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A Giant Falls |
 INGMAR BERGMAN ...in his prime while directing 'Wild Strawberries' in 1957 |
The last of the old masters
finally takes his leave
of TheColumnists.com
One evening, when I was dating the young woman who eventually became my wife, we stopped at her house after seeing a film by Ingmar Bergman and began trying to unravel some of the symbolism we'd seen on the screen. One of her younger sisters, then a teenager, listened patiently for awhile, then finally just had to speak up.
"I don't get it," she said. "Why would you two go to a movie when you can't even figure out what it's about while you're watching it? You're doing this all the time, aren't you? Haven't you ever gone to a movie just for fun?"
Well, what can I say? Perhaps this: Her little sister is probably one of the many American teenagers who grew up to be people who weren't in the least disturbed at the news that Ingmar Bergman had died last week at the venerable age of 89. If they knew the name at all, they probably thought he was Ingrid Bergman's uncle or something.
Ingmar Bergman probably was the very last of the living "old masters" that I came to revere as a young cineaste or, if you prefer common language, as a young movie freak. They're all gone now: Welles, Hitchcock, Hawks, Capra, Fellini, Truffaut, Malle, Kurosawa, Ray, Bergman and even young whippersnappers like Kubrick. Bergman stopped filming a decade ago, but he was still alive and kicking. I felt better just knowing that.
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Ullmann and Ingrid Bergman in "Autumn Sonata." |
Yes, there were times when Bergman's films could be pretentious. As great a film as I'm sure it is, if you're in the proper mood, I never got with "The Seventh Seal." I guess Death playing chess with a medieval knight just didn't intoxicate me enough with intellectuality. I like my symbolism best when it doesn't hit me over the head.
But I dearly loved "Wild Strawberries" (1957), the somber story of an old doctor who's making a journey to receive an honorary degree and can't help reliving the memory of a youthful romance that has haunted him throughout his life. It was sad and bittersweet and loaded with little touches that seemed to indicate even greater meaning if you could just figure out what they symbolized. I remember sitting around with my roommates in our college apartment, located over a doctor's office, and pooling our mental resources to puzzle the movie out while soaking up enough cheap beer to make it rather a difficult task.
In the 1950s, when I first discovered Bergman films, films from Sweden were supposed to be "naughty." I guess that meant you occasionally saw a woman's breasts or the subject under discussion had to do with sex. I never thought Bergman's films were especially sexy, not even "Illicit Interlude," "Summer with Monika" or "Smiles of A Summer Night," which were supposed to be "risque."
That isn't to say that he didn't have some mighty good-looking women involved in his films, among them Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and especially Liv Ullmann. I think I saw most of them at least partially naked, but mostly remember what good actresses they were--and how often they got me involved in their troubles.
I never saw a dubbed Bergman film. I liked to listen to the Swedish dialogue spoken by the real actors, evem if that meant missing much nuance in the actual words being spoken. Until his later years, Bergman's films were always black and white, which seemed appropriate to stories that often were stripped of all the niceties of life.
What was truly great about Bergman was the fact that his films almost always dalt with serious and weighty issues about which viewers could argue and debate endlessly. The thing I couldn't explain to the young sister was that trying to solve a puzzle together can be lots of fun. Films that last longer than the time you're watching them are becoming rarer today. Bergman's films always gave you much to talk about because they dealt with such common and central issues.
In my second favorite Bergman film, "Persona," the director has a nurse (Bibi Andersson) caring for a famous actress (Liv Ullmann). At least I think that's what he has. As the women continue to get to know each other, we realize how much like each other they are becoming. Is the actress imagining the nurse? Is she beginning to act like the nurse because she's a role she is studying? Or is it the other way around? Ultimately, Bergman does something startling: He brings the two faces together and merges them!
If you follow my drift, I don't think any Bergman fan wants a subtitle that tells him what to think about what he's seeing. You wanted to take on Bergman's challenge because that's what was fun about his movies.
In his later days, Bergman made two color films that were much more accessible than his earlier works. One was "Autumn Sonata" (1978), in which three-time Oscar winner Ingrid Bergman returned to her native Sweden to play an aging concert pianist who's at odds with her adult daughter (Liv Ullmann). Watching Ingrid play this role in Swedish convinced me I would have understood her character no matter what language she was speaking.
In "Autumn Sonata" and "Fanny and Alexander" (1982) Bergman became extremely nostalgic, revisiting his own youth in much the same manner that Federico Fellini did in such films as "Amarcord" or "And the Ship Sails On." These films weren't as cerebrally engaging as his earlier works, but they were warm and rich with captivating anectdotal material. They just gave us another side of Bergman that we'd forgotten was an essential part of his creative makeup.
Some critics argue that Bergman, who also worked busily in theatre, was a stage-bound director and not really a cinematic innovator. Who cares? He used film to bring us absorbing and stimulating stories that worked perfectly well if you rose to his challenge. Though Woody Allen, who idolized him, has made his Bergman homage films ("Interiors," "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," etc.), there is really nobody out there doing what Bergman did for some 50 years.
I'm hoping Bergman's death will bring a great outpouring of new DVD releases of his more obscure films and maybe new--and less expensive--versions of his most popular films. I think there's a whole generation that doesn't know about him and his luminous work. It's time for that to change.
©2007 by Ron Miller. This column first posted Aug. 6, 2007.
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