Ingmar Bergman

by Hamish Ford

Hamish Ford is a lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
Newcastle, and a regular contributor to Senses of Cinema.

b. July 14, 1918, Uppsala, Sweden

d. July 30, 2007, Fårö, Sweden

The radical intimacy of Bergman

Prologue: facing the void

I came out of that movie house reeling like a drunkard, drugged speechless, with the
film rushing through my bloodstream, pumping and thudding.

Gunnel Lindblom, star of The Silence, describing her first experience of a Bergman
film in 1949 (1)

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. (2)

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.” (3)

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. (4)
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? (5) 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.” (6)

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… (7)

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. (8) 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.’” (9)

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) (10) 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). (11)

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.

Belief in crisis: The Seventh Seal & halcyon art cinema (1957 – 1960)

The Seventh Seal is Bergman’s most famous work, much pastiched by Monty Python,
Woody Allen, and in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001, via a metaphysical
cowboy, one of his many Bergman references). Starring Max von Sydow, Gunnar
Björnstrand and Bibi Andersson, this story of a Knight who plays a game of chess
with Death as he returns from the Crusades, made Bergman the cult director of the
late-’50s. Its beautiful high-contrast images of medieval Sweden and von Sydow’s
anguished performance made for icons of a new existentialist cinema that resonated
deeply with a world at the height of the Cold War. To late-’50s audiences it asked
what metaphysical schemas and values humanity can possibly live by in a time when
apocalyptic death is a daily threat, and when structures of belief seem to bring only
regression, blindness and servitude.
Like Rome, Open City (Rossellini, 1945) and Rashomon (Kurosawa, 1950) before it,
The Seventh Seal was a watershed ‘foreign film’ in its critical and audience impact
around the world. It became perhaps the central work in a halcyon period for ‘art
cinema’, opening the way in the US and Britain for the early-’60s successes of Fellini,
Antonioni and the nouvelle vague. Stamping its images into the cultural memory of
world cinema, The Seventh Seal‘s aesthetic and thematic richness also hugely
influenced the development of film societies and then academic cinema studies in
North America.

Also like Rashomon, when looked at today The Seventh Seal is partially a victim of its
success. It has been held up as exemplary prosecution or defense witness for ‘art
cinema’ per se and is hence frequently over-praised or unfairly dismissed. But like all
seminal texts, this film must be approached both through an appreciation for its
historical importance, and yet also by striving to really watch the film without letting
the parodies and pastiches with which we are familiar dictate our engagement. Only
then perhaps can one truly appreciate Bergman’s astonishing achievement with this
film: a compacted, logical and linear, yet crystalline and endlessly refractory tragi-
comic parable, the aesthetic-conceptual density and genuine cultural universality of
which is truly Shakespearean.

Today we hardly know how to approach something so serious and philosophically

‘big-picture’ yet also so accessible and burlesque as Bergman’s most famous film.
This is at least in one sense odd: for all its preposterous thematic reach and blatant
theatricality, the film achieved its immense cultural impact (still being shown twice
daily somewhere in the US four years after initial release) through a reflexively coded
intertextuality – something not so unfamiliar to attuned postmodern minds after all.

The Seventh Seal works like a prism and entry point of a monster oeuvre, laying out
trajectories more confrontingly explored in Bergman’s 1960s work in which (unlike at
the end of The Seventh Seal) no-one really escapes the horrific and liberating
negativity that lies beneath the modern world’s veneer. But first, other late-’50s films
would continue to mine a mid-century crisis of belief through varying subjects,
discourses and lenses.

Wild Strawberries, another big worldwide hit, is a very different film to its
predecessor. Here the crisis of belief is entirely immanent (the God debate’s only
appearance is through a quaint argument between teenage suitors), in the form of a
longing for personal self-acceptance and reconciliation with others and one’s past.
The film influentially renders the achronological affectivity of time and memory as
seen in old age. Victor Sjöström, Sweden’s most important director of the silent era
(who then went to Hollywood), stars in the film as a crotchety old professor who
travels south from Stockholm with his daughter-in-law to receive a career award from
his alma mater. Wild Strawberries‘ realist address is punctured throughout by the rich
expressionist imagery of its famous dream sequences/flashbacks, the crystalline
temporal layering and confusion of which was revolutionary at the time (clearly
influencing Tarkovsky’s work).

So Close to Life and The Magician followed in 1958. The former, a clinical study in
close-up of three women in different stages of pregnancy and abortion (which I have
not been able to see), reminded viewers that Bergman refused to stick to one style as
he explored what seem like characteristic themes. By contrast, The Magician is a very
densely layered, baroque work. Set mostly in mid-19th Century Stockholm, this
complexly ironic and expressionist film enacts classic Enlightenment quandaries,
playing off science-reason and art-magic. Dismissive yet also frightened of each
other, these binary discourses emerge as similarly ritualised performances maintained
through and for the personal sustenance of their adherents. Desire and anguish are
here spread out into broadly painted figures – and portrayed as inextricably allied with
regimes of belief central to an emergent modernity.

The Virgin Spring (1960) is a gruesome tale set in medieval Sweden when Christianity
was just in the ascendancy over Paganism, about the rape and murder of a girl and her
father’s quest for revenge. A huge success, winning the first of Bergman’s three
Academy Awards for ‘best foreign film’, it is nevertheless in many ways his least
interesting work from the period. However, it does mark the beginning of the
filmmaker’s collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, replacing Gunnar
Fischer (whose richly textured, densely lit images were so important to Bergman’s
’50s work). This would turn out to be one of world cinema’s most important and
productive director-cinematographer partnerships, continuing to the end of Bergman’s
filmmaking life.

1960 also saw The Devil’s Eye, which, like its predecessor, Bergman also regrets
making. This take on the Don Juan story is a kind of filmed version of one of
Bergman’s stage adaptations (its theatricality is hyper reflexive), which again shows
the filmmaker’s uneasy hand with comedy. After two films he deemed artistic failures
(despite the critical and commercial success of the former), Bergman went about
reinventing his cinema. The change was extraordinary.

Metaphysical reduction: the ‘faith trilogy’ (1961–4)

”The more mature Bergman becomes as a filmmaker, the more caustically and
inexorably he focuses on the destructive forces that flow beneath harmonic culture.”
So writes Swedish film scholar Mikael Timm. (12) This is true of Bergman’s thematic
and hermeneutic explorations in the 1960s, and equally so of the films’ formal
developments. In his most radical decade, Bergman increasingly made films that
attack modern culture and its various investments from beneath, in dissonant terms,
developing a new, much less tonally ‘centered’ cinema in which violent engagements
with alterity, doubt and negativity seem to prevail. As a result, this period of
Bergman’s work tends to either radically repel or attract viewers and critics alike.
In his 1999 book Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet, Marc Gervais sees
Bergman’s films as a struggle between the ‘life force’, an affirmational humanistic
pole, and abstract negativity, a bleak engagement with nihilism and hopelessness. He
sees the best films as balancing the two, and while Gervais doesn’t really like the
apparent trajectory of Bergman’s ’60s films (his dialectic now supposedly drowned by
the negative pole), still admires them for their multi-faceted subversions. What
became known as the ‘faith trilogy’ (13) – Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light
(1962) and The Silence (1963) – set the tone for these increasingly harsh explorations.

The first thing one notices about Through a Glass Darkly is that it looks remarkable.
There is a new kind of complex realism and clarity to the image; the viewer can
almost smell and feel the film’s rendered world, the infinite shades of gray and semi-
audible sounds of a remote Baltic island off the Swedish coast in summer. (This is
Fårö, which would provide the sparse setting for many Bergman films to come, and
which from 1966 would be his home). Opaque dawn skies, a rocky shoreline and a
pre-industrial house dominate the mise-en-scène, along with only four humans we
first glimpse emerging out of a primordial sea.

With this film, the viewer confronts images of a bare world where those who survive
are the rational men of a cold modernity, while those who flounder might have been
its best hope. In a protean performance as Karin, Harriet Andersson dishes out both
emotional warmth and shards of negativity in her sublime but fragmented
engagements with others and the world. Her subjective focus is insufficient to
consistently master linear demands, and religious belief is a kind of madness taking
her away from reality rather than means to a centering affirmation, when her ethereal
fantasies turn to revulsion. (Karin’s sensuous wait for God in the attic culminates
when she sees him as a spider that tries to penetrate her body.)

On the surface, her father (Gunnar Björnstrand) and husband (Max von Sydow) have
adapted to a chilly reality with more success. Karin is most at home with her teenage
brother Minus who is engulfed in his own identity crisis as he gallivants around the
island rocked with doubt, not at home inside himself or his culture.

Following her breakdown in the attic Karin is penetrated again, by the all-too-real
cold fluid of science as her doctor/husband calmly applies a sedating needle, to which
she responds with only marginally more displeasure than to the benign and genuine
(but to her, meaningless and perfunctory) words of love he offers throughout the film.
Meanwhile, outside awaits the giant spider shape of a helicopter in which von Sydow
will accompany her to his secular sureties of institutionalised care.

Framed by the setting sun through a window, for the first time alone (and indoors)
together, at the end of Glass Darkly Minus asks his father how they can help Karin,
and receives a ‘God is love’ lecture. Like earlier declarations of love for his family (to
whom he gives Stockholm airport trinkets as presents after arriving home from a trip
to central Europe), this man’s attempt at a didactic humanist faith here seems
extremely forced and tenuous. (14) Yet Minus responds positively to this perfunctory
communication in the final line of the film, “Papa spoke to me”. And in previously
admitting the desire to chart his own daughter’s schizophrenia so as to provide stimuli
for his writing, the father also exhibits (as throughout the film) here a raw,
contradictory kind of honesty typical of Bergman’s dark renderings of human desire.

In Winter Light the surface freezing of Gunnar Björnstrand’s character is just one
component of austere images below which the tension of a barely repressed
apocalypse is sustained for less than eighty minutes. Shivering a cold sweat of flu and
doubt, he plays a priest who suffers ‘bad faith’, and in the face of his anguish
struggles to retain belief through ritualized performance. Even when the only person
attending the service is his agnostic lover (Ingrid Thulin) who suffers her own –
purely secular – kind of abject love.

Yet somehow Max von Sydow’s brief appearance in Winter Light seems the epicenter
of it all, as a man worried about ‘the Chinese’ with their rumored nuclear weapons. In
so much of Bergman’s cinema, anxiety has broad social as well as existential
resonance, and here it is through fear of global apocalypse (the film was made during
the Cuban Missile Crisis). What is most personally and culturally striking is this
almost mute man’s total incapacity to go along with even a threadbare performance of
hope – in ourselves and in this world, both physical and metaphysical. From the first
time we see him, he seems on the other side of an important line to the others. Yet
they themselves barely sustain their veneer. Von Sydow’s terminal condition is
reinforced when his priest’s council slips from unhelpful insistence (replying “we
must live” to von Sydow’s query, “why must we live?”) into a self-obsessed
monologue betraying his own private horror.

Rather than philosophical explication, The Silence‘s almost wordless images generate
our experience and reading of a very open film, concluding the loose trilogy in an
unexpected way. The complex combination of an uneasy realism with stark formalism
makes for clean and complex deep-focus shots matched with an immaculate hyper-
diegetic soundscape. So little is literally said here that the formal affect and
hermeneutic generativity of Bergman’s sound-image compositions are given space to
speak louder than ever.

Through The Silence’s aesthetic matrix we sensuously, yet uncomfortably, watch and
feel two sisters and a young boy as they have experiences in the hotel of an alien city.
When Gunnel Lindblom combs her hair and washes her clothes and body before one
of many solo excursions into the world, the tactile and emotional intimacy is both
warmly human and erotic, and like cold machine-like fingernails on chalkboard.
Meanwhile, during her own body’s eruption in the throes of serious illness, the older
sister (Ingrid Thulin) articulates her repulsion – “it’s all just erectile tissue and bodily
secretions” – in a hateful sputtering at the corporeal (and hence for her, meaningless)
nature of existence.

Thulin plays The Silence‘s only real ‘believer’ – in truth, reason, knowledge, meaning
– and is here a decaying figure associated with death. The sheer sensuality of
Lindblom’s performance might comparatively offer corporeal affirmation, but the
very empowerment of this very ‘alive’ woman can seem reactionary in its binarism
(the revenge of the body, against Thulin’s hegemonic, rancid Cartesianism). It is
ultimately the small boy as a nubile, amorphous figure (without any conventional
patriarchal model) that provides the real sense of future possibility in the film, as he
bears witness to the enactments, investments and dysfunction of his elders.

The Silence enjoyed substantial international success (Bergman’s last for ten years), in
no small part due to its then-controversial nudity and explicit sexuality (the film was
censored in many countries). Meanwhile, Bergman became director of the Royal
Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm in 1963. The one film shot during this tenure was
Now About These Women (1964). Co-written under a pseudonym with lifelong friend
and star of later Bergman films, Erland Josephson, this theatrical and ill-tempered
comedy was time-out from the political and workload crisis endemic to being in
charge of Sweden’s premiere theatrical institution, and interrupts his otherwise deadly
serious film work of the period.

Limit-point negativity & modernism: Persona & beyond (1966–9)

Bergman resigned from the Royal Dramatic Theatre mid-contract an exhausted man.
He booked himself into a psychiatric clinic in 1965, and after a while started working
on an idea based on a physical similarity he had noticed between Bibi Andersson and
Liv Ullmann when the former had introduced her young friend in the street. He
invited the two actors to visit him in hospital and explained his idea for a film. They
agreed to star in the project, and a few months later what would become probably
Bergman’s supreme achievement was in production.

Persona in many ways leads on from The Silence, as Susan Sontag argues in her
famous 1967 essay on the former. (15) In both films our engagement is with the
multiple thematic trajectories of an ambiguous psychic war between two women, as
rendered through the most radical aesthetics Bergman was ever to explore. If the first
films of the ’60s increasingly marked him as a difficult filmmaker, Persona offers
greater challenges.

Out of a genuinely avant-garde prologue emerges a story in which an actress refuses

to speak, while a nurse is assigned to her ‘recovery’. Most of the film takes place in
and around a beach-house on the windswept coast of Fårö. But the women’s
experience of space and time, along with the viewer’s grasp of these forms and
Persona‘s narrative, suffers increasing interruptions as fragmenting layers of formal-
thematic stimuli build into one of the most difficult, open and generative feature-films
ever made.

Liv Ullmann’s silent portrayal of an artist confronting and performing her own
ontological lack is dominated by twitching lips, ambivalent gazes and vampyric
desire. Bibi Andersson plays the chatty state carer whose perfectly adaptive nature
leads to being sucked into her companion’s showdown with negativity – so that she
too is made to examine what, if anything, lies behind her own socially-ordained mask.

As these dual gazes and subjectivities develop and cannibalistically intermix, halfway
through the film the celluloid appears to rip and burn up in the projector. Diegetic
space and cinema’s sheer materiality here intermix, and we are left to work out what
has become of a film whose plastic essence either violently asserts itself to crush the
metaphysics of a fictional world – or whose fragmentation is remarkably generated
by the psychic dissonance and heat of the diegesis. Regardless of our desire to explain
the film’s material violence and reflexivity, Persona‘s formal-thematic mutation is
ultimately then brought to full fruition and complexity when the famous hybrid gaze –
half of each woman’s face grafted to the other – stares out of an amorphous gray void,
and into the viewer’s own unstable space.

From the vantage point of thirty-six years, Persona can be seen as a standout film in
terms of Bergman’s oeuvre and cinema history. The essays in Ingmar Bergman’s
Persona, a 2000 compilation volume edited by Lloyd Michaels, position the film as a
cinematic work of high modernism par excellence. And it is the sort of artwork about
which those who have experienced it feel the utmost emotional and intellectual
commitment. (16)

Bergman’s next film continues the highly personal relationship the viewer is forced
into with Persona‘s interior gaze. In Hour of the Wolf (1968) we enter the
protagonist’s gaze through a more clearly expressionistic form. Like The Magician,
this film makes explicit what can be said of Bergman’s most intense cinema – it is like
an esoteric horror movie. (17) This is perhaps one reason for the film’s lesser art-
house reputation – though more importantly, its proximity to its illustrious
predecessor disadvantages the film, despite Bergman’s stated desire that Wolf
continues Persona‘s innovations. But perhaps the film is ultimately less appealing
because we are faced with, and enter, an even more demonic protagonist. Here we are
immersed in – uncomfortably seeing and feeling – the vertiginous, vampyric mind of
a male artist (Max von Sydow), through images that seem like shards of his fracturing
psyche.

Wolf does feature perhaps Bergman’s single most disturbing sequence, a wordless
interlude with enormous symbolic refractions featuring high contrast images shot on
degraded stock. Here a young boy attacks/seduces von Sydow on jagged fishing
rocks, and after a struggle where this ‘little demon’ bites his victim bird-like, the boy
is violently beaten with a large stone and drowned in the murky water. Here and
throughout, we are intimately engaged with a more directly horrific artist-subject even
than that of Persona. We uncomfortably think and feel the protagonist’s interior fall,
through some of Bergman’s most oneiric and strikingly gothic images, a terrible
maelstrom around which floats the organic but increasingly nervous performance of
Liv Ullmann.
Von Sydow and Ullmann are again the couple in 1968′s The Shame. Sometimes seen
as concluding a trilogy about the artist’s ethical relationship to social reality with the
previous two films, it also takes a step back in formal complexity. This is a war film
without action, heroes or oppositional clarity, concerned with the basic responses of
the human subject – in this case, two naïve ex-concert violinists – to the sheer
existential un-understandability of war.

The Shame was often seen as a commentary on the conflict in Viet Nam and Bergman
was attacked for not coding the film morally or politically, criticism that
misunderstands what kind of film this is. (18) The Shame would be as controversial
today in its probing of ‘engagement’, and its take on the absurd affectivity of war –
how such operatic violence never ‘makes sense’. One can sympathise with the central
characters as passive victims of a war they can’t do anything about, and/or criticize
them for a lack of political understanding. Their performances offer pity, resentment
and pathos in turn, through the alien perspective they have on the real world outside.
This makes the film (and its title) a chilling evocation of both civilian
confusion/casualties and cultural disengagement, while grimy materiality goes on
unchecked – just as it highlights that reality’s being fuelled by the opaque
metaphysics of ideology and politics.

War of a more purely cultural kind dominates Bergman’s short TV film called The
Ritual, released theatrically in 1969. This nasty little work features three actors who
are forced to demonstrate their troupe’s ‘obscene’ act for a civil judge/critic, a
performance that in the event kills him. They also behave violently (psychically and
physically) towards each other in tableaux set in sterile hotel rooms and office spaces.
The mise-en-scène is purely made up of the interiors of an affluent and powerful
modern state, a surface beneath and above which these aggressive outsider figures
paint a repressed metaphysical scream of gothic proportions with their grotesque
rubber masks and costumes (featuring oversized dildos), and their masochistic
behavior – as they voice the cry a rationalist modernity tries to paper over with
material comfort.

The Ritual works like a sharp concluding jab in Bergman’s treatment of the artist as
exaggerated, at times monstrous modern subject. Bergman confrontingly evokes this
subject’s distance from bourgeois normality and assurances, and their facing and
enactment of kinds of negativity usually hidden or smoothed over in conventional
society. The artist in Bergman’s films feels only ambivalence about their modernity, a
subject who both yearns for and detests the surety and structure of mainstream
cultural forms, sadistically undermining these structures and vampyrically turning
them into material on which to feed – even as it leads to a gnawing terror and self-
conscious entropy.

A Passion (1969) returns us to the culturally removed space of Fårö. Despite a muted
palette, Bergman’s first serious colour film looks like science fiction (one shot appears
to show three suns). Here the epistemological surety of characters – and viewers
watching them – unravels as we sometimes see desired or feared events actually
occurring, before an unstable reality is restored. This acts like a seldom carried-
through but constant threat, a sense that subject, image and world always have
something horrible straining at the edges of the frame.

A Passion is a loose and very open film in which Bergman experiments with both
improvisation and (scripted) out-of-character monologues by the actors, as we follow
the story of a hermit (von Sydow) who starts a relationship with a woman (Ullmann)
who has probably killed her husband, then another (Bibi Andersson) who is desperate
for contact of any kind. They are threatened from the inside as the past hangs about
their necks like a noose, in danger of being horribly replayed through regressive and
destructive psychological processes. And these possibly dangerous people are
themselves in danger from the outside as well (the island’s animals are being
mysteriously slaughtered).

Like a limit-point rendering of The Seventh Seal‘s thematic trajectory, A Passion

seems to posit belief per se as a conduit of violence, as well as encouraging a
dangerously passive relationship to time and history. And the closest the film has to an
artist figure is Andersson’s husband (Erland Josephson), an ice-cold nihilist who
collects and records images of people in moments of terrible suffering. Asked the
reason for his collection, Josephson articulates what seems a central idea in
Bergman’s most negativity-charged cinema, when he tells von Sydow: “I’m under no
illusion I’m capturing the essence of things; I am merely recording the interplay of
small and immense forces. Everything is useless.” (19)

A Passion completes a remarkable and quite unique decade’s work. In general, the
dissonant rendering of modernity that characterises these films becomes partially
submerged in Bergman’s post-’60s cinema. Besides, Persona and other late-’60s work
brought diminishing commercial returns, receiving nothing like the wide distribution
of his ’50s hits. So, like Kurosawa and so many of his peers, Bergman had to look
outside normal channels of funding to continue working in the ’70s.

Difficult humanism: international & TV work (1970 – 1983)

The 1970s was a more successful decade for Bergman in terms of both commercial
and critical consensus than the ’60s, even if it was also a period of intermittent
creative decline. The decade certainly started off horribly when the filmmaker signed
a US co-production deal in 1970 with Dino de Laurentis for The Touch, to be set in
Stockholm but shot in English, and starring Elliot Gould and Bibi Andersson.
Bergman is here clearly uncomfortable outside his own language and the film is
another curious periodic low point in this workaholic’s otherwise high-achieving
oeuvre.

Burnt by how a new language and foreign co-producer so easily put Bergman off
form, his next film was produced largely by himself along with the film’s actors and
Sven Nykvist, investing their work for a percentage of the film’s profits. The US
distribution problem was also overcome through the unlikely figure of Roger Corman,
who committed to releasing Cries and Whispers without even seeing it. With a
triumphant (and rare) 1972 appearance at Cannes to accompany the film (screening
out of competition), Bergman was welcomed back into world cinema’s main
spotlight, as critics and audiences embraced this story of a woman who slowly dies in
a country house surrounded by cold and selfish sisters and her maid/companion/lover
at the turn of the century.

Maintaining the intimacy and close-ups of Bergman’s ’60s work, with this film décor
has an added role too, thanks to Nykvist’s Oscar-winning wide-screen
cinematography in its rendering of a red-saturated mise-en-scène. The film was
deemed harrowing at the time, yet the period setting and poetic tone also bring a
movement towards grace. His biggest hit since The Seventh Seal, the film’s heavily
symbolic color scheme and mise-en-scène would influence Peter Greenaway and
countless other 1980s and ’90s art-house directors.

If Cries was the lush color masterpiece for those who found Bergman’s more radical
(and monochrome) ’60s cinema too extreme, like Seventh Seal, the film is also one of
his prism works. It looks back at themes more thoroughly essayed in earlier films, and
glancing toward a more accessible – though difficult – humanist tonality. Yet despite
its more prosaic form and thematic concerns, it is the following Scenes from a
Marriage that more relentlessly and radically continues Bergman’s diverse
engagement with modernity’s crisis of belief.

As Maaret Koskinen says of the “metaphysical problems in Bergman’s films [...], they
express not so much belief, as doubt, perhaps an eternally human and existential state
of crisis, a revolt against an absolute authority who might be God, fellow human
beings, or marriage.” (20) Shot cheaply on 16mm and first screened in six fifty-
minute episodes on Swedish television, despite its plain appearance Scenes from a
Marriage is as ‘metaphysical’ as Cries and Whispers. Without the previous film’s
elegiac notes of a decaying culture, this work is more tied to the surface minutiae and
investments of late modernity’s secular world. And with its banal setting, the piece’s
investigation into what lies beneath the visible plane of suburban domestic space and
its epicenter of the heterosexual couple is all the more bracing.

Featuring the milieu and personas (husband and wife, played by Liv Ullmann and
Erland Josephson) of Sweden’s affluent bourgeoisie – a culture beamed back into its
own space, as large mainstream audiences engaged with Bergman’s work for the first
time – the film violates the sacred ontology of those formations. Starting with a
sequence in which a TV-style crew interviews the couple, this reflexive journey into
the heart of a personal relationship is in many ways as thematically disturbing as
Persona, but literally closer to home. (21) Scenes may look less radical, but the
apparent safeness of its form and setting allows for a rare intersection between
television and popular culture’s traditional domestic space and a more modernist
insistence on the various forces of repressed negativity that flow beneath the surface
of everyday life.

Rather than succumbing to its more conservative traditions, Bergman utilizes

television’s formal limitations so as to pursue a more extreme manifestation of his
confronting close-up technique. “The human face,” Truffaut says of this period in
Bergman’s cinema, “no one draws so close to it as Bergman does. In his recent films
there is nothing more than mouths talking, ears listening, eyes expressing curiosity,
hunger, panic.” (22)

The face of Ullmann, anguished performer of so many Bergman subjects, has never
been more chillingly open than in Scenes from a Marriage as we almost
embarrassingly watch it up close for very long periods without a cut. Forced upon us
through such extended looking, the face has never been more confrontingly interior,
our relationship with it more disturbingly intimate – as we watch the material
communicative nerve ends of our giant onscreen companion as it seeks to look
‘inside’ itself, by means of a gaze ultimately directed straight out at us.

Television seemed the best means through which to fund new projects, and in 1974
Bergman staged, directed, and filmed a version of Mozart’s Magic Flute. The film
recreates a 17th Century Swedish theatre in which a modern audience watches the
opera. The camera also shows us behind-the-scenes moments during the performance,
amid a subtle essay on the mediation of art forms and the constant presence of other
textual realities (perhaps no less revealing) beneath that of the ‘primary’
text/performance.

Another multi-part television project followed in 1976. While I have only seen the
shorter (and English-language) cut of Face to Face, here Bergman’s detractors seem
right: the film, about a psychiatrist who has a nervous breakdown, seems a hermetic
and cloying work, a case where Bergman repeats and makes too literal more
successful past ideas. Rather than repeating himself, another US co-production called
The Serpents’ Egg (1977) is problematic for opposite reasons. Shot in Germany and
filmed in English, (23) starring Ullmann with David Carradine, the dying days of late-
Weimar Berlin is Bergman’s uncharacteristically large canvas. The skills that forged
his unique intimate cinema are entirely opposite to those required for this historical
drama, and Bergman’s lack of overt political analysis for once does make the work
superficial. Like The Touch, the film was a commercial and critical disaster.

Filmed in Norway, Autumn Sonata (1978) seems a reaction against Serpent’s Egg.
This film about a celebrity concert pianist and her daughter’s brief reunion, brings
back Bergman’s trademark ‘chamber cinema’ with a vengeance. Starring Ullmann and
Ingrid Bergman (who developed cancer during shooting, and retired from the cinema
immediately afterwards), the film also seems softer, more conciliatory, and after a
harrowing night’s interaction, recognizably humanist. Depending on the viewer, the
film is either a more approachable chamber drama, or repetitive filmmaking with the
harder edges rounded off. (24)
Certainly From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) cannot be accused of humanist
warmth and reconciliation. More than the epic family melodrama Fanny and
Alexander, the critical and audience adoration of which in 1983 celebrated Bergman’s
whole career as he moved into retirement, Marionettes is a fitting coda to this
filmmaker’s modernist trajectories. Filmed for German television, it is the hardest and
bleakest work of Bergman’s final decade. A very idiosyncratic take on German
enunciation and filmmaking, the film stands as a powerful continuation – a coda,
really – of Bergman’s almost career-long focus on the doubt-ridden confrontation with
a very immanent and personal abyss, and the aesthetic rendering of subjective crisis
that generates a horrible kind of intimacy for the viewer.

Marionettes‘ long confessional monologues in part tell the story of a man who has
killed a prostitute, and in fake ‘investigation’-style flashbacks, partakes in murderous
games with his wife – with whom he seems to share a horrible grafting beyond love or
hate. Though usually compared to Scenes from a Marriage, with its airless interiors
rendered through spare monochrome images without a hint of sunlight or nature, and
in which a violent interpersonal life nastily plays out amid the clean modernist
designs of Munich, the film seems just as linked to the hard lines of The Ritual.

Bergman decided to retire from commercial filmmaking with a return to Sweden.

With long-time friend, filmmaker and writer Jörn Donner acting as executive
producer for this Swedish/West-German/French co-production, Fanny and Alexander
was Bergman’s (and Sweden’s) most expensive film, with lavish set design and
cinematography winning two of the film’s four Oscars. Yet despite its ostentatious
scale, the film’s best scenes still feature intimate spaces and interactions, and the
extended television version in particular is much more Bergmanesque than the work
at first appears.

The full five-hour cut of Bergman’s last official film includes some of this
filmmaker’s clearest, most mature working through of age-old concerns, in the guise
of a warmer, more accessible address. For casual viewers Fanny and Alexander is
Bergman’s most attractive film, while for connoisseurs it is a massive crystalline
prism text that refracts the central concerns of a forty-year oeuvre.

Coda: an epilogue and film history

Bergman immediately followed the huge success of Fanny and Alexander with a
much more characteristically small film called After the Rehearsal (which I have not
been able to see). Like Marionettes, it was intended only for TV, but was nonetheless
then sold for theatrical release. This was the last film written and directed by Ingmar
Bergman to be commercially distributed – although in late 2002 he has completed
shooting a new film possibly to be released in 2003.

Bergman spent the late 1980s and ’90s writing screenplays (the most recent of which
was Faithless [1999], directed by Liv Ullmann), novels and two autobiographical
books. The Magic Lantern (1987) is Bergman’s much-lauded work about his own life,
the address and thematic texture of which is uncannily like a superb Bergman film.
And Images (from 1991) is a fascinating contemporary reappraisal of his work amid
extracts from original workbooks kept during production.

He has also been intermittently directing (and sometimes writing) TV productions like
1997′s In the Presence of a Clown, and more consistently still works in the theatre
(from which he also ‘retired’ many times). But Bergman spends most of his days
writing and looking out on the mise-en-scène of his most radical and characteristic
work – the violently sublime rocky shoreline and seas of Fårö.

During this very active twenty-year epilogue to one of the most remarkable careers in
world cinema, Ingmar Bergman has been a specter haunting film history. Although
not often invoked in film culture, he is still in some quarters thought of as an
important figure that asked of cinema what it is – and what are the beings that invent
it. During Ullmann’s press interviews for Faithless, half the questions were about
Bergman. There was curiosity about his script for the film, as well as his personal and
creative relationship with Ullmann. But there were also questions about Bergman per
se as if to simply acknowledge one of the not so often mentioned masters of world
cinema, and to gesture towards the corner that shrouds an already dark oeuvre.

Today’s film students are often more likely to have seen Imitation of Life (Douglas
Sirk, 1959) than any Bergman. While the revisionist approach to history and culture
has been necessary, there is a real danger of writing out figures, films and bodies of
work containing some of cinema’s really important achievements, like The Seventh
Seal or Persona. Perhaps the same people for too long said the same things about
Bergman, while others saw him as personifying a cinema that had to be overcome –
so students and readers understandably went off in search of new interests within film
history’s then neglected corners. “Yet there is no body of work of the caliber and
integrity of Bergman’s since the war,” (25) argued Truffaut in 1973, protesting at
Bergman’s decade of critical obscurity prior to Cries and Whispers. For me, Truffaut’s
considerable claim still stands. In terms of an oeuvre, the equation is daunting: around
fifty films of remarkable reach, at least a third of them genuine masterpieces.

A long period away from Bergman’s cinema should allow serious film culture to look
afresh at a body of work that is today one of film history’s best-kept secrets. Faced
with new uncertainties and doubts about a turn-of-the-century world, our role in it and
what we want out of images, as well as perennial problems of subjectivity that are far
from overcome, fresh eyes and minds could really open up Bergman’s most
challenging work.

For the very first time these films can be liberated from a historical position within
teleological modernism, or as components of an authorially overdetermined oeuvre.
Some dense life and difficult pleasure would be generated from a brand new
encounter with Bergman’s very modern cinema and the radical intimacy it engenders.

Filmography
Below are all the films Ingmar Bergman has directed to date. The list omits only
theatre productions of other writers’ work that Bergman directed straight to television.
All the films below were commercially released Swedish language productions,
unless otherwise noted. The dates given pertain to when the film was first released,
theatrically or on television. Bergman’s films were often released outside Sweden
with various titles. The films are listed below with the most generally well-known
English translation alongside the original Swedish (allied with a general preference
for the UK release titles, which are usually more accurate than the US versions).

As director

Kris (Crisis) (1945) also writer (adaptation)

Det regnar på vår kärlek (It Rains on Our Love) (1946) also co-writer

Skepp till Indialand (A Ship Bound for India) (1947) also writer (adaptation)

Musik i mörker (Music in Darkness) (1948)

Hamnstad (Port of Call) (1948) also co-writer

Fängelse (Prison) (1949) also writer

Törst (Thirst) (1949)

Till glädje (To Joy) (1950) also writer

Sånt händer inte här (This Can’t Happen Here) (1950)

Sommarlek (Summer Interlude) (1950) also co-writer, synopsis

Kvinnors väntan (Waiting Women) (1952) also writer

Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika) (1953) also co-writer

Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel) (1953) also writer

En lektion i kärlek (A Lesson in Love) (1954) also writer

Kvinnodröm (Journey into Autumn) (1955) also writer

Sommarnattens leend (Smiles of a Summer Night) (1955) also writer

Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) (1957) also writer

Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) (1957) also writer

Nära livet (Brink of Life) (1958) also writer

Ansiktet (The Magician) (1958) also writer

Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring) (1960)

Djävulens öga (The Devil’s Eye) (1960) also writer (adaptation)

Såsom i en spegel (Through a Glass Darkly) (1961) also writer

Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light) (1963) also writer

Tystnaden (The Silence) (1963) also writer

För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor (Now about these women) (1964) also co-
writer

Persona (1966) also writer

Daniel (1967) also writer, photographer, narrator; short episode in the compilation
film Stimulantia

Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf) (1968) also writer

Skammen (The Shame) (1968) also co-producer, writer

Riten (The Ritual) (1969) also co-producer, writer, actor; television mini-feature,
followed by theatrical release

En Passion (A Passion) (1969) also co-producer, writer

Fårö-dokument (The Fårö Document) (1970) also producer, writer, performer;

television documentary

Beröringen (The Touch) (1971) also co-producer, writer; Sweden/USA, English

language

Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers) (1972) co-producer, writer

Scener ur ett äktenskap (Scenes From a Marriage) (1973) also producer, writer;
300-minute television version in 6 parts, 168-minute theatrical cut

Trollflöjten (The Magic Flute) (1975) also writer (adaptation); television production,
theatical release

Ansikte mot ansikte (Face to Face) (1976) also co-producer, writer; Sweden/USA;
200-minute television version in 4 parts, 136-minute theatrical cut

Das Schlangenei (The Serpent’s Egg) (1977) also writer; West Germany/USA,
English language

Herbstsonate (Autumn Sonata) (1978) also producer, writer

Fårö-dokument 1979 (The Fårö-document 1979) (1979) also co-producer, writer,

narrator; television documentary
Aus dem Leben des Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes) (1980) also co-
producer, writer; West Germany; television feature, theatrical release

Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander) (1982) also co-producer, writer;
Sweden/West Germany/France; 312-minute television version in 5 parts, 183-minute
theatrical cut

Efter repetitionen (After the Rehearsal) (1984) also producer, writer; television mini-
feature, theatrical release

De två saliga (The Blessed Ones) (1985) television feature

Dokument Fanny och Alexander (Documentary of Fanny and Alexander) (1986)

also producer, writer; television documentary

Karins ansikte (Karin’s Face) (1986) also producer, writer; short television film

Larmar och görsig till (In the Presence of a Clown) (1997) also writer; television
play

Bildmakarna (2000) also writer (adaptation); television feature

Anna/Saraband (2002/3, in production) also writer; shot for theatrical release

OTHER CREDITS

Hets (Frenzy) (1944) Dir: Alf Sjöberg (co-writer)

Kvinna utan ansikte (Woman Without a Face) (1947) Dir: Gustaf Molander (co-
writer, synopsis)

Eva (1948) Dir: Gustaf Molander (co-writer, synopsis)

Frånskild (Divorced) (1951) Dir: Gustaf Molander (co-writer)

Sista paret ut (Last Couple Out) (1956) Dir: Alf Sjöberg (writer)

Lustgårde (The Pleasure Garden) (1961) Dir: Alf Kjellin (co-writer)

Reservalet (The Reservation) (1970) Dir: Jan Molander (writer) television feature

Den goda viljan (The Best Intentions) (1991) Dir: Bille August (writer) television
series

Söndagsbarn (Sunday’s Children) (1992) Dir: Daniel Bergman (writer)

Enskilda samtal (Private Confessions) (1996) Dir: Liv Ullmann (writer)

Trolösa (Faithless) (1999) Dir: Liv Ullmann (writer)

Films about Bergman:

Ingmar Bergman (1971) Dir: Stig Björkman (filmed around the time of The Touch)

Ingmar Bergman: Reflections on Life, Death and Love, with Erland Josephson
(1998) Prod: Malou von Sivers. TV4 International, Sweden, English language version
released in the US with Cries and Whispers DVD, Criterion Collection, #101, 2001

Ingmar Bergman on Life and Work (1999) Dir: Jörn Donner. English language
version released in the US with Wild Strawberries DVD, Criterion Collection, #139,
2002