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Carletto di San Giovanni:]

The following essay was written by Hamish Ford from the website sensesofcinema.com

Ingmar Bergman's mature cinema provokes the viewer into an intimate engagement in which a range of uncomfortable feelings are opened up, shared and laid bare. And this often occurs, quite literally, face-to-face.

An encounter with Bergman's seminal 1966 film Persona is exemplary here. The film's original title was Cinematographet, Swedish for 'cinematography'. But either name is appropriate for a work that enacts inquiries into cinema and the subject in states of fecund but disturbing ontological breakdown. And this can perhaps most clearly be seen in Bergman's extraordinary use of the close-up, which Gilles Deleuze described as enforcing a coalescence of the human face with the void.

The relentless close-up of the face is a useful formal and thematic key to Bergman's work. In these frequent, almost embarrassingly close and radically elongated moments the viewer can see, think and feel existential sureties in different states of crisis - as we watch subjects reduced to pure flesh, bones, mouth, nose, hair and eyes.

The detail of this fine-focus dissection forces us to confront both the inscrutable materiality of the face, and its role as the communicative nerve centre of the individual subject's investments. The camera moves in uncomfortably, almost seeking to go inside – until a giant abstracted face fills the frame, stopping the zoom dead. The viewer is confronted with a close yet also alienating proximity to such a large expanse of human exterior, while we watch our enormous diegetic companion ask of itself 'what' it is, as it faces a very personal void.

A dual gaze of inquiry takes place here, whereby the onscreen subject's gaze of self-conscious crisis meets the viewer's implicated looking upon – and participation in – that image. Both face and viewer seem to feel the intermixing and breaking down of diegetic and meta-diegetic space, and intensities of looking. This is sparked and enforced by Bergman's tight use of a 1.33:1 frame which often excludes any clear glimpses of the world beyond a face which finds no up, down, left or right in which to direct its gaze.

Imprisoned in its relentless close-up, the face seems to search beyond the dimensions of the frame only to find a black-hole space immune to cinematic life. Shut in on all four sides, the face then looks to the one direction not limited by the screen's graphic dimensions, into a space that is much more than a black hole.

This final movement where the giant face gazes straight out of the screen, visually exploring a world beyond that in which it traditionally exists, connects the space of the diegetic subject to my space. And here I sit, troubled yet also thrilled by this uncomfortably intimate experience.

Where is Bergman?: the problem of (a) demonic authorship

The central presence of Bergman's films in my own experience and personal cinema history contrasts strongly with their position a propos of revisionist film histories. Bergman's work was totally unmentioned during my undergraduate studies in the early/mid-1990s, and I only developed a relationship with the films through auto-didactic means. In many ways, of all the renowned filmmakers from the past, no-one's reputation seems to have fallen so far from international deification to obscurity.

Bergman has written and directed around fifty feature films, and for over twenty years from the late-'50s his work was canonical to 'art-house' movie culture, academic cinema studies and film clubs all over the world. Today, a young film enthusiast or student is most likely only to have seen The Seventh Seal or perhaps Wild Strawberries (both 1957), or in some countries, Persona. However, they are just as likely to have seen no Bergman at all.

Taking nothing away from the '50s hits that made Bergman the cult director of art cinema's pre-nouvelle vague heyday, I would contend that the key to his work for the serious contemporary viewer potentially lies with this filmmaker's unique modernism, most notably found in the '60s films.

Unsurprisingly, the apogee of Bergman's idiosyncratic modernist explorations also comprises the work in which his particular authorial intensity is at its strongest. In an ambivalent article in the January 2002 issue of Sight and Sound, Peter Matthews suggests Bergman's critical fate rests on authorial markers that are almost uniquely “overdetermined”. All Bergman's mature work exhibits what is both the most appealing and disconcerting about his films; no one has enunciated a clearer and more intimate authorial voice through cinema's mass-produced, industrial medium.

At the time of release, Bergman's most important work was often received as a 'personal cinema' of virtually unparalleled strength. There was something very exciting about images that could generate such feelings of raw, complex subjectivity. Yet reading some of the critical work from the 1960s and '70s there also seemed something worrying about this cinema's power, especially as enunciated and shaped through the figure of a demonic author-subject.

By the 1980s and into the '90s, the kind of excessive authorial stamp Bergman's films so powerfully rendered sure enough became increasingly suspect. As Matthews tells it, once authorship and the film 'masterpiece' came to be broadly critiqued and the deified film artist was downgraded to make way for genre valorisation amid revisionist histories of cinema, Bergman became a target of attack or was deemed an irrelevancy. Surveying the impact a changing view of authorship has had on Bergman's reputation, Matthews concludes he must be “denied the foremost rank among the auteurist seraphim.”

Yet Matthews' essay itself illustrates that ultimately Bergman's work cannot really be accounted for within the criteria of auteurism, which was originally designed as a polemical means to unearth authorial traces and visual artistry in Hollywood cinema, (and which Truffaut, among others, declared by the early-'60s to be outdated). The excessively foregrounded appearance, or 'function', of Bergman's authorial signature – in late modernist tradition, to the point of extreme auto-critique and crisis – that Matthews highlights, is precisely what makes an attempt to try judge the films in auteurist terms unconvincing.

Nowhere in Bergman's most important films is there the energising tension between 'content' and 'form' that auteur criticism saw in select Hollywood films. Bergman wrote the majority of his screenplays alone, and at the height of his career experienced an unparalleled creative freedom. As read into the films, author 'Bergman' feels the existential weight of expressive responsibility, as he revels in modern cinema's aesthetic and philosophical potential while also asking what relevance and ethical effect the culturally-encoded author has within modernity's social real. Some mythically inscribed author-function is both demonically felt by the viewer in engagement with these films, and always in crisis as a performatively exaggerated and disturbing modern subjectivity exploring vertiginous freedoms of address through cinema's plastic expression.

After marking him an also-ran auteur, Matthews' article changes tack for the final sentences, saying:

Bergman's guilt-ridden desire to crack open the narcissistic shell and face reality strikes a distinct chord in our newly troubled times. Perhaps he is only just beginning to speak to us.

This undeveloped point adds to broad questions of late which ask whether recent global events might contribute to a realignment of what strikes us as relevant and worth facing in contemporary art, discourse and everyday experience.

So 'apolitical' and self-obsessed to his detractors, Bergman's most difficult work forces us to ask of ourselves who and what we are, and how we live with others – hardly questions outside proper contemporary ethical, political and social considerations. Cocooned in social networks and watching a new global war slowly gestate on television, the freshly darkened skies bring such basic, yet hard and disturbing engagement to the forefront of our difficult thought and action in the only sphere over which we have any real control, daily experience.

But where is the quintessential writer-director of what Matthews calls “the hard stuff” (the title of his Bergman article)? Where is the figure that at one time in the 1970s was the subject of more book-length studies than any other filmmaker? Important here is the recent availability of Bergman's films on DVD.

With their abrasive intimacies, there was always something a bit too public, too 'shared', about watching films like Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Persona, or Scenes from a Marriage (1973) with strangers or friends in the cinema. At home, with a film preserved in almost hyper-real fidelity, one has the undistracted opportunity to experience and reflect upon the awkwardly close power of our singular encounter – face to (onscreen) face.

Perhaps most importantly, DVD allows Bergman's peak modernist work, in which the thorny issues of demonic subjectivity and authorship are most thoroughly explored and intertwined, the possibility of a fresh position within contemporary film discourse and history. In his excellent 1982 book Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art, Paisley Livingston hones in on the problem of Bergman's particular modernism, saying that already:

[t]he filmmaker who still best exemplifies to a large part of the public the serious and difficult artist is often ignored by critics whose stated concern is the art of film. To them, Bergman represents only a stage in film history that has been bypassed in the inexorable progress of the avant-garde. As a modernist who is no longer new, Bergman falls prey to the danger identified in one of Oscar Wilde's sayings: “Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.”

Livingston counters what he saw at the time as a fashionable view that the questions Bergman's cinema asks have been answered or overcome. Twenty years later, the kind of linearity avant-garde discourses may have privileged in the past now seems emblematic of modernism's ideology of forward thrust. Removed from their role as a stretch of road in modern cinema's relentless progress, Bergman's films can today be looked at through new eyes and re-thought, to see what they might now say in newly troubled times.

It may be that the problems Bergman's most challenging cinema so powerfully and disturbingly raises have not only not been answered; looked at afresh, they could be more pressing than ever. Rather than experiments overcome by newer progressive models, now that the era of modernism is deemed to have passed, this work seems more daringly etched and radical then ever.

The high modernism of films like Persona is not the beginning of the Bergman story. Yet some of the problems viewers and critics have had with his mature work stretches right back to the beginning of this filmmaker's massive corpus.

Stylistic diversity, nihilism and comedy: early work (1945 – 1956)

The fifteen feature films Bergman directed between 1945 and 1954 received very mixed reactions in Sweden. A review of Crisis, his first film as director, argued:

there is something unbridled, nervously out of control in Bergman's imagination that makes a disquieting impression. He [...] seems to be incapable of keeping a mental level of normalcy. What the Swedish cinema needs in the first place are not experimenters, but intelligent, rational people…

Such criticism exemplifies problems Swedish film writers would intermittently continue to have with Bergman's work throughout his career. This quote and the copious writing that followed over forty years (perhaps most notably the criticism he received from the Swedish Left in the 1960s) suggests this filmmaker's position as a pebble in the shoe of a hyper-Enlightenment culture, loudly articulating repressed aspects of a highly rationalist modernity.

Bergman's 1940s work, to which domestic criticism responded so unenthusiastically, is drenched through with a pessimistic existentialism. The protagonists of these films are young disaffected figures that dwell on the social and economic margins of contemporary life in Stockholm, outraged at the inevitable failure of their attempts to find a niche in the daily modes of a tedious and conservative socio-economic real.

If there is a consistent thematic of youthful existential despair, these early films also show Bergman trying out diverse formal techniques to fit his thematic concerns. Hence we can see the clear influence of Rossellini in the gritty mise-en-scene of the films right after the war, and Hitchcock (with Rope) around 1948 with a move towards long takes and tracking shots.

The '40s work comes to a peak with what now seems the clearer early formal-thematic Bergman signatures of 1949's Prison, with its nihilistic brooding and harsh expressionism. However, it is with Summer Interlude (1951) that we find the filmmaker's first wholly masterful utterance. This film goes beyond a precious youthful cry at the abyss, and adds rich layers of memory and projection to the portrayal of a thirty-something woman as she looks back on the choices made when she was young enough to not feel the weight of time. In the final scene we watch realistic yet at the same time highly oneiric images of the central character confronted backstage at the theatre by a man in grotesque clown make-up, as she is forced to 'confess' her chilling and vertiginous freedom and responsibility.

The newly mature existentialist quandaries of Summer Interlude clearly states the modern subject's situation which one can discern in every Bergman film of the 1950s: how to sustain a life without real belief – in human good, in society, in God, or even in the self.

Finnish writer and filmmaker Jörn Donner described Sweden in 1972 as the most secularised country in the world, and hence the furthest down the road of a crisis related to the disappearance of belief. Continuing this line in 1995, Swedish Bergman scholar Maaret Koskinen argues that as new secular forms “did not succeed in filling the void and replacing the old norms, a spiritual unrest emerged in Swedish society.” Koskinen and Donner both argue Bergman's films are a reflexive symptom of this crisis, awkwardly and noisily playing it out. In this way, the religious element in Bergman's films is really an image of lack rather than belief – as Koskinen says, rendering the “void that 'has remained' after material welfare has been taken care of. Or, as Bergman himself is supposed to have said, 'When all the problems seem to be solved, then the difficulties come.'”

In contrast to influential Scandinavian and Anglo-American thematic analysis, it was the formal aspects of Bergman's films which first attracted French critics, whose response (starting with Bazin in 1947) really kick-started Bergman's international success in the 1950s. In Godard's overview on the occasion of a hugely successful 1958 Bergman retrospective in Paris, there is a rapturous discussion of a shot in Summer with Monika (1953).

In the film, a fantastic summer-idyll has been terminated by chilly reality for the teenage Monika (played by Harriet Andersson, an icon of unbridled 'natural' Swedish beauty, and of whom Antoine's friend in The 400 Blows [Truffaut, 1959] steals a publicity still) and her boyfriend. Having returned to a drab rational civilization from paradise gone sour, Monika rejects her lover and father of her child, motherhood and family life. Amid this rebellion comes Godard's moment of fascination. In a grimy cafe Monika slowly turns to face the audience to stare out without reservation at us, in a then remarkable meta-diegetic excursion in narrative cinema – a sober and reflexive marking-off of illusion through a young woman's 'no'.

Monika enacts here a typically Bergmanesque moment of ambiguous negativity (is she an existentialist hero, or moral villain?). Her actions both question the metaphysical investments of a culture and its control of individual subjects, while also forcing us to consider the dissenting individual's ethical impact on others. These gestures will be played out in even more violently ambivalent ways through other Bergman films.

Released the same year, Sawdust and Tinsel is the expressionist correlative of Summer with Monika's gritty realism. Here Bergman uses circus performers to exaggeratedly portray an everyday life where bodies are always in the service of others – in ritualized daily employment and in interpersonal relations, where abject humiliation and emotional violence are the result of a crisis-ridden subjectivity's impact on the immediate world. Slated upon release for its harsh images and portrayal of debased personal and professional relations, the film was later seen as a quantum leap for Bergman's formal-thematic inventiveness.

But films like Sawdust and Tinsel were commercial disasters, so in an attempt to keep working Bergman also made a series of comedies at this time for his studio, Svensk Filmindustri. These more commercial efforts like Waiting Women (1952) and Lessons in Love (1954) show Bergman's unease with the comic idiom. But their tensions between comedy's normal function and Bergman's more typical inclinations also create a fascinating conflict, something self-consciously developed in the final (and finest) of these works, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

Winning a major prize at Cannes in 1956, and setting Bergman off to international success, Smiles of a Summer Night now looks atypical of Bergman's brooding philosophical cinema. Yet despite its air of French farce, its primary mood is Mozartian comedy with a dark underbelly, energized by a dialectic of humor and rancid truth beneath the veneer of self-conscious laughter. This is a comedy about the failure of comedy to fulfill its promise of cathartically laughing away the horror and absurdity of human emotions and the pathetic farce of subjects attempting to satisfactorily live by ridiculous societal rules. Smiles deals with the problems of how human beings behave when belief lies in shreds – something Bergman's next films more directly and seriously pursue.

With the Svensk Filmindustri phones ringing hot for sales of Bergman's international hit comedy, the filmmaker slipped his most personal script yet onto the producer's desk. Drunk with the success their Cannes-crowned auteur was bringing the company, a cheap shoot was approved. The outcome was The Seventh Seal– a genuine landmark in film history that would exemplify 'art cinema' the world over for years to come.

Memorable Quotes:

Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.
--"Ingmar's self portrait" (1957) as quoted in "Who is he really?"

This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?
--"Jöns" (Gunnar Björnstrand) in The Seventh Seal (1957)

Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life. My days pass by in solitude.
--"Isak Borg" (Victor Sjöström) in Wild Strawberries (1957)

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been my great source of recreation and stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically.
--"Introduction" of Four Screenplays (1960)

People ask what are my intentions with my films — my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed — master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; 'eternal values,' 'immortality' and 'masterpiece' were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation.

The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.

We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster's whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon's head, an angel, a devil — or perhaps a saint — out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.

Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.
--Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (1960)

You find him disgusting with his thick mouth and ugly body and wet appealing eyes. You think he's disgusting and you're afraid.
--"Alma" (Bibi Andersson) in Persona (1966)

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death — this infantile fixation of mine — was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry — with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'
--Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (1971)

In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me.
--On Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with John Simon (1971)

I think he's a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho, he had some moments. Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more — no, I don't want to know — about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.
--On Alfred Hitchcock in an interview with John Simon (1971)

I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.
--As quoted in Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images. --The New York Times (22 January 1978)

I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable. I think it's awful.
--BBC article (10 April 2004)

I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and [illegible] liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.
--On his plans for his autobiography Laterna Magica, as quoted in "Who is he really?"

When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure...
--On Andrei Tarkovsky in Laterna Magica (1987); The Magic Lantern : An Autobiography as translated by Joan Tate (1988) [also sometimes referred to as The Magical Lantern]

I hope I never get so old I get religious.
--As quoted in the International Herald Tribune (8 September 1989)

The demons are innumerable, arrive at the most inappropriate times and create panic and terror... but I have learned that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage.... Lilies often grow out of carcasses' arseholes.
--As quoted in "Bergman talks of his dreams and demons in rare interview" by Xan Brooks, The Guardian (12 December 2001)

Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.
--Laterna Magica (1987); The Magic Lantern : An Autobiography as translated by Joan Tate (1988)

Variant translation: Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
--As quoted in "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" by John Berger, Sight and Sound (June 1991)

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