Ingmar Bergman: Major Works

"There are many filmmakers who forget that the human face is the starting point in our work. To be sure, we can become absorbed by the aesthetic of the picture montage, we can blend objects and still life's into wonderful rhythms, we can fashion nature studies of astonishing beauty, but the proximity of the human face is without doubt the film's distinguishing mark and patent of nobility.'
--Ingmar Bergman


Since 1945, Ingmar Bergman has produced a series of films that are critically notable for their emotional intensity and extensive philosophic reach. His films have consistently dealt with a highly defined set of evolving themes that have, at their core, an overwhelming concern with individual consciousness. With this acute sense of self-awareness, Bergman has repeatedly explored the repressive side of human nature, the potential sterility of intellectual ism, and God's apparent indifference to mankind. Firmly rooted in the literary and philosophic traditions of August Strindberg and Soren Kierkegaard, Bergman is an artist whose films asks questions rather than present answers and his search for meaning within a possibly meaningless universe brings Bergman to the forefront of existentialist inquiry in the cinema. Though some critics have periodically accused him of latent narcissism, Bergman is one of the few filmmakers whose work transcends the flat and shadowy limitations of the screen.

Bergman was born in 1918 to the family of a stern and aloof Lutheran minister. In his childhood, he received an extensive exposure to religious doctrine and education. The theatre, however, became Bergman's great interest and one of his fondest childhood memories would be of magic lantern shows. The magic lantern, a primitive forerunner to the cinema, would be an all important reference point for the mature Bergman in the 1930s and 1940s as he became a theatre playwright and director and, beginning in 1944, a regular screenwriter for Svensk Filmindustri.

His transition from screenwriter to writer-director would take place in 1945 with the production of Crisis. This was the first of 12 minor films directed by Bergman that would, in retrospect, present his crucial first steps toward his major works of the 1950s. While most of Bergman's early films were realistic studies on the increasing potential for alienation within modern Swedish society, these works also provided Bergman with a good training ground in which he finely honed his skills for narrative structure while collecting round him the actors and actresses who would form a virtual repertory company under his command.

By the early 1950s, Bergman was increasingly directing films whose unique themes and stylization clearly identified them as the artistic achievement of his own singular vision. This was first, and most genuinely achieved in Sawdust and Tinsel (Sweden 1953). The film's barren landscape mirrors its emotional theme in which the bluster of masculine sexuality and pride is exposed as a shallow reservoir of guilt and spiritual impotency.

By the second half of the 1950s, Bergman created some of his most ambitious efforts. The Seventh Seal (Sweden 1957) became his supreme state­ment on the human condition. In the film, idealism and pragmatism are divided between Max von Sydow's knight and Gunnar Bjornstrand's squire. Suggestively, through out the film, neither God nor devil exists and only Death, who engages the knight in an ongoing game of chess, seemingly represents the greater cosmic order. It is against this "silence of God" that Bergman also directed such films as The Virgin Spring (Sweden 1959) -- the one film by Bergman in which God answers -- and The Silence (Sweden 1963), a film in which even human communication ultimately fails.

Age and death are the final arbitrators of life in both Wild Strawberries (Sweden 1957) and Autumn Sonata (Sweden 1978). With age comes a lifetime accumulation of memories, regrets, and the deep self-awareness of a once possible happiness that was never achieved. The surrealistic veneer of Wild Strawberries contrasts sharply with the realistic and intimate structure of Autumn Sonata, but both films address themselves to Bergman's concern with mortality and the complex, and often failed, inter-relationship between love and family.