Recently we lost one of the greatest visionaries of the cinema, Ingmar Bergman.  He was a landscape artist—his landscape being the human face—and a ruthless explorer of the human soul.  Bergman was singular, delving into the darkest regions of human being that no other filmmaker has ever managed to ford.  He used the camera like a surgeon uses a scalpel. 

His films were nihilistic but religious, exploring the fundamental questions of human existence, dispassionately looking at the meaning of suffering and pain, the arbitrary nature of death, the impossibility of redemption, and the inconsolable solitary nature of man.  It’s not that God doesn’t exist; it’s that He just isn’t listening.   In Through the Glass Darkly he tells the tale of a schizophrenic woman whose father—a doctor—is coldly detailing her madness for a book.  She is driven over the edge and into incest with her brother and ends up seeing God emerging out of a wall as a huge nasty spider. In Wild Strawberries, an ageing academic sets off to receive an honorary degree, the journey bringing him face to face with his own hollow achievements that now feel like failures and the regret that he made no room for love.  In Shame two characters experience the hopelessness of maintaining human values in a world of perpetual war.

His films can be horrific, extreme, unbearably affecting, and are always unforgettable (This from the land that brought us Abba and the insouciance of Ikea).  Winter Light is a meditation on the senselessness of the universe, or, as Bergman himself describes it, ‘a Swedish man in the midst of a Swedish reality experiencing dismal aspects of the Swedish climate.’

What was it about Bergman?  Are his movies just intrinsically Swedish, the only possible results of long barren winters, punishing Lutheranism, and Vitamin D deficiency?  My Swedish friends don’t like him.  They say he represents nothing Swedish. But I’ve been there, to Stockholm.  I went to a bar.  There was no music playing, no one was talking, no one was smiling.  There were raw wooden benches where patrons would hole up after getting a glass of basic alcohol and drink.  There was the sense of no-nonsense utilitarianism—a bar was a place where you sat under florescent lights and got as drunk as you could as fast as you could.  I felt suffused with Bergmanesque despair.  Perhaps it’s just the kind of places I search out when I go on holiday, I don’t know, but as John Waters has written of Bergman’s films, ‘…going through all sorts of agony over miscarriage, abortion, sexual frigidity, fear, unwanted children and other neuroses that seem to be to Sweden what tulips are to Holland’

Bergman was the son of a severe Lutheran pastor, a strict disciplinarian who suffered no tomfoolery.  The story that Max von Sydow’s character tells in Hour of the Wolf about being locked in a cupboard as a child and told he would be attacked by a toe-eating monster was autobiographical.  As a boy he was punished with silence. ‘Grown-ups would not speak to the offending child,’ he said, ‘until he had shown contrition . . . that really was God’s silence’

He was close to his mother, Karin, though Freudists can only speculate at the troubling nature of their relationship: Karin is the name he gives the schizophrenic daughter in Through a Glass Darkly, the girl raped and murdered by medieval hoodlums in Virgin Spring, the sister who sexually mutilates herself in Cries and Whispers, among others of his most scarred characters.

It is said that he was a very amicable fellow.  It’s said that his sets were fun.  His films were seldom fun.  He certainly had some problems when it came to comedy. All These Women was a miserable failure: the man who gave us Ingrid Thulin masturbating with a shard of broken glass in Cries and Whispers could not do slapstick.  And though Smiles of a Summer Night is inarguably an artistic highpoint, while he was writing it he attempted suicide.   Comedy was not his natural habitat.

There is almost always a moment in Bergman’s films things imperceptively start to slow down until the frame is very still.  And then a character begins to tell a story.  This is a true master at work, a filmmaker with the confidence, the bravura, to utilize a visual medium for undiluted verbal storytelling, letting us focus on the most breathtaking spectacle of all, the human face in close-up.   When people are asked about the most memorable scenes in his films, most cite scenes—Alma’s sexual escapade on the beach in Persona, Anna’s car wreck in The Passion of Anna, Johan’s childhood trauma in Hour of the Wolf—that they never actually saw.  They were told.  Bergman, who started and finished in the theatre, talks of the wonder of a character on an empty stage who says, ‘What a beautiful sunrise,’ and it will be the most beautiful sunrise the audience has ever seen. ‘No lighting professor in the whole world could create the sunset as beautiful as you have made it in your own mind.  You have created it . . . ‘He trusted the audience, trusted them enough to challenge them.

Persona has been called the most complex movie ever made.  Elisabeth is an actress who has gone dumb in the middle of a performance of Medea, Alma is the nurse sent to cure her.  What ensues is gradual disintegration of the women’s indentities, a blurring of what it means to be individual, a treachery of silence, and a questioning of the validity of art itself, not least Bergman’s own.  He dismantles the mechanisms of cinema before our very eyes, its puerile magic lantern shows impotent to say anything meaningful in a world as irrational and ruthless as our own.

His cinema is not about escapism, but the very opposite: the recognition within ourselves of our most intimate and unacknowledged feelings.  Often this recognition difficult to face; indeed, we may have spent lifetimes structuring avoidance of what he lays bare.

His influence is incalculable.  Almost single-handedly he was responsible for birthing what we know as World Cinema.  In the 1950s exhibitors took advantage of the anti-trust rulings freeing them up to programme their own screenings and Bergman’s films hit America with massive impact.  Initially screened as skin flicks, an entire generation of filmmakers—most notably Woody Allen—were inadvertently inculcated into the world of art films.  They came to his films initially for Harriet Andersson’s nubile, naked breasts; they returned for the dizzying biopsy of the soul. He made movies grow up. 

Bergman made over 50 films, retiring after the luminous, Fanny and Alexander in 1982 (though he continued to direct for the theatre and Swedish television until 2003).  Fanny and Alexander is gentle, magical and warm; a tender curtain call to a career that pulled no punches.  It is one of his few films set in the characters’ home instead of the alienation of a road trip or stranded on a barren island.

It has been said that he is no longer relevant, that in this world of ‘Big Brother’ and Jackass Number Two his ponderous, oblique films have no home.  His films are only irrelevant if art is irrelevant, if intelligence is irrelevant.  His films are irrelevant only if we allow them to be, if we stop questioning, if we stop searching, if we are so cowardly that we stop examining our own lives.

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