“Cries and Whispers” (1972)
Among the unlikeliest Best Picture nominees of all time, not only due to its status as a foreign-language film but also as it’s a formally experimental, thematically uncompromising work, “Cries and Whispers” is one of the Bergman’s bleakest films. A chamber piece forged in blockish blacks, whites and blood-reds, it’s perhaps the culmination of Bergman’s recurrent obsession with the jealousy, malice and sheer hatefulness that can infect sisterly relationships. Yet the film takes in other familiar notions, like female duty versus female selfishness, maternal relationships, religious faith, and an almost paranoiac horror of the body, whether as a sexual plaything or a vessel for the inordinate degradation of disease and death. With “present” tense episodes sitting alongside flashbacks, it’s the story of three sisters, Maria (Ullmann) whose flighty sensuality masks a contempt toward her husband that allows her to watch dispassionately while he attempts suicide; Karin (Thulin), whose disgust at sexual contact is such that she mutilates her genitals; and Agnes (Harriet Andersson), who is dying horribly (the scenes of Andersson writhing and screaming in primal animal pain are among the most distressing Bergman ever filmed), and to whose deathbed the other two have come in a show of sisterly concern that only seems fleetingly genuine. Laughs are few. The maid Anna (Kari Sylwan), drawn as the only decent person in the house, is religious and devoted to Agnes, perhaps to the point of their having been lovers, but is unceremoniously fired with little severance as soon as Agnes dies, and while the ending may have her gaining comfort from a memory in Agnes’ diary of a happy moment between all three sisters, it is emphatically not a happy ending. Bergman is rightly known as cinema’s great humanist, but sometimes his vision of humanity is one that begins and ends in despair.
“Scenes From A Marriage” (1973)
Originally a miniseries made for Swedish television (though if you can’t commit to all 300 minutes, there is a serviceable 168-minute theatrical cut, which makes it feel slightly soapier, but only slightly), the things that Bergman loses in the transition to the smaller screen, such as the magnificence of Sven Nykvist’s big-screen cinematography, are vastly outweighed by what he gained. Namely, Nykvist’s clever small-screen cinematography, as well as the ability to go broad and deep into his area of greatest expertise: middle class marriage. Ullmann,whose every performance for Bergman we’ve probably labelled “definitive,” but we really mean it this time, stars alongside an equally remarkable Erland Josephson, as Marianne and Johan, the central pair who start the show as a literal magazine-spread-happy-couple, only for the more flirtatious and sexual Johan to announce that after ten years of marriage he is leaving her for another woman. Their divorce proceeds fitfully and eventually they marry other people, but what do they do with this instinctive familiarity, this muscle memory of each other? Despite the psychological and physical pain and humiliation they inflict on each other (and Bergman is as ever unflinching in these details) and though there’s a good deal of mordant mileage to be had out of the fact that in a show about marriage, they separate a third of the way through and later divorce (how very Bergman), the bond between Marianne and Johan is revealed to be a lasting marriage in its non-legal sense. As they come together again by the end, not resolving their differences but perhaps resolving the foolishness of trying to define their relationship in simple societal terms, they are acknowledging a deeper connection, which despite his Swedish pessimism elsewhere, “Scenes from a Marriage” tells us Bergman truly does believe in. For all its insight into the viciousness and unmanageability of long-term relationships and its ambivalent attitude toward the social institution of marriage, Bergman ultimately surprises and delights us all by subscribing in his own hard-won, uniquely anti-romantic way, to the immensely romantic notion of The One.
“Autumn Sonata” (1978)
It’s hard to trace the exact moment at which “Autumn Sonata” begins to break your heart (we suggest it’s about 5 minutes in, or just after the opening credits have faded), but once it starts it never, ever stops and will leave you in smithereens by its conclusion. The wrenchingly truthful story of a single day and night during which renowned concert pianist Charlotte (Ingrid Bergman) comes to stay with her daughter, Eva (Ullman), with a few quick cuts of Bergman’s scalpel-sharp dialogue lays this ossified mother/daughter relationship painfully bare in all its guilt, neglect, selfishness and repression. Charlotte hasn’t seen Eva for seven years, during which time Eva has married and suffered the death of her little boy. Eva has been frequently writing to her mother, but Charlotte has often neglected to fully read the letters, caught up in a more glamorous life of world travel, career success and love affairs. Following the death of her longtime companion, Charlotte comes finally to visit, and discovers to her unconcealed horror that her other daughter Helena, who is crippled and almost unable to speak due to a degenerative disease, is living with Eva, and not in the home in which Charlotte placed her. The intensity of the emotional tug of war between the women can be monstrous, yet neither is a monster, and the speed with which our sympathy swings from one to the other at times threatens whiplash. It’s a brilliant evocation of a kind of horrible irony: they’re different in every way from each other but must continually orbit each other, united by tethered histories and a few stubborn strands of DNA. In contrast to the simple good that families and mothers often represent elsewhere, here that bond is shown to be less a blessing than some sort of life sentence that Charlotte and Eva are both fated to serve to term.
“Fanny And Alexander” (1982)
Weighing in at an even greater length
than “Scenes Of A Marriage,” though unavailable in the U.S. in its full five-and-a-half hour TV edit until relatively recently, “Fanny And Alexander” was seen by Bergman as something of a summing-up and a swansong for his career, though he went on to make several other films for television over the next two-and-a-half decades. It’s a magnum opus in the truest sense, one of the director’s most personal, powerful pictures, a Dickensian, Proustian epic that despite its length (even the cinema edit was over three hours) could be the most accessible entry point to his work —the Academy certainly thought so, giving it four Oscars and nominating it for another two. Based loosely on Bergman’s own childhood with his strict and abusive minister father, it’s set in Uppsala in the early years of the 20th century and told through the eyes of the two young title characters (Pernilla Allwin and Bertil Guve), as their warm, joyful life is upturned when their father dies and their mother (Ewa Froling) marries the harsh local bishop, who begins to punish Alexander for the slightest infractions, including making up stories. The film’s expansive and beautifully textured cast of characters encompasses most of Bergman’s favorites, and moves from a naturalistic, legitimately enjoyable opening through increasingly harrowing and bleak aspects (the sequence where the bishop’s aunt lights herself on fire is one of the most haunting things he ever shot). Visually lavish, with regular collaborators like Sven Nykvist doing perhaps their finest ever work, and with the depth and complexity of a great novel, it might not be Bergman’s most iconic film, but it’s easily one of his greatest and loveliest achievements, and proof that a filmmaker can go out on top.
Honorable Mention/More Classics
It is a mark of Bergman’s stature that this list was irreducible beyond 15 titles, and could easily have gone past 20 had we included films he wrote as opposed to those he directed. So if there’s anyone out there who wishes to berate us particularly for leaving off fascinating experimental opera adaptation “The Magic Flute,” “Summer Interlude,” “Sawdust and Tinsel,” “The Passion of Anna” or “Prison” especially, we’ve no good defense —they are each brilliant films that would summit most directors’ filmographies. Beyond that, newly minted fans have more to discover like “Face to Face” and the weird and wondrous “The Magician” along with earlier films including “The Devil’s Eye” and TV films like “From the Life of the Marionettes.” But we hope this selection, as well as giving several suggested entry points for the total neophyte, has given some hint of our utterly fathomless admiration for this peerless filmmaker. We’re deeply jealous of anyone just now embarking on their voyage of Bergman discovery. —Jessica Kiang, Oli Lyttelton & Rodrigo Perez
The Essentials: The 15 Greatest Ingmar Bergman Films
