Ingmar Bergman's World of Dreams
Bergman’s cinema introduced the force of contemplation, a path that political cinema has rarely shown the courage to explore.
Ingmar Bergman in a 1981 photo. Credit: Reuters
Moinak Biswas
FILM
26/MAR/2018
When Ingmar Bergman (July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007) was honoured with the Erasmus Prize in 1965, he could not attend the ceremony. Instead, he sent a piece to be read out titled ‘The Snakeskin’. It is one of the bleakest in its genre, a strange and bitter testimony to the sense of doubt and futility that haunted his films.
Art, including cinema, he said, is more free and intense, but has lost all importance. It has the feverish intensity of a snakeskin full of ants, “The snake itself is long since dead, eaten out from within, deprived of its poison; but the skin moves, filled with busy life.” If he would continue to make films “(e)ven though I, and many with me, find Westerns more stimulating than Antonioni or Bergman” it was because of a consuming curiosity, and a creativity that he felt as “hunger”.
By then, Bergman already had 21 years of filmmaking behind him, with widely celebrated films such as Summer with Monika (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957) and Silence (1963). Of the post-war art cinema, he was the most emblematic director. A year later, Persona (1966) would put him in the position of an undisputed master of the league, placed by some critics a rung above Antonioni, Godard, Fellini and Bresson.
Feverish creation it indeed proved to be, with over 60 films, 172 stage productions and numerous writings. Two elements stand out: a life-long investment in theatre, unique in the career of a major director if we leave out Fassbinder; and a dogged preoccupation with a handful of themes over a prodigious corpus – death, crisis of faith, failure of communication, desperate efforts of revitalisation – almost always played out within the troubled yet inescapable circle of the family.
Legendary Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman attends a news conference for his film Troloesa in Stockholm in this May 9, 1998 file photo. Credit: Reuters/ Gunnar Seijbold/ Scanpix
All that contributed to a powerful model of ‘personal expression’ in cinema, considered a hallmark of artistic independence in the 1950s and 60s. The dynamics of the cinema as an institution governed by the logic of mass production gave personal expression its special value. The deeply personal quality of Bergman’s world, on the other hand, resonated well with the prevailing existentialist intellectual climate. As that climate shifted, Bergman’s preoccupations played a role in the decline of his reputation.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s obituary for the director boldly voiced the suspicion that he may have been overrated. There were rebuttals to the article, prominently from David Bordwell and Roger Ebert, but the very fact that a respected critic like Rosenbaum could write so sceptically upon the master’s death was an indication of a crisis.
There is perhaps not much doubt that the spectacles of existential suffering so characteristic of the men and women of Bergman’s cinema, their imploding desolation, their often inexplicable struggle with the soul, would not have the desired impact on the viewer today. But it is by freeing the director from the mould of his reputation that we can see why all cinema should remain grateful to his work.
Bergman’s extraordinary craft has never stopped inspiring practitioners. From Tarkovsky to Woody Allen, a wide range of filmmakers have learned and borrowed from him. It continues to this day if we think of the recent works of Bela Tarr (Satantango, 1994), Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, 2008), Michael Haneke (White Ribbon, 2009) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, 2014).
When we say craft, we mean not only the remarkable technical achievements: the cinematography (Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist), editing (which reached a high-point in Shame, 1968), use of actors, study of landscape etc., but also the method that makes it possible for feeling and thought to take on independent shape. One should probably ignore the spiritual convulsions of his characters to some extent to appreciate the wealth of emotions and the scope of contemplation his cinema offers. Feeling and thought often move beyond person-centric neuroses in his films to become entities in themselves. One could follow two prominent traits of his work to think about this – theatre and the face.
Perhaps the two are one. Theatre is performance, and often it comes down to the question whether the face tells the truth. The deep disgust Bergman sometimes felt with life as an organism (shared by a director like David Lynch, who owes no small debt to him) could lead him to denigrate even the most enduring faces he created. I am thinking of Erland Josephson’s harangue over Liv Ullmann’s close up in the mirror in Cries and Whispers (1972) denouncing a life of sterility and selfishness.
But it was on Ullmann’s face that the director built the most striking images of the limits of speech in Persona. That was Bergman’s answer to petulance and pontification, against the drama through which, as he said in his autobiography The Magic Lantern and elsewhere, he could lie.
Ullmann, a stage actor, simply loses the ability to speak as the film begins. Over the rest of the film, she remains silent, while her nurse, Bibi Andersson, holds up a monologue. But Andersson’s words fail to convince us of their truth: we are not always sure if she refers to actual events or is narrating dreams. This is where Bergman begins to transform presence – vision, speech – into a set of relations that constitutes a parallel world.
These, more than the brilliant reflexive prologue and endings of Persona, affords his cinema the opportunity to think. The face in Bergman oscillates between the mask and the visage. His cinema is theatrical in this sense too; not only because of the taut drama and powerful performances, or for the repeated use of the theme of staging. And faces often look directly at us – again a trace of the theatre. He creates a rift in the order of reality on the screen through the tentative positioning of the face.
“The close-up is the face”, writes the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “There is no close-up of the face”. He thought especially of Bergman as he wrote this. Soon after Persona, where the art of the close-up attains great musical power, he pushed the face beyond the lines of balance in what is probably his most significant film, Shame.
As a nameless war rages all around, Ullmann and Max von Sydow, a musician couple, experience an unstoppable draining of love and compassion. The face, especially Ullmann’s, often comes too close to the camera, gets out of focus, fragmented. The contemplating face becomes rare. Instead, we are invited to reflect on the very coordinates of sensible reality.
This most political of Bergman’s films rests his world, set repeatedly in his favourite island of Faro from the mid-sixties on, on inscriptions of historical tragedy. Even as private lives undergo unbearable convulsions, Bergman manages to set the process of contemplation free from the person and extend it over the dreadful beauty of the surrounding nature. As they are captured by a fascist army and taken into an interrogation centre, Ullmann says, “Everything seems like a dream”.
In the final shots, when they are drifting away in a boat in the misty ocean (evoking images of Syrian refugees for us today), her words seem to come from the depths of a dream. The uncertain separation between dream and reality has been a characteristic feature of Bergman’s films, but here something else happens: the world seems to be dreaming.
In this cleft of reality, Bergman’s cinema introduced the force of contemplation, a path that political cinema has rarely shown the courage to explore.
Moinak Biswas is Professor of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.Ingmar Bergman's World of Dreams
Bergman’s cinema introduced the force of contemplation, a path that political cinema has rarely shown the courage to explore.
Ingmar Bergman's World of Dreams
Bergman’s cinema introduced the force of contemplation, a path that political cinema has rarely shown the courage to explore.
Ingmar Bergman in a 1981 photo. Credit: Reuters
Moinak Biswas
FILM
26/MAR/2018
When Ingmar Bergman (July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007) was honoured with the Erasmus Prize in 1965, he could not attend the ceremony. Instead, he sent a piece to be read out titled ‘The Snakeskin’. It is one of the bleakest in its genre, a strange and bitter testimony to the sense of doubt and futility that haunted his films.
Art, including cinema, he said, is more free and intense, but has lost all importance. It has the feverish intensity of a snakeskin full of ants, “The snake itself is long since dead, eaten out from within, deprived of its poison; but the skin moves, filled with busy life.” If he would continue to make films “(e)ven though I, and many with me, find Westerns more stimulating than Antonioni or Bergman” it was because of a consuming curiosity, and a creativity that he felt as “hunger”.
By then, Bergman already had 21 years of filmmaking behind him, with widely celebrated films such as Summer with Monika (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957) and Silence (1963). Of the post-war art cinema, he was the most emblematic director. A year later, Persona (1966) would put him in the position of an undisputed master of the league, placed by some critics a rung above Antonioni, Godard, Fellini and Bresson.
Feverish creation it indeed proved to be, with over 60 films, 172 stage productions and numerous writings. Two elements stand out: a life-long investment in theatre, unique in the career of a major director if we leave out Fassbinder; and a dogged preoccupation with a handful of themes over a prodigious corpus – death, crisis of faith, failure of communication, desperate efforts of revitalisation – almost always played out within the troubled yet inescapable circle of the family.
Legendary Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman attends a news conference for his film Troloesa in Stockholm in this May 9, 1998 file photo. Credit: Reuters/ Gunnar Seijbold/ Scanpix
All that contributed to a powerful model of ‘personal expression’ in cinema, considered a hallmark of artistic independence in the 1950s and 60s. The dynamics of the cinema as an institution governed by the logic of mass production gave personal expression its special value. The deeply personal quality of Bergman’s world, on the other hand, resonated well with the prevailing existentialist intellectual climate. As that climate shifted, Bergman’s preoccupations played a role in the decline of his reputation.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s obituary for the director boldly voiced the suspicion that he may have been overrated. There were rebuttals to the article, prominently from David Bordwell and Roger Ebert, but the very fact that a respected critic like Rosenbaum could write so sceptically upon the master’s death was an indication of a crisis.
There is perhaps not much doubt that the spectacles of existential suffering so characteristic of the men and women of Bergman’s cinema, their imploding desolation, their often inexplicable struggle with the soul, would not have the desired impact on the viewer today. But it is by freeing the director from the mould of his reputation that we can see why all cinema should remain grateful to his work.
Bergman’s extraordinary craft has never stopped inspiring practitioners. From Tarkovsky to Woody Allen, a wide range of filmmakers have learned and borrowed from him. It continues to this day if we think of the recent works of Bela Tarr (Satantango, 1994), Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, 2008), Michael Haneke (White Ribbon, 2009) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, 2014).
When we say craft, we mean not only the remarkable technical achievements: the cinematography (Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist), editing (which reached a high-point in Shame, 1968), use of actors, study of landscape etc., but also the method that makes it possible for feeling and thought to take on independent shape. One should probably ignore the spiritual convulsions of his characters to some extent to appreciate the wealth of emotions and the scope of contemplation his cinema offers. Feeling and thought often move beyond person-centric neuroses in his films to become entities in themselves. One could follow two prominent traits of his work to think about this – theatre and the face.
Perhaps the two are one. Theatre is performance, and often it comes down to the question whether the face tells the truth. The deep disgust Bergman sometimes felt with life as an organism (shared by a director like David Lynch, who owes no small debt to him) could lead him to denigrate even the most enduring faces he created. I am thinking of Erland Josephson’s harangue over Liv Ullmann’s close up in the mirror in Cries and Whispers (1972) denouncing a life of sterility and selfishness.
But it was on Ullmann’s face that the director built the most striking images of the limits of speech in Persona. That was Bergman’s answer to petulance and pontification, against the drama through which, as he said in his autobiography The Magic Lantern and elsewhere, he could lie.
Ullmann, a stage actor, simply loses the ability to speak as the film begins. Over the rest of the film, she remains silent, while her nurse, Bibi Andersson, holds up a monologue. But Andersson’s words fail to convince us of their truth: we are not always sure if she refers to actual events or is narrating dreams. This is where Bergman begins to transform presence – vision, speech – into a set of relations that constitutes a parallel world.
These, more than the brilliant reflexive prologue and endings of Persona, affords his cinema the opportunity to think. The face in Bergman oscillates between the mask and the visage. His cinema is theatrical in this sense too; not only because of the taut drama and powerful performances, or for the repeated use of the theme of staging. And faces often look directly at us – again a trace of the theatre. He creates a rift in the order of reality on the screen through the tentative positioning of the face.
“The close-up is the face”, writes the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “There is no close-up of the face”. He thought especially of Bergman as he wrote this. Soon after Persona, where the art of the close-up attains great musical power, he pushed the face beyond the lines of balance in what is probably his most significant film, Shame.
As a nameless war rages all around, Ullmann and Max von Sydow, a musician couple, experience an unstoppable draining of love and compassion. The face, especially Ullmann’s, often comes too close to the camera, gets out of focus, fragmented. The contemplating face becomes rare. Instead, we are invited to reflect on the very coordinates of sensible reality.
This most political of Bergman’s films rests his world, set repeatedly in his favourite island of Faro from the mid-sixties on, on inscriptions of historical tragedy. Even as private lives undergo unbearable convulsions, Bergman manages to set the process of contemplation free from the person and extend it over the dreadful beauty of the surrounding nature. As they are captured by a fascist army and taken into an interrogation centre, Ullmann says, “Everything seems like a dream”.
In the final shots, when they are drifting away in a boat in the misty ocean (evoking images of Syrian refugees for us today), her words seem to come from the depths of a dream. The uncertain separation between dream and reality has been a characteristic feature of Bergman’s films, but here something else happens: the world seems to be dreaming.
In this cleft of reality, Bergman’s cinema introduced the force of contemplation, a path that political cinema has rarely shown the courage to explore.
Moinak Biswas is Professor of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
Ingmar Bergman in a 1981 photo. Credit: Reuters
Moinak Biswas
FILM
26/MAR/2018
When Ingmar Bergman (July 14, 1918 – July 30, 2007) was honoured with the Erasmus Prize in 1965, he could not attend the ceremony. Instead, he sent a piece to be read out titled ‘The Snakeskin’. It is one of the bleakest in its genre, a strange and bitter testimony to the sense of doubt and futility that haunted his films.
Art, including cinema, he said, is more free and intense, but has lost all importance. It has the feverish intensity of a snakeskin full of ants, “The snake itself is long since dead, eaten out from within, deprived of its poison; but the skin moves, filled with busy life.” If he would continue to make films “(e)ven though I, and many with me, find Westerns more stimulating than Antonioni or Bergman” it was because of a consuming curiosity, and a creativity that he felt as “hunger”.
By then, Bergman already had 21 years of filmmaking behind him, with widely celebrated films such as Summer with Monika (1953), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957) and Silence (1963). Of the post-war art cinema, he was the most emblematic director. A year later, Persona (1966) would put him in the position of an undisputed master of the league, placed by some critics a rung above Antonioni, Godard, Fellini and Bresson.
Feverish creation it indeed proved to be, with over 60 films, 172 stage productions and numerous writings. Two elements stand out: a life-long investment in theatre, unique in the career of a major director if we leave out Fassbinder; and a dogged preoccupation with a handful of themes over a prodigious corpus – death, crisis of faith, failure of communication, desperate efforts of revitalisation – almost always played out within the troubled yet inescapable circle of the family.
Legendary Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman attends a news conference for his film Troloesa in Stockholm in this May 9, 1998 file photo. Credit: Reuters/ Gunnar Seijbold/ Scanpix
All that contributed to a powerful model of ‘personal expression’ in cinema, considered a hallmark of artistic independence in the 1950s and 60s. The dynamics of the cinema as an institution governed by the logic of mass production gave personal expression its special value. The deeply personal quality of Bergman’s world, on the other hand, resonated well with the prevailing existentialist intellectual climate. As that climate shifted, Bergman’s preoccupations played a role in the decline of his reputation.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s obituary for the director boldly voiced the suspicion that he may have been overrated. There were rebuttals to the article, prominently from David Bordwell and Roger Ebert, but the very fact that a respected critic like Rosenbaum could write so sceptically upon the master’s death was an indication of a crisis.
There is perhaps not much doubt that the spectacles of existential suffering so characteristic of the men and women of Bergman’s cinema, their imploding desolation, their often inexplicable struggle with the soul, would not have the desired impact on the viewer today. But it is by freeing the director from the mould of his reputation that we can see why all cinema should remain grateful to his work.
Bergman’s extraordinary craft has never stopped inspiring practitioners. From Tarkovsky to Woody Allen, a wide range of filmmakers have learned and borrowed from him. It continues to this day if we think of the recent works of Bela Tarr (Satantango, 1994), Arnaud Desplechin (A Christmas Tale, 2008), Michael Haneke (White Ribbon, 2009) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Winter Sleep, 2014).
When we say craft, we mean not only the remarkable technical achievements: the cinematography (Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist), editing (which reached a high-point in Shame, 1968), use of actors, study of landscape etc., but also the method that makes it possible for feeling and thought to take on independent shape. One should probably ignore the spiritual convulsions of his characters to some extent to appreciate the wealth of emotions and the scope of contemplation his cinema offers. Feeling and thought often move beyond person-centric neuroses in his films to become entities in themselves. One could follow two prominent traits of his work to think about this – theatre and the face.
Perhaps the two are one. Theatre is performance, and often it comes down to the question whether the face tells the truth. The deep disgust Bergman sometimes felt with life as an organism (shared by a director like David Lynch, who owes no small debt to him) could lead him to denigrate even the most enduring faces he created. I am thinking of Erland Josephson’s harangue over Liv Ullmann’s close up in the mirror in Cries and Whispers (1972) denouncing a life of sterility and selfishness.
But it was on Ullmann’s face that the director built the most striking images of the limits of speech in Persona. That was Bergman’s answer to petulance and pontification, against the drama through which, as he said in his autobiography The Magic Lantern and elsewhere, he could lie.
Ullmann, a stage actor, simply loses the ability to speak as the film begins. Over the rest of the film, she remains silent, while her nurse, Bibi Andersson, holds up a monologue. But Andersson’s words fail to convince us of their truth: we are not always sure if she refers to actual events or is narrating dreams. This is where Bergman begins to transform presence – vision, speech – into a set of relations that constitutes a parallel world.
These, more than the brilliant reflexive prologue and endings of Persona, affords his cinema the opportunity to think. The face in Bergman oscillates between the mask and the visage. His cinema is theatrical in this sense too; not only because of the taut drama and powerful performances, or for the repeated use of the theme of staging. And faces often look directly at us – again a trace of the theatre. He creates a rift in the order of reality on the screen through the tentative positioning of the face.
“The close-up is the face”, writes the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “There is no close-up of the face”. He thought especially of Bergman as he wrote this. Soon after Persona, where the art of the close-up attains great musical power, he pushed the face beyond the lines of balance in what is probably his most significant film, Shame.
As a nameless war rages all around, Ullmann and Max von Sydow, a musician couple, experience an unstoppable draining of love and compassion. The face, especially Ullmann’s, often comes too close to the camera, gets out of focus, fragmented. The contemplating face becomes rare. Instead, we are invited to reflect on the very coordinates of sensible reality.
This most political of Bergman’s films rests his world, set repeatedly in his favourite island of Faro from the mid-sixties on, on inscriptions of historical tragedy. Even as private lives undergo unbearable convulsions, Bergman manages to set the process of contemplation free from the person and extend it over the dreadful beauty of the surrounding nature. As they are captured by a fascist army and taken into an interrogation centre, Ullmann says, “Everything seems like a dream”.
In the final shots, when they are drifting away in a boat in the misty ocean (evoking images of Syrian refugees for us today), her words seem to come from the depths of a dream. The uncertain separation between dream and reality has been a characteristic feature of Bergman’s films, but here something else happens: the world seems to be dreaming.
In this cleft of reality, Bergman’s cinema introduced the force of contemplation, a path that political cinema has rarely shown the courage to explore.
Moinak Biswas is Professor of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata.
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