“I have always tried to make my films appealing in some way to my audience,” wrote the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman in Images—a 1990 autobiographical rundown of his career to that point. This might surprise anyone still hesitant to jump into the titanic director’s voluminous and, by reputation, difficult body of work. His films are Serious Art, the story goes, cinematic broccoli: nourishing, sure, but something even a cinephile initially tastes out of obligation.
That reputation isn’t entirely unfounded. The films of Bergman are by turns beguiling, infuriating, magical, unendurable, violent, placid, dreamy, terrifying. And they’re greatly varied in subject and temperament. There’s a world of distance between the deliriously drawn-out tragedy of Cries and Whispers, a claustrophobic study of the rituals of family and death; the delightful but intimidatingly quick-witted erotic comedy of Smiles of a Summer Night; and the practically avant-garde opening minutes of Persona, a film that seems poised to re-invent the language of movies before you’re even sure that you’re watching one.
But Bergman, who died in 2007 at age 89, didn’t say he wanted to make his films easy. Instead, he invested in appeal—and his films, which have endured since his 1946 directorial debut, are a consummate demonstration of that appeal, tackling universal subjects (love and sex, youth and wisdom, nature, God, theater, identity) with an alluring, outsize boldness. Parodies of The Seventh Seal in art as far-flung from Bergman’s work as Monty Python and the Animaniacs can attest to as much.
It’s been a century since Bergman’s birth in 1918—a span that practically accounts for the entire history of movies. To mark the occasion, Janus Films—the pioneering original distributor of Bergman’s work in the U.S.—has organized a countrywide retrospective of the Bergman canon. If you couldn’t make it to that, FilmStruck, the art-house streaming service, has made most of Bergman’s films available for some time—but, as cinephiles nationwide know and dread, FilmStruck dies this week.
Thus, it’s left to Janus’s sister company, the Criterion Collection, to do the hard work of making Bergman available to the masses for home viewing. Criterion—which once featured its massive catalogue on FilmStruck, and will launch its own streaming service in 2019—has done just that, for $299.95. The distributor has just released Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, a gorgeous and, frankly, gargantuan new box set of Bergman’s work, featuring 39 of Bergman’s films, a 248-page volume of critical essays from authors as varied as the feminist film critic Molly Haskell and novelist Alexander Chee, and—as is the Criterion way—a slew of special features: videos and commentaries, rarely seen documentary shorts, and too much else to list. Clearly, for many, it has already proven worth it; the set may be pricey, but it’s been on back order since at least the day of release. The Bergmaniacs are hungry.
And they’ll undoubtedly be satisfied by what Criterion has assembled. Fans of Bergman’s heavy hitters—Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and the like—will of course find them here, as Criterion has already been selling a decent chunk of Bergman’s catalogue as individual films for some time. (The special features from those earlier Criterion releases are reproduced in this new collection.) The real gems, though, are the 18 films that hadn’t gotten the Criterion treatment until now: From the Life of the Marionettes, which was made in 1980, during Bergman’s exile in Germany, and opens with a shocking murder; or the Elliott Gould-starring The Touch, Bergman’s first English-language film and an infamous box-office disaster—which should make you all the more curious to see it for yourself (in addition to trying to wrap your mind around a movie starring Gould and the great Bibi Andersson, a Bergman regular).
Such a glut of options can’t help but be tinged with irony for a filmmaker whose work was often difficult to see in its original, uncompromised, uncensored form—and whose mythos accordingly titillated a generation of American cinephiles during the postwar art-house boom. “I went to film school, and Bergman was this iconic figure,” Abbey Lustgarten, a producer at Criterion and the central architect of this set, told me in an interview. “You heard about The Serpent’s Egg, that it was really hard to find—and likely you’ve never seen it, and may never get a chance to see it, especially on the big screen.”
This set includes The Serpent’s Egg. But from the moment you open its heavy, handsome pages—the volume of essays is adorned with a photo of young Bergman that frankly makes one want to swipe right—the box set risks becoming an ordeal. Do you proceed chronologically? Hit the major films first, satisfying your gaps in the canon, before wandering through the smaller, earlier, or less renowned ones?
You might, at Criterion’s encouragement, treat it like a film festival. Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema is organized like such an event, with an opening-night selection (Smiles of a Summer Night, a box-office smash that catapulted Bergman into fame), three centerpieces representing the arguable high points in Bergman’s career (The Seventh Seal, Scenes from a Marriage, and Persona), and a closing-night selection, the mammoth, much-adored Fanny and Alexander. In between, smartly paired, are double features, pairings aimed at getting viewers to think and make connections across the full brunt of Bergman’s career.
It’s a chance, among other things, to bring greater attention to Bergman’s earlier work, especially his lovely lighter features. “The beauty of this project,” said Lustgarten, “was to discover the comedy, the comedic side of him, because apparently he was a very funny person.” Despite what you may have heard, Bergman was not all Cries and Whispers and chess games with death. But isn’t even that—death as a clever, lurking man with a face painted white, like a clown’s—sort of funny?
A marathon of Bergman’s films, even a miniature one, is humbling. Watching his major films alongside his minor ones reveals, above all, that “minor” is a misnomer here. Bergman’s early work is still substantial, even when you recognize that the themes he’s exploring therein await further development in later films. Summer Interlude (1951) is a plausible precursor to 1953’s Summer with Monika, which is the more famous film of the two, in part because it was originally distributed in the U.S. as a “naughty nudie,” as Peter Becker, president of the Criterion Collection, said. Both films depict an almost unendurable conflict between the sexual, spiritual freedoms of youth and the inevitable buzzkills of tragedy and adulthood; both insist on the metaphysical ties between nature and desire.
And both display Bergman’s penchant for exploring the psychological mystery and, unsurprisingly, the raw beauty of women: Bibi Andersson, alongside Harriet Andersson (star of Summer with Monika), Liv Ullmann, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, and Eva Dahlbeck. As Lustgarten put it, “Who are these Swedish goddesses?” And gods: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Erland Josephson—Bergman’s regular cast of stock actors is one of the most accomplished in the history of movies. He also collaborated with one of our greatest cinematographers, Sven Nykvist, who would later be hired by Woody Allen, a noted Bergman fanatic, to create indelible images in Crimes and Misdemeanors. Nykvist won an Oscar for the red hellscapes that make Cries and Whispers such a visual touchstone. He won again for Fanny and Alexander.
Bergman was a magnet for talent; funnily, this never obscured his own, but pushed it to into the stratosphere. “On the international stage,” said Becker, “Bergman was certainly the avatar of the cinéaste as artist. He was the image that we had, on the international stage and in the postwar period, of what it meant—this independent artist who was the soul of cinema in a certain way.” He was a director’s director.
But we’re back to making him sound intimidating. Working slowly through a large chunk of the collection over the last month revealed to me that his work is so often the opposite. It’s shattering and invigorating even when opaque, lively and rejuvenating much of the rest of the time. He was a director for whom romance seemed to bloom in nature, and to whom artifice was a quality worth celebrating.
He had a substantial career in the theater—a fact lovingly reinforced by films like the circus-set Sawdust and Tinsel—and his passion for theatricality, for the magic of stagecraft and the frightening immediacy native to live performance, suffused his movies. Just look at those excruciating close-ups, a Bergman hallmark. They push us into his characters’ minds sometimes, and at others relish in the uncompromising fact of their bodies. Harriet Andersson’s heaving throughout Cries and Whispers is one terrifying example. Bergman’s fixation with sex is, of course, another.
If Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema accomplishes only one thing, it should be to remind us of how far Bergman pushed cinema forward, and how frequently, in his wake, it has fallen back. Not because of artists, but because of the systems containing them. Bergman was primarily an independent agent who, as Becker noted, defied genre. He rarely copped to the demands of commerce—he’s lucky not to have started out in Hollywood!—even as some of his films made good money. The Silence (1963), my favorite of his films, has a raw sense of sexuality and politics, and a gobsmacking confrontation with spirituality that puts most independent cinema of today to shame—in America, at least. Bergman’s movies say that movies don’t have to be the way they so often are. With this renewed interest in his work, let’s recognize as much.
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