A knight returning from the Crusades plays chess with Death on a beach; the film ends with a dance in silhouette over a hill (1957)
The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) — Max von Sydow; the most parodied image in art cinema
Film · European
Ingmar Bergman
1918–2007 · Swedish
Swedish art cinema; existential and chamber drama
Ingmar Bergman wrote or directed more than sixty films and over 170 theatre productions, working almost entirely in Sweden and, from 1961, largely on the Baltic island of Fårö. The son of a Lutheran chaplain, he returned again and again to silence, faith, marriage and death, and built a repertory company — Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson — around the cinematographer Sven Nykvist.
How to spot them
- ▸Close-ups held far past comfort; two faces in one frame; Nordic summer light and winter silence
- ▸God's silence, Lutheran guilt, failing marriages, artists who cannot speak
- ▸Fårö, the Baltic island where he lived and shot from Through a Glass Darkly onwards
- ▸Sven Nykvist behind the camera; Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow and Erland Josephson in front of it
- ▸Autobiography The Magic Lantern; the childhood magic lantern and the cold Lutheran manse
Key films
An elderly professor drives across Sweden to collect an honorary degree and dreams of a clock with no hands (1957)
Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället) — Victor Sjöström in his last role
An actress who has stopped speaking and the nurse who tends her on a Baltic island; their two faces are finally printed as one (1966)
Persona — Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson
Three sisters in a red-walled manor house at the turn of the century, one of them dying, held at the last by a servant (1972)
Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop) — Sven Nykvist won the Oscar for cinematography
Six episodes of a marriage falling apart, made first for Swedish television and blamed for a rise in the national divorce rate (1973)
Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap) — Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson
A concert pianist visits the daughter she abandoned, and they fight it out over a Chopin prelude (1978)
Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten) — Ingrid Bergman's last cinema role, opposite Liv Ullmann
A warm Uppsala family Christmas in 1907, followed by the cold household of a bishop stepfather; the director called it his last film for cinema (1982)
Fanny and Alexander — it won four Oscars
A country pastor loses his faith between morning and afternoon services on a winter Sunday (1963)
Winter Light (Nattvardsgästerna) — the middle film of the 'silence of God' trilogy
Key ideas
- The silence of God: the trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence
- The chamber film — few characters, one house, no escape — borrowed from Strindberg's chamber plays
- The face as landscape: the close-up as the fundamental unit of cinema
Quick-fire facts
- •Born in Uppsala in 1918; his father was a Lutheran chaplain who later served the Swedish royal family
- •Three of his films won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film: The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly and Fanny and Alexander
- •He received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1971
- •Arrested for suspected tax evasion in 1976 while rehearsing at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, he suffered a breakdown and left Sweden for Munich; the charges were dropped
- •He ran the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten) in Stockholm from 1963 to 1966
- •His autobiography is The Magic Lantern (Laterna Magica, 1987)
- •He wrote screenplays filmed by others after his retirement, including Faithless (2000), directed by Liv Ullmann
- •He died on Fårö on 30 July 2007 — the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni
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Sources
- Ingmar Bergman Foundation — About Bergman
- Ingmar Bergman — The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography