profited from her contract in ways not lost on Bergman or her husband. Her only Selznick films were
Intermezzo
and
Spellbound
(45, Alfred Hitchcock). At the same time, Selznick built her up and indulged her whims by loaning her out for
Adam Had Four Sons
(41, Ratoff) and the dreadful
Rage in Heaven
(41, W. S. Van Dyke). Then she persuaded MGM and Victor Fleming to let her switch parts with Lana Turner in
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(41, Fleming). Thus, for the first time she played a “bad” girl and reveled in it, especially the sultry lipstick.

The films that made her followed. When Hal Wallis elected to make the woman in
Casablanca
(43, Michael Curtiz) European, he soon abandoned thoughts of Hedy Lamarr for Bergman. That film shows how naturally she played romance in a mood of torment, indecision, and incipient suffering. When Vera Zorina proved inadequate, Selznick’s steady boosting won her the part of Maria, with cropped hair, in
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(43, Sam Wood). Far better was
Gaslight
(44), in which George Cukor helped her to be very moving as the wife edged close to madness by Charles Boyer. Again, she excelled in an ordeal, and her beauty seemed more vivid in masochistic situations. The Oscar for
Gaslight
was the peak of her Hollywood glory. Asked to be a flamboyant Creole in
Saratoga Trunk
(46, Wood), she was coy and unconvincing. But she was adorable again (if hardly professional) as the psychiatrist in
Spellbound
, a very successful picture that was topped by
The Bells of St. Mary’s
(45, Leo McCarey) in which she played a nun opposite Bing Crosby’s priest. Then Hitchcock put her in
Notorious
(46), her best performance yet, as an espionage agent driven to drink and despair. Hitchcock had seen the melancholy within her, and its closeness to guilt. With her suffering from Cary Grant’s hard exterior,
Notorious
proved a major film.

Selznick wanted to renew Bergman’s contract, but she insisted on going freelance: first as a prostitute in
Arch of Triumph
(48, Lewis Milestone) and then as
Joan of Arc
(48, Fleming), based on the Maxwell Anderson stage play
Joan of Lorraine
, which she had played on Broadway. At this point, she went to London to make
Under Capricorn
(49, Hitchcock)—as an Irish aristocrat in Australia, married to an ex-convict who went to jail for a crime she committed. It is a searching study of deterioration through guilt and again dependent on drink. The film was a flop on release but now looks like a Hitchcock masterpiece, owing a good deal to Bergman’s long confessional speech (in one torturous take, of course).