Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet

336 Pages·1999·49.621 MB·English

by  Marc Gervais

I N G M A R B E R G M A N

I n g m a r
B E R G M A N
Magician and Prophet
MARC GERVAIS
McGill-Queen's University Press
Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca
© McGill-Queen's University Press 1999
ISBN 0-7735-1843-6 (bound) ISBN 0-7735-2004-x (pbk)
Legal deposit fourth quarter 1999
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a grant from
Concordia University.
McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial
support of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BDIDP) for its
activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada
Council for the Arts for our publishing program.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gervais, Marc, 1929-
Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-1843-6 (bound). ISBN o-7735-2oo4-x (pbk).
1. Bergman, Ingmar, 1918- Criticism and interpretation.
1. Title.
PN 1998.3.B47G47 1999 791.43'0233'092 C99-901002-6
This book was typeset in 10.2/14 Electra
Design: David LeBlanc
Frontispiece: Svensk Filmindustri
CONTENTS
Foreword Liv Ullmann vii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
Prelude: Summer Idyll 15
SECTION ONE
PROPHET OF OUR TIMES
In the Beginning 22
Summer Tears, Summer Smiles 32
The Light in the Darkness 46
The Waning of the Light 70
Ingenting ... or Almost 88
Just Doing My Job 114
The Little World? 136
Fade into Dream: A Conclusion? 144
THE IMAGES
SECTION TWO
MAGICIAN OF THE CINEMA
Preamble to the Privileged Moment 152
Into the Trenches 156
The Bergman Magic 194
SOME OF THAT OTHER WORK
Now about Television 220
Confessions of a TV Freak Jannike Åhlund 221
E P I L O G U E
Large Second Thoughts, or, It Did Not End in 1983 232
Film List 251
Index 253
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F O R E W O RD
As I write this, Ingmar Bergman continues to be a very close friend and, at
times, a very valued artistic collaborator. To be sure, there were those other
years a few decades ago, when our sharing of our lives, both personally and
professionally, was intense. So, when I think of his movies, for example, how
do I approach them? For me - and I've mentioned this a few times in past writ-
ings - it tends, of course, to be a series of very personal things: intuitions about
his past, painful or joyful memories, a capturing of moments, of a nuance, or
of a sight or a sound, a sense of wonder, a searching for the answer, a cry for
wholeness. And emotions, of course: good ones, and bad ones, terror, exalta-
tion, love, hate, the mystical, the mundane.
Marc Gervais, I'm reasonably certain, would never claim to have had those
kinds of close personal encounters with the subject of his book! And yet he
never seems to abstract from these Bergman wellsprings as, time and again, in
his own way, he returns to what he calls the "magical Bergman moments."
Blessedly, his book is never free of them. And, especially in certain privileged
instances, he brings a bit of magic of his own, explaining in great detail and in
terms proper to film art, how Ingmar Bergman goes about creating these
moments so that they become intensely personal to the viewer as well. One
does not have to be a film professional to benefit from this, and readers will
feel enriched in their understanding of the complexities of film.
But the book goes well beyond this. I would never describe myself as a pro-
fessional culture scholar, so it was quite wonderful to discover to what an amaz-
ing extent those intense filmic moments have enjoyed a relevance well beyond
the personal: for over fifty years they have served as artistic incarnations, noth-
ing less, of mainline western culture as it has evolved since World War II. Marc
Gervais brings his impressive knowledge and understanding of this shared cul-
ture - philosophy, art, theology, history, literature, the theatre, and the cinema
- to serve a huge task: to demonstrate how the Bergman works are direct, spe-
cific, almost formal reflections, criticisms, extensions of that culture, in what
FOREWORD
might be called an ongoing, never-resolved conversation that has no parallel in
the history of world film. As with the rest of us, Bergman is the product of a rich
and often contradictory mixed heritage from the past. And Gervais spells this
out clearly, as the culture and Bergman's movies have evolved through "post-
war existentialism, deconstruction, postmodernism." To understand his films in
this perspective is to help understand ourselves in our evolving culture.
All of this may sound a bit threatening, or at least (academically) heavy. But
have no fear, dear reader: the Ingmar Bergman movies take on an added rich-
ness and delight as the book easily unfolds before us, a joy to professionals, I am
sure, but also for any of us who love film and culture. I use words like "delight-
ful" and "fresh" because, unlike most writers on culture, Marc Gervais, while
trying to be fair and objective, never forsakes the richly human dimension, nei-
ther Bergman's nor his own. He does not mask his own enthusiasm, hopes, or
disappointments: it's as if we can hear ourselves laughing or (almost) crying
with him as he recalls over fifty years of "Bergman" experiences. And, ulti-
mately, the reader comes to share the Gervais enthralment at the achievement
of an artist who has indeed become a prophet of our times, enhancing our
understanding of those times as he ceaselessly struggles to achieve wholeness
and ruthless honesty, while revealing the cost and the personal vulnerability.
I find myself immensely touched by this situating on the broad cultural
stage of Ingmar Bergman, a man I know so well, and who, in spite of what at
times has been a sense of overwhelming complexity, ambiguity, even futility,
has never ceased struggling to arrive at some kind of ultimate love, meaning-
fulness, immensity, the mystical.
And perhaps this too is part of the magic, an essential aspect of each one of
us, and of our contemporary culture as it continues to evolve.
LIV ULLMANN
viii
P R E FAC E
Power is where it all starts, a power to mesmerize seldom matched in the
annals of film history. One remembers those special moments, those images of
beauty, innocence, or spiritual devastation, the mystery of the silences, the
enchantment, or the terror of the nature sounds, or the withering dialogues
verging on the primal scream - and all of it set to rhythms echoing our heart-
beats. Ingmar Bergman's ability to seduce, enthral, and subjugate us, and to
drive us deep within our innermost selves, is unquestionably the first factor in
a complex, powerful artistic equation.
Speak of a Bergman movie and you find yourself speaking of poetry, of
heightened experience, "the magic of art." But beware: this is not magic dedi-
cated to the flight from reality. Rather, it is a force driving us beneath, beyond,
above the mundane, to explore those regions of our personal lives we might
otherwise choose to leave unconfronted. Experiencing his movies we hear
vaguely recognizable echoes; we grope for familiar terms of reference that have
their origins in the experiences and memories unique to and yet shared by
each one of us.
That is one aspect of Ingmar Bergman's cinema - one, sadly, that is often
taken for granted or even dismissed in the strange "revenge of the intellect
upon art" that Susan Sontag used to speak about.1 The analyst/critic, sidestep-
ping precisely those areas where art cannot be reduced to the categories
imposed by his or her methodology, hurries on to what is "really important":
the elucidation, from the carefully selected appropriate data chosen from the
vast complexity of interwoven elements, of his or her interpretation of the
"Bergman themes." As if, in truth, the mesmerizing power of Bergman's art did
not represent an extraordinarily rich achievement, setting Bergman apart from
the vast majority of his peers. Without it none of the rest would matter, for no
1 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1966) 7.