Ingmar Bergman came to embody a new kind of cinema, which emerged in the late 1950s an artisticly ambitious cinema, which was capable of dealing with human existence and important issues. The March 1960 cover of Time Magazine, cast Ingmar Bergman in the part of a visionary, a philosopher or writer. If it wasn't for his gesture, framing a shot and the text announcing a movie director. The year before, an influential film critic had announced Ingmar Bergman to the American public as cinema's first true existentialist. Along with the Italian Federico Fellini, Bergman rendered cinema the modern art form. Instead of picking the novel or a writer's career, young men – and men it was for the most part – began to consider cinema as a medium for expressing their personal insecurities and doubts. Bergman's model for cinema as a means for personal expression has been so powerful since 1960 that we tend to forget an equally strong model for understanding what makes a good film. Filmmaking as a craft. Craft has to be learned before one can excel at it. This is certainly true in Bergman's case. It is one thing to slip one's demons into a narrative. It is another to make it resonate with large audiences. When we watch the films he made over a span of six decades, his 1940s films suggest he was learning his craft. Whereas in the 1950s, he demonstrated his expertise in a variety of genres. These genres include comedies such as Smiles of a Summer Night and Lessons of Love, rebel youth films as Summer with Monica, period dramas as Seventh Seal, and a circus film such as Sawdust and Tinsel. In the 1960s, he did his most groundbreaking work which culminated with his 1966 Persona. Focusing on a few characters in what is supposed to be intimate and loving relations, he let a group dynamic be infused with sexual frustrations and struggles for power and control. And this is true not only of Persona but also Through a Glass Darkly, and The Silence, Winter Light. To stir up things a bit more, he would put characters in different spheres of communication, for instance, by pitting a self-indulgent intellectual against an intuitive believer. Bergman would return to what he called his chamber films, almost a genre of his own. A great success in his 1972 Cries and Whisper and Saraband, his last film from 2002. The variety of films which he directed is astonishing. In some of his later films there's a strong sense of narrative digress as inner and alter reality become confused. This is true of his Hour of the Wolf. Whereas, others appear straightforward, almost Hollywood-like in their narrative form. This is the case with Fanny and Alexander from the early 80s. Some have a narrative framework almost as a kind of detective narrative, as in the Serpent’s Eggs. While others, even though they have a murder in the beginning, appear more like explorations of how a marriage may turn cold and bitter and mean, as in the Life of the Marionettes. This is a theme which was fully explored in his TV series, Scenes from a Marriage. In assessing Bergman's legacy, one has to take into account his work schedule. If we include television and documentary, Bergman directed some 59 films. On top of this, he was one of 20th century's most prolific directors in theater, directing 171 stage productions including radio. And he had a highly productive career as a writer of screenplays, articles, dramas, and autobiographies. In his mid 20s, Bergman was appointed head of a municipal theater in Helsingborg, in the south of Sweden, and he pursued this career alongside his career as a cinema director. I highly recommend the Ingmar Bergman Foundation's website for an overview of his works and his career. It is also important to consider the industrial constraints under which Bergman worked. One of the constraints of a small nation such as Sweden is that actors cannot specialize in film. They also have to perform for the stage to make a living. Arguably stage acting calls for a different set of skills with more emphasis on line delivery and posture. But I believe that Bergman fostered an acting style appropriate for this constraint. The result would often give the spectator a sense of being close to a character in a confiding and vulnerable moment. Bergman's vast production was subject to commercial constraints as well. Up to the mid 1950s, Bergman would be asked by his studio boss to do a comedy or asked to adapt a specific book or play. Bergman was motivated for filmmaking in part by his need to support his many ex wives and children. When turning 42, Bergman had married three times and was the father of seven children. And he would have more children and more marriages. He needed to work, not only to specialize, I'm sorry, not only to realize his artistic ambitions, but also to make a living. When a strike stopped the Swedish film industry in the early 1950s, he turned to promotional shorts for a soap, called Bris. His film grew commercially viable only when he became an international brand name in the late 1950s transnational art cinema. The image offered by Time Magazine cover easily leads us to consider Bergman to stand for the opposite of Hollywood. But his turning down lucrative American offers was likely also motivated in his experience of not getting paid for a script which he had adapted for a prominent Hollywood producer, David Selznick. And later, he may just have realized that Sweden best served his need for creative control. Sweden is where he found his locations and teased out performance of his sample of preferred actors, such as Max Von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Erland Josephson, Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck. In the supplementary material, you will find links to two obituaries in the summer of 2007 when he died eighty-nine years old. One of the obituaries is titled Scenes from an Overrated Career. It suggests that Bergman is in a minor league compared to directors such as Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer. The other obituary suggests that his later films sometimes had a repetitive feel. Part of the problem may be that Bergman is almost too perfect a match to Time Magazine's filmmaker as visionary, or filmmaker as intellectual. Bergman was adept at applying personal experiences to his art from his marriages, his infidelities, and jealousy or from his stern and traumatic upbringing in a pastor's home. And he was uncompromising and demanding on the set. But the model of personal cinema may not fully capture the extent to which he drew upon genres of character constellations already in place. Bergman's major achievement is the development of the chamber film, a semi-genre that he mastered better than anyone before or after. But as he has always pointed out the influence of his fellow Swede, August Strindberg's, chamber plays was always there. Also we should be cautious in comparing Bergman to minimalists such as Bresson or Dreyer. Bergman does not spare the spectator from explicit images of sex or loud cries of pain, or from scenes of painful humiliations from expressions of despair or insanity. I think of Bergman's best films as a happy marriage of what he brings from personal life with possibilities in the narrative and the character types and I think of Bergman's legacy of that director both imaginative and interpretive. In my next lecture I will look at some of his films from the 1950s in greater detail. [MUSIC]
