Ingmar Bergman

• 1. Introduction

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  At the age of nine, Ingmar Bergman traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern. Within a year, the boy had built a private world he never wanted to leave. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes, and lighting effects. He staged puppet productions of Strindberg plays, speaking every part himself. Born in Uppsala on the 14th of July 1918, he would grow into a Swedish film and theatre director and screenwriter regarded among the greatest in the history of cinema. His films have been described as profoundly personal meditations into the struggles facing the psyche and the soul. But the man behind those meditations carried strange contradictions. He locked horns with a strict minister father who once shut him in dark closets. He saw Adolf Hitler in person at sixteen and, by his own admission, was for years on Hitler's side. He married five times, fathered nine children, and kept dozens of mistresses. What does it take to turn a childhood of dark closets and church arches into a body of work that moved Stanley Kubrick to call him the greatest filmmaker at work? Why did this man, secure in his funding and his fame, suddenly vow never to work in his homeland again? And how did a self-described loser of faith come to say, near the end, that dying would be interesting?

• 2. The Minister's Son

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  Inside the church, while his father preached and the congregation prayed, young Ingmar's attention drifted to the building itself. He later wrote of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, and coloured sunlight quivering above medieval paintings of angels, saints, dragons, and devils. His father, Erik Bergman, was a conservative Lutheran minister, later chaplain to the King of Sweden, with strict ideas about parenting. Punishment for infractions such as wetting himself meant being locked in dark closets. His mother, Karin, was a nurse of Walloon descent, and Ingmar grew up between an older brother, Dag, and a younger sister, Margareta. Religious imagery and argument filled the household. Yet Bergman said he lost his faith at age eight. He claimed he only came to terms with that loss while making Winter Light in 1962. His family tree ran deep into Swedish nobility and beyond. On his mother's side he descended from a Dutch merchant, Paul Calwagen, who left Holland for Sweden in the 17th century. His paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather were cousins, which made his own parents second cousins. The closed world of that household pressed against a boy already building escape hatches out of marionettes and light.

• 3. A Problem Child

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  At the Palmgren School, the teenage Bergman was, in his principal's later words, a problem child. He remembered his school years unfavourably for the rest of his life. He wrote that he hated school as a principle, as a system, and as an institution. He disliked the emphasis on homework and testing in his formal education. That resentment became fuel. In a 1944 letter responding to debate over the film Torment, which he had written, Bergman attacked the idea that students who did not fit some arbitrary prescription of worthiness deserved the system's cruel neglect. In 1934, aged sixteen, he was sent to Germany for the summer to stay with family friends. There he attended a Nazi rally in Weimar and saw Hitler in person. The German family had hung a portrait of Hitler by his bed. For many years, Bergman wrote, he was on Hitler's side, delighted by his successes and saddened by his defeats. He called Hitler unbelievably charismatic, said the Nazism he saw seemed fun and youthful. The reckoning came later. When the concentration camp doors were thrown open, he said, at first he did not want to believe his eyes. In a brutal and violent way he was suddenly stripped of his innocence.

• 4. Breaking In

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  In 1937, Bergman enrolled at Stockholm University College to study art and literature, and promptly became a genuine movie addict. He poured his time into student theatre rather than coursework, never graduating. A romantic involvement around this period led to a physical confrontation with his father, breaking their relationship for many years. His path into the industry opened in 1942, when he directed one of his own scripts, Caspar's Death. Members of Svensk Filmindustri saw the play and offered him work on scripts. His film career began in 1941 with rewriting, but his breakthrough came in 1944 with the screenplay for Torment, directed by Alf Sjoberg. Bergman served as assistant director, and in his book Images: My Life in Film he called the shooting of the exteriors his actual directorial debut. The film's international success won him his first chance to direct the following year. Over the next decade he wrote and directed more than a dozen films, including Prison in 1949, and both Sawdust and Tinsel and Summer with Monika in 1953. He married the choreographer Else Fisher in 1943, the first of the partnerships that would shape both his life and his work.

• 5. The Films That Made Him

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  Smiles of a Summer Night, released in 1955, brought Bergman his first worldwide success, winning a prize for best poetic humour and a Palme d'Or nomination at Cannes. Two films followed in 1957, released in Sweden ten months apart: The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries. The Seventh Seal took a special jury prize at Cannes, while Wild Strawberries earned awards for Bergman and its star, Victor Sjostrom. In the early 1960s he made three films exploring faith and doubt in God: Through a Glass Darkly in 1961, Winter Light in 1962, and The Silence in 1963. Critics labeled them a trilogy. Bergman first denied seeing any common motifs, then later adopted the idea with some equivocation. He said The Silence marked the end of the era in which religious questions were a major concern of his work. Persona, in 1966, starred Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. Bergman considered it one of his most important works, and though it won few awards, it has been called his masterpiece. With his cinematographer Sven Nykvist, he built a crimson color scheme for Cries and Whispers in 1972, which earned a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. Of all his films, Bergman said he held Winter Light, Persona, and Cries and Whispers in the highest regard, and felt he pushed the envelope of filmmaking in the latter two.

• 6. The Conjurer's Method

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  By his own account, Bergman never had a problem with funding. He stayed clear of international financing by keeping his films low-budget and by refusing to live in the United States, which he viewed as obsessed with box-office earnings. Cries and Whispers was finished for about $450,000. Scenes from a Marriage, a six-episode television feature, cost only $200,000. He thought about his screenplays for months or years before the writing itself, a process he found tedious. As his career went on, he increasingly let his actors improvise. In his later films he wrote only the ideas informing a scene and let the actors find the exact dialogue. When he overrode that instinct, he said, the results were often disastrous. His working relationship with Sven Nykvist ran on near-silent trust. Bergman would not worry about a shot's composition until the day before filming. On the morning of the shoot he spoke briefly to Nykvist about mood and composition, then left him alone until the next day's work. Watching daily rushes, Bergman pushed himself to be critical but unemotive. He asked not whether the work was great or terrible, but whether it was sufficient or needed reshooting. His subjects circled mortality, loneliness, and religious faith, with sexual desire running through the foreground. In a 1964 Playboy interview he said he wanted audiences to feel and sense his films, not merely understand them. He called film his demanding mistress, and called himself the conjurer.

• 7. The Arrest

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  On the 30th of January 1976, two plainclothes police officers arrested Bergman while he rehearsed August Strindberg's The Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. The charge was income tax evasion. The impact was devastating. He suffered a nervous breakdown from the humiliation and was hospitalised in deep depression. The investigation centered on an alleged 1970 transaction of 500,000 Swedish kronor between his Swedish company Cinematograf and its Swiss subsidiary Persona, used mainly to pay foreign actors. Bergman had dissolved Persona in 1974 after a notice from the Swedish Central Bank, and had reported the income. On the 23rd of March 1976, the special prosecutor Anders Nordenadler dropped the charges, saying the alleged crime had no legal basis. He compared it to charging a person who had stolen his own car, thinking it was someone else's. Though cleared, Bergman became disconsolate, fearing he would never direct again. Despite pleas from the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme and leaders of the film industry, he vowed never to work in Sweden again. He shut down his studio on the island of Faro, suspended two film projects, and went into self-imposed exile in Munich, West Germany. Harry Schein, director of the Swedish Film Institute, estimated the immediate damage at ten million kronor and hundreds of lost jobs. In a 2005 interview on Faro, Bergman said the exile cost him eight years of his professional life.

• 8. Exile, Return, and After

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  From Munich, Bergman briefly considered working in America, then made The Serpent's Egg in 1977, a West German-U.S. production and his second English-language film after The Touch in 1971. A British-Norwegian co-production followed, Autumn Sonata in 1978, starring Ingrid Bergman, no relation, alongside Liv Ullmann. By mid-1978 his bitterness had eased. He visited Sweden that July, celebrating his sixtieth birthday on Faro and partly resuming work at the Royal Dramatic Theatre. To honour his return, the Swedish Film Institute launched an annual Ingmar Bergman Prize for excellence in filmmaking. He returned home to direct Fanny and Alexander in 1982, which he declared would be his last film before turning to theatre. He kept writing scripts and directing television specials. His final such work was Saraband in 2003, a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, directed when he was eighty-four. Across his life Bergman directed more than 60 films and documentaries and more than 170 plays. At twenty-six he had become the youngest theatrical manager in Europe at the Helsingborg City Theatre. His last stage production was Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003. He retired from filmmaking in December 2003, had hip surgery in October 2006, and made a difficult recovery. He died in his sleep at age 89, found at his home on Faro on the 30th of July 2007, the same day the existentialist director Michelangelo Antonioni died. Years before his death his name and birth date had already been inscribed under his wife's on a tomb at Roslagsbro churchyard, even though he was buried in secrecy at the Faro Church on the 18th of August 2007.