Swedish filmmaking legend Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden on the 14th of July, 1918. He was the son of lutheran priest Erik Bergman and nurse Karin Bergman (neé Akerblom), and was raised in a very religious and conservative family home. As a child he gained interest in theater and art, and through the religious imagery that abounded in his house he could let his imagination run free. Its no wonder that he’d become the master of cinema that we know and recognize in the present. Today would have been his 100th birthday, had he not passed away in 2007. He did leave us however with an extensive canon full of majestous pieces: a world in which faith, dreams, spirituality, memory and the human soul never rest in order to create their own meaning. Bergman has always been one of my favourite directors (in fact, he’s on my top 3, accompanied by other cinematic gods Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick), and I’ve always wanted to write something about him, and what better ocassion to do so than his one hundredth birthday?

Like I said, Bergman was raised in a very religious house, and this shows through his work. His father was very strict and conservative (it is thought that the character of Edvard Vergerus in “Fanny and Alexander” (1982) was inspired by him), and this resulted in Bergman losing his faith by the age of 9 according to him, though he wouldn’t really come to terms with this until he worked on “Winter Light” in 1962. Due to this upbringing many of his films deal with issues of faith and spirituality, or the lack thereof. He served two mandatory terms in the swedish army in the 1930s, and he even sympathized with a certain Adolf Hitler years before the war and before his crimes were known to mankind. He started studying art and literature at Stockholm University in 1937, where he became actively involved in theater groups and wrote a couple of plays, one of which would later be produced. Members of the Svensk Filmindustri saw this play and later offered Bergman a job of working on finished screenplays for movies. This was his entry into the industry, and the rest, as they say, is history. Bergman’s first big break came in 1944 when he wrote the screenplay for a film called “Torment”, directed by Alf Sjöberg, and had the chance to work as his assistant director. Two years later he made his directorial debut with “Crisis”, which tells the story of a small-town girl and her relationship with her foster mother. What followed were almost seven decades of some of the most excellent filmmaking the world has ever seen.

Bergman’s films are existential in nature. He muses over metaphysical questions that are, in a sense, inherent to human nature, and yet he never poses a definite answer nor allows for his films to have a specific meaning ascribed to them. In 1957 he released two of his most famous films, both dealing with the topic of death: “The Seventh Seal” and “Wild Strawberries”; but while the former delves deep into the acceptance of it in a world devoid of a caring god, the latter also focuses on the acceptance of death but on a much more personal level, while at the same time tackling the subject of memory and reminiscence. As stated before, faith and spirituality play a big role in his filmography. Between 1961 and 1963 he released what is considered the “God’s silence” trilogy: “Through a Glass, Darkly”, about a mentally ill woman who claims to have met God as she and her family spend some time on an island; “Winter Light”, about a pastor and his crisis of faith; and “The Silence”, about two sisters and the son of one of them as they cross through a war-torn unnamed country without knowing the language. All three films deal with issues of faith, becoming ever more nihilistic by each passing installment of the trilogy. 1960’s “The Virgin Spring” also deals with such topics, this time juxtapoxing cristianism and paganism in medieval europe.

Yet, not every one of his films deals with religious subjects. 1966’s “Persona”, arguably the very best entry in his canon, tells the story of a young actress who suddenly falls mute in the middle of a performance, and the young nurse who is tasked to aid her in her recovery. As the film progresses, in their isolation the personalities of both women start to merge together, leading to unsettling revelations of themselves. One could say that main themes of this movie are duality, identity and guilt, but there are plenty of other possibilities that could describe this masterpiece. His next film, “Hour of the Wolf”, was released two years later, and it focuses basically on the hell and nightmares of an artist on an island as he meets its mysterious inhabitants (this is probably his most surreal film). Given the subject we can see some of Bergman himself in this one, his portrayal of the tortured artist – one can argue that “Persona” also deals with this, but to a lesser degree. Other movies like “Scenes of a Marriage” (1973) and “From the Life of the Marionettes” (1980) seem to diverge from his usual subjects and instead explore the lives of married couples, but always with the existential feeling that characterizes his work.

Throughout his career, Bergman won numerous prestigious awards: three times he won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film with “The Virgin Spring” “Through a Glass, Darkly” and “Fanny and Alexander”; he won the Golden Bear at the 1957 Berlin Film Festival for “Wild Strawberries”; at Cannes he won the Best Director award for “Brink of Life” in 1958, along with other press awards on various ocassions, and he received the honorary Palm of Palms in 1997; and of course, his films won four times (“The Silence”, “Persona”, “Cries and Whispers” and “Fanny and Alexander”) Best Picture at the Guldbagge Awards (Sweden’s version of the Oscars), while he won Best Director on two of those occasions (“The Silence” and “Fanny and Alexander”). This shows that his legacy is very well recognized by the film world, and more than a handful of filmmakers have cited Bergman as a big influence on their work, including: Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Krzystof Kieslowski, Jean-Luc Godard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Margarethe von Trotta, Ang Lee, Woody Allen, Lars von Trier, and many others.

Now, I haven’t seen all of his films, there’s a good amount that I still have to get through (for example, I’ve still to see “Cries and Whispers”, “Summer with Monika”, “Smiles of a Summer Night”, “The Magic Flute”, “The Rite”, among others), which is actually a good thing because that means there’s a lot of more Bergman to discover. Still, if I had to rank his films somehow, an impossible task given that they’re all masterpieces, I’d have to say that “Persona” is my favourite one, followed by “Winter Light”, then “The Virgin Spring”, then “Fanny and Alexander”, and “The Seventh Seal” rounds up my top five. But I would encourage everyone to pursue all of his movies (myself included), for they are incomparable experiences each in their own right.

I recently had the chance to watch Margarethe von Trotta’s documentary “Auf der Suche nach Ingmar Bergman” (it translates roughly to “Searching for Ingmar Bergman”) in a theater in Frankfurt, and von Trotta herself was there to present the movie. One could tell the big influence the man had on her life and career, and that respect was mutual, since Bergman named von Trotta’s “Marianne and Julian” (1981) as one of his favourite films. Anyway, the documentary was a fantastic experience, one gets to see a side of Bergman that’s probably not so obvious at first. I’d recommend seeking it out for any Bergman fan, it is new so it’ll probably hit theaters some time soon.

So sumarizing, Ingmar Bergman is most definitely one of the greatest directors that has ever lived, his work a testament to his craft and love for cinema, his influence evidence of the power the man could convey. Without a doubt he directed some of the best films I’ve seen in my entire life, and I’m counting on that many of the ones I haven’t seen will join that list once I watch them. So far I’ve only spoken very superficially about some of his films, but I really encourage you, reader, to seek out his movies if you haven’t, for they have to be experienced first hand in order to fully grasp their aura, and if you have then rewatching is always a good option since there’s so much to read in and discover. A great profound artist, a very powerful thinker, the master of many masters and one of the greatest filmmaking legends, we remember Ingmar Bergman today on his 100th birthday.

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