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Interview with Ingmar Bergman

Day_	17/05/2004

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The legendary Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman is a towering figure in world cinema history. For the last half-century, his films have been seen by countless people all over the world in cinemas, on TV screens, at university film clubs, and in more recent times, video cassettes and DVDs. And his career in theater has been no less important. It is wonderful to be able to report that in 2004, Bergman is still in the news.

A new and vivid film language

If you ask any person anywhere around the world to name a famous modern Swede, the chances are he or she will say Ingmar Bergman. The legendary film director has long since become Sweden's chief cultural export, and with good reason. Throughout an extraordinarily prolific career that has spanned the entire second half of the 20th century, Bergman has created an intensely personal body of work that profoundly changed the way people world-over thought about film as an expressive medium. In such 1950s and -60s classics as The Naked Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light and Persona (to name just a few), the director invented a new and visually distinct film language which he applied to complex psychological or metaphysical themes rarely seen in films at the time. With their heightened and symbolic imagery, use of allegory, memory and dream states, not to mention their emotionally intense content, these films hit the international cinema world like a bombshell. The look and feel of the films were so particular that, in similarity with the Italian master director Federico Fellini, Bergman often found his name transformed into an adjective - Bergmanesque - to denote his intense cinematic style. Even specific images themselves - the Knight playing chess with Death in The Seventh Seal, for example - have achieved an iconic resonance known the world over. This power of imagery combined with an unrelenting devotion to a very personal brand of self-expression was of historic importance in contributing to the then-developing concept of "art film," and it cemented forever Bergman's place in the filmmaking pantheon.

A variety of themes

Over the course of 50 years and just as many films, Bergman has explored a variety of themes. Although he may be most famous - initially, at least, for his brooding explorations into metaphysical questions about God, other themes inevitably emerged. Most important of these was the role of the Artist and the sometimes fine-line between creativity and madness. This theme is already integral to The Naked Night and Persona, and is equally important to The Magician and Hour of the Wolf. In addition, BergmanÅLs fascination with womenhas been a long-running motif, culminating in Cries and Whispers, famous not only for its extraordinary (and gorgeous) use of the color red, but also for the remarkable performances of the three leading actresses, Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson and Ingrid Thulin (all of whom, it should be noted, appear regularly throughout the Bergman oeuvre).

And with variations in theme came variations in tone. Notwithstanding the cliche about Bergman being "heavy," the director has also shown himself to be a master of comedy -- his joyous 1955 masterpiece Smiles of a Summer Night is just one example. Another is Bergman's last feature film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), one of his most beloved works both in his native country and around the world. Although a very serious piece at heart, Fanny and Alexander is also an epic and sumptuous love poem to the theater world, veritably bursting with its ample share of boisterous, comedic passages.

Theater and television

The importance of theater in Fanny and Alexander is no accident. For Bergman is just as much a man of the theater as of cinema. If this crucial side of his career is less known outside of Sweden, it is only because live theater is considerably more difficult to export than film is. First at various regional theaters, and then for four decades at Sweden's world-renowned Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, Bergman has staged over a hundred productions. Often featuring some of the actors appearing in his films, Bergman's theater work is known for the razor-sharp psychological clarity that the director brings to (mostly) classical texts. Using surprisingly simple, economic staging to heighten what is most essential in a play, these stage productions all the while maintain a distinct and poetic visual aspect. Innovative productions of Ibsen, Shakespeare and Moliere pop up regularly in the Bergman theater canon, but it has been the great Swedish playwright August Strindberg - not surprisingly - who has been of monumental importance to Bergman's work overall.

Ever ambitious, Bergman was hardly one to ignore the TV medium. Most famous in this category is undoubtedly the 1973 6-part miniseries Scenes From A Marriage (released outside Sweden in a shorter film version) which proved to be an unprecedented popular triumph for the director. As the story goes, once a week for an hour, all of Sweden came to a virtual halt as Swedes everywhere tuned in to watch the ensuing drama of Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) whose marriage was coming apart at the seams.

Remarkably, Marianne and Johan have resurfaced some three decades later in Saraband (2003), Bergman's latest TV film that he both wrote and directed. This haunting but ultimately hopeful film brings back the couple (with Ullmann and Josephson reprising their roles) who meet up again after not seeing each other for 30 years. As we watch them try to come to terms with their lives, the personal nature of the film becomes increasingly palpable.

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