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It was only after seeing Ingmar Bergman’s films,
Wild Strawberries (1957), The Seventh Seal (1957), and The Virgin
Spring (1960), that I came to understand film as art and what
“cinematic” means. Like most people, I thought movies were just
another way of telling stories or presenting plays. These three
Bergman films, and latter the ten or more others that I have seen,
made me realize that a whole hour-and-a-half movie need not tell a
story at all but still seize a viewer with the poetry of cinematic
images, sounds and silences, the shock of recognizing philosophical
arguments happening on the screen grippingly in the form of
conversations between characters.
My friends and I saw these films
in the 60s in the Insular Life Building and in the now-gone Rizal
Theater in Makati. It impressed me no end that he had a “guild”
of actors and did not depend on big-name stars.
One of the memorable Bergman
images that still often visit my mind’s screen, whenever an
emotionally, physically or poetically parallel experience happens
around me, is that of a faceless clock—or rather the face of a
large train-station clock without hands.
Bergman lost his faith in God. I
sometimes wonder if I would have come to love his films the way I do
if I had encountered them not as an ignorant young man but as the
man I am now, whose confessions are longer but whose faith and
appreciation of Christian theology have deepened.
What follows is an obituary of
Ingmar Bergman culled from AFP and other sources— Rene Q. Bas
Ingmar Bergman was the master of
turning tales of anguished love and loneliness into films that made
him one of the leading directors of the 20th century.
Bergman, who died Monday July 30
at the age of 89, made more than 40 movies and won three Oscars for
best foreign language films during a career spanning four decades.
The Virgin Spring (1960), Through
a Glass Darkly (1961) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) all won best
foreign language film Academy Awards.
Those, along with 1957 movies
Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal are considered classics of
European art house cinema. Leading directors such as Woody Allen and
Robert Altman have named Bergman as a major influence on their own
work.
For many movie buffs, Bergman,
who married five times and fathered nine children, was the greatest
of the authorial filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s, outranking even
Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel or Jean-Luc Godard.
In 1973, his Scenes from a
Marriage, a six-episode television miniseries later repackaged for
cinema, won him a wider audience in Europe and later in the United
States. But it was filmed in his signature direct, often stark look
at what critics called the internal human landscape, an approach the
general movie-going public found remote.
In his native Sweden he was often
accused of portraying the country as a nation of neurotics though
this softened in the last decade of his life.
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in
Uppsala, Sweden, on July 14, 1918, the second of three children.
His father Erik was a Lutheran
minister who imposed a strict upbringing on his children. Family
relationships influenced Bergman profoundly and were reflected in
all his work.
Bergman recounted some episodes
of his childhood in Fanny and Alexander, which won four Oscars in
all and was his last major film for the cinema.
At Stockholm University, the
young Bergman discovered his vocation when he chose the drama
society, which put on plays by Strindberg and Shakespeare, over
literature and art history classes.
He directed his first film Crisis
in 1945 and for more than three decades produced on average a movie
a year. He did not earn international acclaim until 1956 when Smiles
of a Summer Night was shown at the Cannes Festival.
Known in Sweden mainly as a
dramatist, Bergman obtained poor reviews for work that was
considered dark and incomprehensible, with its focus on love,
loneliness, existential angst and relations with God.
Women occupied a central role in
his work. He had loved his mother intensely as a child and when a
doctor advised her to put more distance in their relationship or he
would be damaged for life, he felt the loss deeply.
Mother-son relationships featured
prominently in his work, as did his experiences from five marriages.
He had nine children, including a
daughter by actress Liv Ullmann, one of his fetish actors along with
Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Jarl Kulle and Ingrid Thulin who
repeatedly appeared in his movies.
Bergman headed the Royal Dramatic
Theatre in Stockholm from 1963 to 1966 and returned frequently to
the stage to directing plays by Strindberg, Ibsen, Anouilh,
Williams, Chekhov and Moliere.
Bergman made profoundly personal
films following his intellectual and spiritual preoccupations and
tracing his loss of faith in God.
The Seventh Seal, The Virgin
Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963)
and The Silence (1963) all lead progressively to a rejection of
religious belief, leaving only the conviction that human life is
haunted by “a virulent, active evil.”
With Wild Strawberries, Bergman
turned increasingly to psychological dilemmas and ethical issues in
human and social relations once religion proved a failure.
Other films considered among his
greatest include Persona (1966), Hour of the Wolf (1968), Shame
(1968), The Rite (1969), A Passion (1970) Cries and Whispers (1973)
and Face to Face (1976).
For many years Bergman declined
offers to work abroad. But in 1976, after being charged with tax
evasion, he moved to Germany and worked as the director of Munich
Residenz Theater.
After a six-year exile he
returned to Sweden and remained until his death. Officially
“retired,” he continued to work tirelessly, directing television
plays, writing screenplays—such as the autobiographical saga The
Best Intentions which reduced to three-hour film length won the 1992
Cannes Golden Palm for director Bille August—and occasionally
returning as guest director at the Royal Dramatic Theatre.
After the 1995 death of Ingrid
von Rosen, his wife of 25 years, he lived alone at their country
home in Fårö on the island of Gotland, enjoying long walks along
the beach in a lifestyle he described as “a comfortable hell.”
He soon had a new
“obsession,” as he described his relationship with actress Lena
Endre, for whom he wrote a new film, Trolösa (Faithless), directed
by Liv Ullmann and released in 2000.
A film for television that he
himself directed, In the Presence of a Clown (1998), received
enthusiastic reviews in Sweden and was screened at Cannes.
Bergman said he could never
decide whether the cinema or the theatre had been more important to
him.
“Now I don’t have to,” he
said shortly before his 80th birthday. “But if I’d had to choose
30 years ago, then I’d have dropped dead. Like a chameleon on a
checkerboard.”
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