He’s old now, largely forgotten, his work rarely seen outside a few classrooms. For a very long time, however, from the mid-1950s to the early ’80s, no moviemaker anywhere commanded more attention, at least among film snoots, intellectuals, and, oddly, churchgoers, or at least the headier among them. For one, he was the master, the Man, the Swedish filmmaker whose work was prolific, stylistically bold, and always compelling, even haunting, albeit sometimes cryptic. Just about single-handedly, Ingmar Bergman exalted cinema into a searing, accessible, psycho-philosophical crucible, imbuing the medium with dead-serious intellectual and religious freight. More than that, though, especially for religious folk, what distinguished him in film after film was his painstaking (and painful) display of the death-throes of God in Western culture and, no less so, in his own dire soul. It is perhaps not too much to say that Bergman, born heavy-duty Lutheran, thrashed out for all to see both the before and the after of non-belief. After all, this is the fellow who wrote and directed films of deep-down faith angst, all riveting still, like The Seventh Seal (1957), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Passion of Anna (1969), Cries and Whispers (1972), Autumn Sonata (1978), and a dozen others of equal worth but less fame. And then, since 1982 and his most celebrated film, the strangely sentimental Fanny and Alexander, a long silence. Only very occasionally has a screenplay borne the name Ingmar Bergman, and those he has given only to trusted others. (In the meanwhile, Bergman returned to the theater to direct more than twenty plays.)
Then, at 87, surprise, along comes another Bergman film, Saraband, the whole thing, both writing and directing, done by the magician himself. Released two years ago in his native Sweden, the film returns to characters whose messy divorce and afterlife Bergman scrutinized thirty years before in the five-hour Swedish television series Scenes from a Marriage (1973; later cut in half for movie houses). Long before reality TV or sagas on the home-life of gangsters and undertakers, Bergman inspected a single marriage for fissures that break into chasms of hostility. As for the sequel, well, the praise has been lavish: “vital … magnificent” (Phillip Lopate, Film Comment); “powerful and poignant” (Richard Corliss, Time); “marvelous” (Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times); and “profoundly affecting … sublime” (Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal). Not bad for an old guy.
Which means, happily, that this is the very same Bergman, in the days after the Fall and after Christendom, painting portraits of bereft, comfortless humanity as it lurches about trying to recoup its inestimable losses. To be sure, the one part of Lutheranism Bergman never discarded was its stringent realism about human nature (nor did witnessing his parents’ marriage, his father a noted preacher, do much to cheer him up; Bergman himself was married five times). But ah, what bracing stuff this is, Bergman as moralist, turning once again with unflinching, dead-honest candor to regard a species hell-bent on self-deception, narcissism, avidity, and plain old meanness.
No one gets off easy—no one. If Bergman is tough on the shortfalls of his pious elders, he is harder still on the feckless self-absorption of the new élites, the belief-less modernists of Bergman’s own sort, artists especially, who do no better than their parents, and usually a lot worse. Indeed, the predominant note in Bergman’s long career is one of pained amazement at what people do to each other in pursuit of they know not what. And amid their willy-nilly scramble to wring from life some measure of blessing, a secular grace, be it love, sex, smartness, art, or cool, these narcissistic latecomers appear to be as insensible of their own malice as they are of life’s limits. At least the bygone Christian vision reined in the worst when folks presumed they had something to be guilty about.
The men are weak, callous, or plainly cruel, such as Jan Rosenberg in Shame (1968), Andreas Winkelman in The Passion of Anna (1969), both played by the remarkable Max von Sydow, or Johan (Erland Josephson) in Saraband. Women by contrast usually seem lost or have about them some kernel of moral purity (many end up with the name Eva). In any case, even when the women rival men in their cruelty, Bergman seems to grasp the origins of their malice, except perhaps in the case of concert pianist Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) in Autumn Sonata (1978), whose aestheticism shrivels her daughter’s body and soul, or Marianne (Lena Andre) in Faithless (2000, directed by Liv Ullmann, with a screenplay by Bergman), whose sexual perfidy demolishes the lives of all those she loves. And for this resolute moral inspection, Bergman’s remarkable style seems more than suited: chiseled scripts, close-ups aplenty, very long takes, structural disruption, and lush visual richness, even in the spare black-and-white films of his early days. Or, as Bergman himself put it in stating his preferences in film stories: “robust, direct, concrete, substantial, sensual.” And of course, not the least, for forty years the cinematography of Sven Nykvist has transfigured Bergman’s worlds not so much with radiance (though that is there) but with seriousness. What cinematographer Chris Menges says of his own aims describes Nykvist’s accomplishment: what “one tries to do is create light that glows—soft, hard, or whatever, but something that is believable, that perhaps has mystery in it.”
Most of Bergman’s notoriety derives not from his rep as a moralist but as cinema’s reverse pilgrim: from full-blown orthodoxy, albeit an uneasy faith, Bergman journeyed to an anguished atheism, one that has, in any case, clearly waned in recent years as Bergman, well into his seventies, examined again that amply troubled family crucible into which he was born. In fact, it is easy enough now to segment Bergman’s long career as a director and screenwriter, some sixty years, into three distinct phases. It is, all told, a pilgrim’s traverse, a long arc that has come to look more and more like a circle, one that, remarkably, given the measure of Bergman’s rejection, returns to the specifically Christian hope with which his mature work began.
That first phase started in earnest when Bergman had achieved sufficient commercial success that the Swedish film industry gave him carte blanche to make what he wanted. He had already written and directed films for ten years, beginning in his late twenties and averaging more than one film a year, but he was broke and close to giving up when Smiles for Summer Night (1955), a lusty but light-hearted sex comedy, hit gold in Sweden and won big at Cannes and elsewhere. (Yes, surprise, Bergman is a funny fellow.) With the new freedom this triumph gained for him, he chose to make The Seventh Seal (1957), which had its birth in a play written in student days. Visually lush and provocative, it remains one of the globe’s great films and perhaps the best religious film ever made.
Knight Antonious Block (Max von Sydow, 28 but looking a worn fifty, a face carved from wood, as Bergman has called it) returns to Sweden amid the Black Death after ten years in the Crusades. His soul sorely troubled, contesting as he is with death and doubt, Block wants belief and the love and hope it gives, but God is impalpable and, at best, remote: “Faith is like loving someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, however loudly you call.” Despite the travail of darkness, the witness of the sweet goodness of life and love intimate the healing that will come: for the dead, as one character puts it, “the rain washes their faces and cleans the salt of the tears from their cheeks.”
Then came Bergman’s great trilogy of affirmation, though the films grew increasingly severe: The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), and Winter Light (1963). These are harsh, even malignant worlds wherein the struggle to believe in a God of love becomes ever more daunting. Bergman refers to “God’s silence” and, worse still, to “an ugly, revolting … spider God” whose intent is to torment humankind (Winter Light). Nevertheless, affirmation comes, though it often does seem, as some critics insist, pat and tacked on. The exception is Winter Light, perhaps Bergman’s greatest film, in which a bitter, narcissistic cleric replaces one image of God—”an entirely private, fatherly god … who guaranteed me every imaginable security” with another, one who suffers for and with humankind so it might endure its anguish. To this end, Bergman marshals his full cinematic arsenal: a riveting, stripped-down screenplay, painterly composition, Sven Nykvist’s crystalline cinematography, and, of course, the really stunning performances that Bergman always extracts from his actors, in this case Gunnar Björnstrand and Ingrid Thulin.
By Bergman’s next film, The Silence (also released in 1963), an arduous Kafkaesque nightmare of alienation, he seemed to have altogether abandoned the possibility of God, and that largely because God seemed to have abandoned thirsty, bewildered humanity. For critics this confirmed Bergman as modernity’s cinematic prophet of angst and everlasting darkness, and for the next long phase of his career that label pretty much fit. In these films—with only a couple of exceptions—God is simply not on the chart, horizon, or anywhere; the very notion is for Bergman an imaginative blank. Through Persona (1966), Shame, The Passion of Anna, and many others to the end of his film directing career with Fanny and Alexander, Bergman displays the labyrinthine complexities of psyche and soul as they lurch toward others and their own intolerable selves, and never is the outcome cheery. Indeed, most people seem over-equipped with a nasty set of claws with which they, either inadvertently or intentionally, end up shredding others. That is true even in the present Saraband, wherein aged father and son still loathe each other with a sort of perverse perfection. The only moderately happy ending comes in the melodramatic Fanny and Alexander, where Bergman idealizes a cheerful bacchanalian tolerance as the cure for human maladies. As for religious belief, the usual take is that Bergman’s final comment is his portrait in Fanny of the sadistic Lutheran bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö), whose deservedly hideous end makes hell redundant.
And yet, that critical judgment ignores persistent hints that even amid Bergman’s post-Christian sojourn, the question of belief was far from being settled. Moreover, Bergman’s screenplays of the 1990s, for a trilogy that explores his parents’ lives, reveal a remarkable third phase, one that is more than surprising—nothing less, in fact, than what seems a return home in thirst for a transcendent caritas that defeats strife, sorrow, and obscene death.
Evidence that Bergman had never discarded the possibility of belief as fully as many contended is ample. It is there, for example, on the edges of perhaps the bleakest of all his films, Shame, where venal Jan Rosenberg (Max von Sydow) ponders by the body of a gentle and innocent farmer, a suicide from mistaken persecution for animal torture; above his bed, in stark counterpoint to the town and Rosenberg himself, hangs a portrait of Jesus walking among sheep. In Cries and Whispers, the dying agony of Agnes (Harriet Anderson), luminously devout, is tended by the immense compassion of similarly devout maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), both of whom are shown in contrast to Agnes’ two sophisticated but profoundly unhappy sisters. In the harrowing Autumn Sonata, Eva (Liv Ullmann), a country pastor’s wife, hosts her gadabout mother, Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman), a renowned concert pianist. The two quarrel through a long night during which Eva spills a lifetime of grievances about lousy mothering, and the film ends with slight hope of reconciliation—save for Eva’s remorse and eloquent sense that a divine reality of love contests despair and death.
Bergman’s screenplays in the 1990s show a writer trying to decipher the riddle of himself, and in a very direct fashion at that. The first of these, Best Intentions (1992), three hours long in commercial release, recounts the courtship and early marriage of Bergman’s parents, from whom he was alienated. Sunday’s Children (1992), directed by son Daniel, depicts a day in the ten-year-old Bergman’s relationship with his father (Samuel Fröler), a prominent preacher and tender but volatile father whom the artist even as an old man himself is reluctant to forgive.
Last, and most telling, is the riveting Private Confessions, a recounting of his mother’s midlife infidelity with a seminary student. Anna (Pernilla August) is shown making five confessions in the film (the Swedish television version has six, as does Bergman’s novelization), three of which are to minister Uncle Jakob (von Sydow simply gets better with age). The ending that Ullman appended to the screenplay, one which Bergman first refused but eventually preferred to his own, shows belief embracing Anna, as she at long last allows the loving but severe hands of God, a central image in the film, to enfold her storehouse of frustration and unrequited longing.
In the film’s last sequence, a decade after her affair, Anna visits the dying Jakob and ends up partaking, reluctantly, in what looks to be Jakob’s last communion. There, belatedly, she again recognizes, amid his pain and vomit, his hands as God’s hands, which was indeed his very intention. And afterward, alone on the street, she recalls, smiling, his long-ago assertion that on occasion an unambiguous Love does indisputably enter history, as it did in the improbable emergence of the church itself. By such evidences of then and now, the embers of solace and hope light and warm the way of the desolate pilgrim.
To be sure, for Bergman belief is no larking song of triumph over despair. Rather, this is a desperate, hard-won turn, and it is necessarily, given Bergman’s dire sense of the world’s suffering, to a God of pity and consolation whose compassion mourns for the world and finally overcomes both the devastations that we do to each other and those that life itself bestows. Finally, then, Bergman acknowledges the mystery of the wild improbability of divine love, which is as it must seem from within human misery and through earth’s dark glass. In the end, though, as Private Confessions and even parts of Saraband suggest, Bergman himself confesses hope that God does fathom woe and lostness, does take all waste and sorrow into himself, and does finally, sooner or later, in infinite mercy, heal and make new all that is.
Roy M. Anker is professor of English at Calvin College and author most recently of Catching Light: Looking for God at the Movies (Eerdmans).
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