[NYTr] A Cuban Look at Ingmar Bergman

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Cuba Now - Aug 6, 2007
http://www.cubanow.net/global/loader.php?&secc=6&item=3089&cont=show.php

Loneliness, Faith, Evil

Death of Ingmar Bergman

By Lisandro Otero

Cubanow.- Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman died a few hours ago in his
secluded home on the island of Faro. His work in the ‘50s and ‘60s
brought about an enthusiastic fanaticism among his legion of admirers.
No one had ever treated human adversities with such depth and realism.

He seemed to have been devoured in the pyre of devotions, in the
fundamentalisms of religious faith, in the militancy of the most
sectarian beliefs. He followed a strict rationality when he shot his
films. But his strict Lutheran education left a profound imprint. His
father was a chaplain to the King of Sweden, and his family lived a
strict atmosphere of methodic devotion.

He used to write his own scripts, which sometimes took him years, but
he gave his actors a scheme of the drama situation and let them
improvise their dialogues. He only used the same histrionics: Max von
Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullman, Ingrid Tulin, among others, who knew
how to play their roles. He gave his photography director, Sven Nykist,
some instructions about the plot atmosphere, the tension between
characters, the light he wanted, and let him just work each situation.
His use of foreign participation enriched many of his films with the
addition of his crew’s bright ideas.

He always used his main characters in vulnerability and defenseless
conditions, something that Woody Allen, one his most faithful
disciples, quickly learned. His films happened in a somber and
tormented atmosphere, debating about death, loneliness, faith, and the
eternal struggle between good and evil, in a sterile metaphysical
debate. His disciples also included Russian Andrei Tarkovsky and
American Robert Altmann.

Bergman wasn’t initially attracted to cinema. He considered himself a
theater man. He directed plays in Helsingfor, Gothenburg, and Malmö,
including the Stockholm Royal Dramatic Theatre, which he directed from
1963 to 1966. His plays about his favorites Stringdberg and O’Neill
gave him a big reputation. But before then, films such as “The Seventh
Seal” (1956) (Det sjunde inseglet), and “Wild Strawberries” (1957)
(Smultronstället), had brought him worldwide admiration. Besides, he
penned films such as “Ms Julia”, “The Virgin Spring”, and “Fanny and
Alexander,” which brought him praise and good critical acclaim. Three
of his films won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: “The
Virgin Spring” in 1961; “Through a Glass Darkly” in 1962; and “Fanny
and Alexander” in 1984. He also won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film
Festival.

Another cause for his success were his low-budgeted films. None of them
ever cost over 400 thousand dollars, the average budget being 200
thousand. He used to say that Hollywood was obsessed with the sales and
that it was the cause of a number of flops and deformations. That’s why
he never left Sweden to work abroad. He got married five times and had
nine children. He lived in Munich from 1976 to 1982 after his
government accused him of tax evasion. The then moved to the isolated
island of Fårö, where he lived until his death yesterday.

Bergman was criticized by his seclusion in human intimacy in times of
great conflicts, something he ignored. In England they practiced “free
cinema” and in France “nouvelle vague”, but they all tried to express
the same, the boredom of a Europe that had been sacrificed in the game
of big powers, and that was tired of being used as a the scapegoat of
ideologies. The Italian cinema of those years was characterized,
together with neorealism, by the use of chronicles to tell everyday
situations and their contradictions, the use of the political arsenal
to denounce social injustices. Good examples from those years go from
Visconti’s “La Terra trema” to Fellini’s “La Dolce vita.”

The ‘50s and early ‘60s were highlighted by the reconstruction of
Europe, the urban explosion, the decrease of farmers, the construction
of a new left. Those were the times of the McCarthy aggressiveness in
the United States against liberals and its decline after Stalin’s death
in the Soviet Union. There was the Korean War and the Suez Canal
conflict, the Budapest insurrection, the French colonial war in
Algeria, the civil rights vindication in the US after the Little Rock
crisis, the Cuban revolution, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and
the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Those were times of many
historical events that defined the character of the twentieth century.
None of that can be seen in any of Bergman’s films.