From the late 1950s to the late 1970s Ingmar Bergman, who has died aged 89, would have been in any average film buff’s list of “great” movie directors. Similarly, no critics’ poll would have omitted either Wild Strawberries or The Seventh Seal from their list of greatest movies. During those decades Bergman was at the height of his prowess and international fame — the latter thanks to the success of Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal, a dazzling hat-trick, made in fewer than three years. His work was in severe contrast to the neo-realist school which had dominated post-war cinema, employing a surgeon-like precision to analyse the intellectual disquiet that seemed fiercely at odds with the hedonistic nature of the times.
His films had a grim obsession with physical confrontation — he once remarked that he would like to have made a film entirely in close-up — made possible by his collaborations with two great cameramen and his team of skilled performers, and Bergman literally astonished people with his willingness to recognise cruelty, death and above all the torment of doubt.
Bergman in his era was an undisputed colossus of the “art” cinema. In his native Sweden he also dominated as a director in the live theatre where he was prolific and, from 1963, the head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm. The two strands in his career were crucially inter-related. He surrounded himself with devoted teams of actors making a film each spring or summer with a superb team of technicians. The acting is stylised rather than natural, highly self-conscious and moulded. Yet in the theatre his aim was always equally cool and precisely detailed. As a film director he, no doubt unwittingly, obliterated the great past and much of the then present Scandinavian cinema, so that his stature and eminence may be seen to have been a mixed blessing for Swedish cinema, especially for its would-be directors.
Bergman became a beached whale and in March 1983 announced, after a return to form and the stunning success of the autobiographically inspired Fanny and Alexander (1981/1982), that he would not direct again. Of course other works followed, some for television, After The Rehearsal (1983), The Blessed One (1985), a documentary about Fanny and Alexander (1986), Karin’s Face (1986) which was a short film about his mother, using photographs and with a soundtrack played by his second wife. And there were works from his novels and screenplays, The Best Intentions (1991) and Sunday’s Children (1992). Plus his autobiography, The Magic Lantern (1988) and the intriguing Images, My Life In Film (1990). Essentially Bergman's cinema career, and most of his theatre work, spanned the period 1944 to the early 1980s.
With his death a reassessment of his impressive output positions him among such talents as Antonioni, Kurosawa, Ray, Wilder, Visconti. These second rung, but never second rate, directors hover fitfully behind the handful of geniuses — Bresson, Dreyer, Ozu, Renoir, Rossellini — where poetry and originality transcend matter and realism.
What Bergman and the others lack is the simplicity of expression that belies inspiration: an inspiration which makes true what would not otherwise have been apparent. In short there is an over-emphasis, an over-weaning power of expression, that obscures the counter currents of emotion lying beneath the surface of the work of those five pantheon directors, in such of their mast erpieces as Voyage to Italy, Gertrud, or Lancelot du Lac which are truly beyond criticism.
Guardian