[An inspiration for this writeup was no doubt Jonathan Rosenbaum’s NYT-commissioned Op Ed piece on Ingmar Bergman. I have decided to furthr expand his words and analyze this particularly problematic director.]
If I remember correctly, the first Ingmar Bergman movie I ever saw was “Persona,” which was seen at Concordia University’s J.A. de Seve theater whilst I was studying film at that same college. The key scene for me in “Persona,” and one which no other Bergman film would, oddly enough, ever match in terms of hypnotic and surreal quality, is when character Alma recounts a day at the beach she had many years ago where she encountered two men that pleasured her to orgasm. The imagery is so forcefully real that its images still linger in my head many years later. That orgasm is the greatest and most intense feeling Alma ever had, also the most "real" she's ever felt in her life, everything else has been laborious and fake. Her self-identity never found again.
That scene and “Persona” were the closest Bergman ever came in his career to being a sort of post-modernist visionary, a true and unadultered filmmaker — oh how the masterful use of extended close-ups in that film could haunt your dreams. Because, you see, Bergman’s cinema, composed mainly of faces and shallow interiors, is too tame today to be regarded as avant-garde, let alone in the same landmark territory as Welles, Godard and company. Those guys changed the language of the medium, Bergman didn’t.
The theatricality in Bergman’s films are what have made them not age as well as his much-heralded contemporary’s works. It’s not like Bergman wanted to change anything in the medium, really. Bergman’s influences weren’t cinematic as much as theatrical, more precisely the late 19th century Swedish theater of Strindberg and Chekhov. His background as an artist started in theater, producing more than 170 productions for the stage —when compared to his fifty or so films for cinema and television, you start to come to terms with why Bergman’s films feel so dry, stifled by their mise-en-scene, in today’s post-modernist world.
Rather, Bergman decided to use cinema to further continue the obsessive themes he tackled on stage, with the same Swedish troupe of actors. Sure, his cinematographer for more than three decades was Sven Nykvist, on of the greats, but post-Persona, when Bergman decided to go the color route white and stop shooting in black and white, Nykvist’s artistry started to get muddled, Bergman’s started looking more staticky.
The repetitiveness of Bergman’s cinematic themes is problematic by today’s standards because, well, his obsessions, the stuff he would continuously ponder upon for more than 5 decades, such as the loss of religious faith and the fading of love in relationships, are just not as taboo today as they were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. In 2019, the loss of religion is seen by many as just the most common sensical way to go; Ditto the lack of marriage between millennials with the skyrocketing rates of divorces making them abstain from any sense of responsibility towards one another. What Bergman is trying to say in his films is too on-the-nose and standard to them, and I do count myself as part of that demographic.
“Persona” would be the only film of his screened during my four years at film school; According to Rosenbaum, the man is “just not being taught in film courses or debated by film buffs with the same intensity as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard.” It becomes even more glaring when you rewatch his films, such as I did recently, and realize that, despite the beautiful artistry and thematic resilience, they just don’t entertain, in fact they are morose, self-absorbed relics by a man that couldn’t care less about his audience. What once surely felt like risky films are now seen as rather tame. Add in the theatricality of these endeavors, the static camera, the almost non-existent urge to go beyond the norm, and you have a director far-removed from the French New Wave that was happening at the same time that his works were being heralded as these awesome and rewarding works of art.
Bergman rather wanted to simply use cinema to depict a psychotherapy he was continuously exercising on himself — there also was the refusal to expand on anything but that. This made for pompous, self-important and, yes, very ugly cinema. In almost every film of his you can sense Bergman vilifying the people and world around him. And yet, he still managed to make a film as beautiful as “Fanny and Alexander” which forced him to actually look at himself in the mirror and expand on his upbringing and the facetious ways he was brought which led to him looking at the world with such cynicism.