Ingmar Bergman

1. Ingmar Bergman Cori Heyman Great Directors 2013

2. Where to begin? First: view films • Waiting Women (1952) • Summer with Monika (1953) • Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) • The Seventh Seal (1957) • Wild Strawberries (1957) • Persona (1966) • Hour of the Wolf (1968) • Shame (1968) • The Passion of Anna (1969) • The Serpent’s Egg (1977) • Fanny and Alexander (1982)

3. How I View Bergman: Second: make connections • Faces obstructed • Theatrical elements • Same actors and actresses • Bossy women • Looking at the camera/ close ups • Gore and shock factor • Religious symbolism • Dreams and visions • Circus/ cabaret • Scary music/ but mostly silence • Film technology exposed

4. How Others View Bergman Third: research time • Laura Hubner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of Light (2007) • Jesse Kalin, The Films of Ingmar Bergman (2003) • Marc Gervais, Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet (1999)

5. Laura Hubner: • Focus on Illusions: Apparitions, dreams, mental delusions, and ghosts Multiplicity of lives and selves • “Gradual shift from focusing on dichotomies between falsities and truth to looking at life and film as a set of constructs.” • Late 1960s: shattering of reality/ illusion and more disturbing films • Early 1980s: resolves disturbances by returning to them, exploring masquerade and multiplicity • the necessary illusion (fantasies, dreams and illusory moments of happiness) are necessary to endure life’s darker realities.” • She describes his filmmaking in matters of Bergman’s spiritual development: The mask against identity, fantasy of escape against real life or compromise, religious faith against life or human love, cinematic illusion against truth, dream against reality, and a return to humanism.

6. Jesse Kalin: • Breaks his career into first and second periods: First: “Great Synopsis” phase life portrayed as offering rebirth and renewal, not despair and suicide which are central themes in the films ends in will-to-carry-on in face of humiliation, failure, abandonment, and death. • Characters show “gloomy optimism” Second:“Second Thoughts” phase 1966 to 1984 the idea that at best, one can only disengage or find comfort in isolation with loved ones. • Bergman explores the “geography of the soul” from Freud's “human condition” • plot points in each film • Judgment • Abandonment • Suffering as a Passion (jouissance) • Turning of human relationships (always in motion) • Shame and recognition of failure • Vision of how one could be

7. Marc Gervais: • Believes Bergman’s films include themes of God/ non-God, meaningfulness/ nothingness, life as a journey, nature, love, psychotherapy, and Freudian symbols. • He also feels that they are all part of the Swedish middle class, there is no Marxism in his films, the main characters are often artists although, “Bergman is not understood as an ‘intellectual filmmaker’ his is essentially a poetic language, proceeding from intuition and feeling.” He attributes (along with Ingmar himself) Bergman’s inspiration to childhood memories, dreams, or a certain sight, sound or movement.

8. Who is Ingmar Bergman? • born July 14th 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden • Parents: Karin Bergman and Lutheran Pastor Erik Bergman • born on a Sunday • “Sunday’s children” Strindberg described as rare individuals who are “capable of perceiving supernatural phenomena, of driving truth and of stripping away facades of lies and deceits that other characters encase themselves in. “ (Cohen, 1). • As a child: he was sickly, whiney, short tempered, shy, and different • First Moving Picture: age 6, • Black Beauty • First Camera: age 9, • Cinematograph/ Magic Lantern

9. Schooling: • Influences Included: • August Strindberg  • Victor Sjöström • Akira Kurosawa  • Federico Fellini  • Marcel Carné • He attended Stockholm University in 1937 and began directing plays • In 1940 he left the university, but continued directing plays

10. Career: “I came to the business in 1942. Sweden was completely isolated; they only get pictures from Germany. So they had to make their own films. Suddenly everybody who knew the front and back of a camera was a camera man and anyone who had ever spoken to an actor was a director.” (Bergman, A conversation with students of AFI) • March of 1943: age 24 Scriptwriter for SvenksFilmindustri • first film he wrote was Torment released in 1944. • first film he directed was Crisis (1946). “I made five films…five catastrophes, no one understood them…I don’t even understand them.” (Bergman, A conversation with students of AFI) • He was active from 1944-2005 Had 56 films, wrote 50 of them, this is not including documentaries

11. How Bergman Sees Himself On Filming: “I like all movies, sometimes I use movies as relaxation, sometimes I learn.” (Bergman, Interview with Dick) “My only tool in my field of work is my intuition. If you trust your intuition you did the right thing, afterwards, you can think it over.” “I don’t know anything about message or symbols or anything like that, it always surprises me when people ask because I have just wanted to be in touch with other human beings when I make a picture…to touch and to feel them and see things within them.” (Bergman, A conversation with students of AFI)

12. Subjects: • Faith, Illness, Insanity, Death, God • On God: “We shouldn’t talk about God, but about the holiness within man.” (Bergman, On Persona) “The idea of God is unhealthy because it’s a feeling of most extreme perfects. God is the perfect thing, the most perfect thing…so I must always feel like a snake, a dirty snake. Its not good to feel like a dirty snake.” (Bergman, On Persona)

13. Filming Frames:

14. Foreground/ Background

15. Barriers/ Bars:

16. Mirrors:

17. Lighting: • On Light: “Sometimes I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films. This is natural and it passes. Most of all I miss working with Sven Nykvist, perhaps because we are both utterly captivated by the problem of light, the gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, spring like, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale, light.” (Bergman, 299)

19. Music: • His use of music is unique. His characters know it is there. • He thought the silent picture was in development when sound came. • He thought music can be dangerous to the rhythm of a film and there was a lot more to learn about sound and silence in films. (Bergman, A conversation with students of AFI)

20. Theater/ Clowns/ Circus/ Cabaret…

21. Illusions: On Dreams: • He filmed two scenes for movies that were based solely on personal dreams (one in Sawdust and Tinsel and the other in Wild Strawberries) • He filmed things from memory alone like bits of cabaret or plays he saw in his childhood. He even recreated one of the first silent films he ever watched (in Persona)

22. Let’s Watch Some! Finally: • Amazon.com Serpent's Egg LivUllman, David Carradine, GertFrobe, Heinz Bennent Movies & TV.htm

23. Remind You of Someone? • Lars von Trier and Bergman: • Film Technology Exposed • Transportation/ Machines (shown and heard) • Narrating his own films • Close-ups

24. Shock, gore, violence

26. Passion

27. So That’s Where You Got It On Women: “acting is a very special women’s profession…women have much more talent for acting…it’s not so difficult… women are more open, they open up more…wearing clothes or not wearing clothes.” (Bergman, Interview with Dick) “I like more to work with women, they have much better nerves that the men have, but on the first hand they are not women they are human beings… and the prima-donnas are men.” On Faces: “I’m passionately interested in human beings, in human face, in human soul.” (Bergman, Interview with Dick)

28. “I think the camera is erotic, the most exciting little machine that exists…to see the human face, the face changing is most fascinating.”

29. Play Boy • Marriage/ Divorces: Else Fisher (1943–45) Ellen Lundström (1945–50) Gun Grut (1951–59) Käbi Laretei (1959–69) Ingrid von Rosen (1971–95) • Children: 9 • professions including actors, actresses, directors and a pilot.

30. Affairs with Actresses: BibiAndersson Harriet Andersson LivUllmann

31. So, Is He Great? Gervais says: “Ideally the director should also be the writer; and the films should be an expression of the director’s sensibility and vision, the product of his or her creativity.” “These movies can be seen as making up a consistent universe, the director’s, as he or she relates to the world we all live in.”

32. So, Is He Great? Bergman thinks films is: “the most fascinating medium in the world” and that it is “magic.”(Bergman, Interview with Dick) When asked if a dictator were to come rule Sweden and say he has to pick Film or Theater which would he choose he said he “wouldn’t exist”, “its because of the freedom you know? Nobody comes to me and says do that, do that, I am my own master and I want the actors and technicians around me to be the same.” He said if someone tried to interfere or get involved who knew nothing of the art he would tell them, “go to hell.”(Bergman, Interview with Dick)

33. Greatness in a Director (for me) is: • Writing your scripts • Having a style and stamp • Being dictator of your films • Uniqueness • Evolving on your own terms • No copying your work or others’ • Making more than a handful of films • Truly engaging and captivating your audience • Loving the medium

34. Do I have Time, Aga?? • Persona (I.Bergman - 1966) - Opening sequence - YouTube.htm

35. Bibliography Bergman, Ernst Ingmar., and Raphael Shargel. Ingmar Bergman: Interviews. Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi, 2007. Print.Bergman, Ingmar. The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography. New York, NY: Viking, 1988. Print.Cohen, Hubert I. Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession. New York: Twayne, 1993. Print.Gervais, Marc. Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1999. Print.Hubner, Laura. The Films of Ingmar Bergman: Illusions of Light and Darkness. Basingstoke [England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.Kalin, Jesse. The Films of Ingmar Bergman. Cambridge [u.a.: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. phille22. “Ingmar Bergman Interview with Dick Cavett parts 1-6.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 13 June 2006. Google Chrome. March 2013. Oras666. “Ingmar Bergman On Persona 1966 (A Poem In Images).” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 3 January 2011. Google Chrome. March 2013. Reshetniak, Anya. “Ingmar Bergman- A conversation with the students of the American Film Institute (AFI).” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 16 November 2012. Google Chrome. March 2013.