WARM FILMS SHOT IN COLD CLIMATES

Ingmar Bergman used the confessional of the screen to document his own crisis of faith. Daniel Arizona puts the Glögg on the boil and cues up his trilogy ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

In July 2007, two of Europe’s towering post-war directors passed away on the same day, Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman. Such a coincidence gave film critics much to opine about. Comparisons were reminiscent of those surrounding the duel deaths of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams: two very different men who served the same revolution.

A.O. Scott, a film critic for the New York Times, framed his memorial as a nostalgic look back at a time when the edgy and transformative work of both men was widely anticipated, proving the lie that movies weren’t art. Scott goes on to say, wistfully, that given today’s standards, it would be hard to view or feel these films as forcefully as their original audiences. That may be, but I think these films still contain plenty that will stylishly provoke and unsettle modern audiences due, in large part, to today’s standards.

Over the holidays, I decided to revisit Bergman, in particular his trilogy on faith: “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), “Winter Light” (1962) and “The Silence” (1963). Now, when you think of "Bergmanesque" you’re probably picturing formless black-and-white films about good-looking Swedes prancing about and spouting bad existential poetry about God, death and art during prolonged fits of morbid self-scrutiny before eventually succumbing to a loss of identity and committing suicide with a hunting rifle. That wouldn’t be too far off the mark. But, as with most art, it helps to know what you’re getting yourself into before frustration and impatience occlude your transparent eyeball.

The key to appreciating Bergman is two-fold: first, one must bear in mind that Bergman is the odd man out of European cinema. At the time that he was enjoying his greatest success, he was competing with both the bleak post-war aesthetic of Italian Neorealism that had preceded him and the breakers of the French New Wave that was itself heavily beholden to American film-making. Notwithstanding the innovations of both movements, Bergman’s films, I would argue, are far more personal: they discard tendentious manifestos in favour of exploring and sharing his own childhood memories and formative experiences.

The second sure-fire way to enjoy Bergman’s films is to gaze transfixed at the unending parade of gorgeous and talented actresses that made up his reparatory. Bergman had the most uxorious camera in the business, even more so than Fellini. (I’m pretty sure that I surpass even such notable perverts as Woody Allen in my love for Harriet Andersson, and really, how could I not?) In all seriousness, though, Bergman’s feminist thrust and thirst for marital strife not only betrays his love of Ibsen and Strindberg, but also his penchant as a psychological director, shocking his own characters into telling his story.

Relying upon his unerring cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, and his own extensive work as a theatre director, Bergman was able to make better use of his sets and locations while still maintaining the intimacy of a small theatre. It is in this moving confessional that Bergman documented his own crisis of faith, which he said he only came to accept while he was actually filming his trilogy.

Bergman’s father was a martinet, a conservative Lutheran minister who severely punished his son. Yet instead of inspiring a loathing for religion in the boy, Bergman wrote in his autobiography "Laterna Magica" that much of it spurred his sense of wonder:

"I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the coloured sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire—angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans."

Accordingly, Bergman’s trilogy pulsates with the same human drama that permeates the Bible: doubt and need, love and hate, despair and death, madness and incest, homosexuality and lesbianism, masturbation and sex, lust and rape, compassion and coldness, trust and betrayal. These are not, strictly speaking, modern themes, but in Bergman’s hands, they acquire unfamiliar contours and feel uncannily new.

Bergman may have been a tad solipsistic in his choice of subject matter, but his instincts were pure showmanship. Bergman knew that his sumptuous visuals and the individual performances he consistently drew out of his regular cast members would win you over (and if those don’t do the trick, then maybe the performing troupe of Spanish midgets will).

So, if you leave contemporary meditations on religion like “Doubt” feeling like it was a little too-clever-by-half, or if you are still completely repulsed by Rick Warren’s invocation the other week, or if you just want to see a good flick about a struggle with faith that doesn’t talk down to you, I urge you to put the Glögg on the boil and cue up some Bergman.

Picture credit: "Winter Light"

(Daniel Arizona is a writer based in New York. He last wrote about Buddy Holly and his chanky chank guitar.)