There are phases to every cineaste’s relationship with film. It probably starts as a voracious, omnivorous hunger that gorges itself on everything in sight, with little regard for quality or provenance. Eventually it slows a little, as diverse flavors and distinctive patterns start to emerge; one develops a certain taste. At this stage, some fall by the wayside, developing other interests, passions, careers —you could call call them lives— but the truly smitten stay the course, seeking out ever more rare and wondrous treasures with a guiding sense of quality control. Soon, they graduate to fully-fledged cinephile status, but only after a period that, for convenience’s sake, we’ll dub “BergmanWeek.”
Ingmar Bergman is a director whose daunting reputation precedes him by several thousand miles. And now among the confirmed pantheon of greats-who-are-no-longer-with-us, his back catalogue has been canonized to the point that it is difficult to simply happen across a Bergman film, or to discover his movies organically. For many, there is an overt, slightly serious sense of duty when you first sit down to pop on a Bergman DVD, or a self-conscious “look at me being all intellectual” feel to buying your first ticket to a Bergman rep screening. It’s unavoidable, and unfortunate, but it also means that generation after generation of film lovers get to make the same incredible discovery that many of us did: Bergman is amazing. Experimental, alive, almost shockingly modern at times, Bergman’s films are not museum artifacts set back behind glass, but enormous, immersive, thrummingly alive works of art that can impact you so profoundly that all you really want to do is devour one after another at a gallop and see if you are even remotely the same person on the other side. That’s Bergman week.
Yesterday, Criterion added a new restoration of Bergman’s magnificent “Cries and Whispers” to their collection, and it got us all reflecting on our own Bergman Weeks — those revelatory moments in which our personal relationships with the Swedish master’s work were forged. So in an effort to encourage even more into the fold (and frankly, in horror that we hadn’t already done so), we thought this was a good time to run through his most essential films. There’s little to be said about Bergman that is not best discovered through his work, but we can say this: a filmmaker who changes and enriches your perception of cinema is a great; but one who changes and enriches your perception of life — of people, human relationships, the whole wide world — is a master.
“Summer With Monika” (1953)
A number of filmmakers started off their careers in soft-core porn, with Francis Ford Coppola the most notable in a list that includes Wes Craven and Barry Sonnenfeld, but it’s still a little surprising when you remember that one of Ingmar Bergman’s earliest films, 1953’s “Summer With Monika,” was repackaged in the U.S. as a sexploitation picture, cut down by half-an-hour and renamed “Monika, The Story Of A Bad Girl.” Even in that form, though, the quality shone through, as the world’s most famous Bergman fan, Woody Allen, noted to The Hollywood Reporter, saying “The first Bergman I ever saw was [Monika] because there was talk in the neighborhood that there was a nude scene. This was unheard of in any American film, that level of advancement. It’s so funny tothink of it that way. I saw it, and it was a very, very interesting film apart from the utterly benign nude moment… it was just a fabulous movie. I was riveted in my seat by it all. I thought to myself, ‘Who is this guy?’” Billed as “A Picture for Wide Screens and Broad Minds” and briefly seized by the L.A. vice squad for indecency, the film, which marks the director’s first team-up with the first of his many muses, Harriet Andersson, is actually a tremendously powerful and raw story of first love that likely didn’t sit particularly well with grindhouse audiences in search of T&A (of which there’s very little). Andersson plays a young girl from the wrong side of the Stockholm tracks who falls for a boy her age (Lars Ekborg), and run away together for the summer, only to discover that she’s pregnant: they’re forced to marry, but too soon, and things swiftly turn unhappy. Free of melodrama and beautifully played by the youthful leads, it’s lyrical, painful, surprisingly claustrophobic stuff, suggesting that love, at least when you’re young, needs space and oxygen to thrive. And while there are some solid Bergman titles before this, ‘Monika’ is popularly accepted as ushering in the most remarkable phase of Bergman’s career, all the more so because it was a “phase” that would last five decades.
“Smiles Of A Summer Night” (1955)
The film that made Bergman’s international reputation after screening in competition at Cannes in 1956 was not one that pointed to the grand, metaphysical torment that was to come from the filmmaker across the next decades. It was in fact, a comedy, not something that Bergman is known for by the more casual viewer but, as anyone who’s seen “Smiles Of A Summer Night” will know, a form that he had quite some capacity for. Set at the turn of the century, it centers on the various romantic infidelities between the middle-aged Fredrik (Gunnar Bjornstrand), his much younger wife, Anne (Ulla Jacobsson), his son, Henrik (Bjorn Bjelfvenstam), his actress ex-lover (Eva Dahlbeck) and several other figures both upstairs and downstairs (the flirtations between maid Harriet Andersson and servant Ake Fridell are among the highlights, though the whole cast is game), one Midsummer’s night. On the surface, it’s different from so much of what would follow, coming across like a classic stage farce by Wilde or Noel Coward as adapted by Ernst Lubitsch, with effortless plotting and a heady, sweaty sense of sex and sensuality running through it, but this isn’t just empty farce. Bergman knew, or at least would come to know, the pleasures and pain of infidelity, his personal life taking in five marriages (he was on his third, and would leave Harriet Andersson for Bibi Andersson soon after production) and multiple affairs with his leading ladies, and there’s a real inquisitive sense here asking why people are driven to look for sex elsewhere. While many of his films would leaven the bleakness with comic elements, here it’s the other way around, with stabs of real pain amidst the wit and partner-swapping, something that proved enormously influential, and not just on the work that it directly inspired — Stephen Sondheim’s musical “A Little Night Music,” and Woody Allen’s film “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.”