The Maestro of Angst: A TRIBUTE TO INGMAR BERGMAN
Consdered one of the greatest film-makers of all time, Ingmar Bergman is a Swedish director, actor, producer, screen-play genius. Beyond his designation as a movie-maker, Ingmar Bergman was an intimate explorer of the human condition- the first to bring metaphysics of religion, death, existentialism and the feminine mystique successfully to the screen.
Not many of us know of Ingmar Bergman, truth be told. His films, although not inaccessible, are alien to the Hollywood-accustomed eye and his films are more art than glamour, black-and-white rather than colorful-and-HD. He has been one of the most powerful influences for many of today's greatest minds in film, such as Woody Allen, Steven Spielberg and Satyajit Ray. In the beginning, he was little known outside Sweden. But he broke upon the international film scene from Swedish film and theater in the mid-1950s with four films that became symbols of his career — “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Magician.”
Bergman made about 50 films over around 40 years. He centered his work on two great themes — the relationship between the sexes and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in film, as he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.” In a Bergman film, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled. He was a master of exploring paradoxes, inviting the cerebral and flushing the heart. His films were about imagery and layers of symbolism, and could leave a quotidian audience perplexed if not probed.
Ingmar Bergman's questing, melancholy knights and his shabby, emotionally-trapped eccentric characters on the brink of a melt-down, were part of my introduction to the European art film genre. I soon learned that Bergman's films ranged from drab social-realist works like “Brink of Life” to airy, witty comedies like “Smiles of a Summer Night”, and to expressionistic films about artists and critics like The Magician (heads up: arguably influenced The Prestige). Not every film was a masterpiece, but they all carried great emotional impact. “Fanny and Alexander” is his last film and is a valedictory, three-hour epic, Bergman's celebration of the power of the imagination hinting at his never-closing troubled childhood. Among his more celebrated works are “The Seventh Seal”, which is almost a soliloquy about a medieval knight who plays chess with Death, “Wild Strawberries” that he wrote while hospitalized, and “Shame”, an emotional dissection of a politically unaware couple about to flee.
In “Winter Light” Bergman states he finally ended his "traumatic conflict" over religious belief, destroying God's image but holding to a "perception of Man as the bearer of holy purpose." In 1966, he directed “Persona”, a film that he himself considered one of his most important works. While the shockingly experimental film won few awards many consider it his masterpiece.
Bergman's films were autobiographical in their reflection of the questions his mind toyed. A hot-and-cold relationship with his mother and a string of torrid affairs and marriages, Bergman's work was not only an outlet for creative angst but also a tool for exploring the darkest corners of the human condition. " He was involved with a number of his actors, and had a way of assuring tormenting faithfulness from them. Obsessed with a sexuality that forced me into constant infidelity," he wrote, "I was tormented by desire, fear, anguish and a guilty conscience." His conscience was guilty, but never so guilty to make him change, but enough to successfully re-channel. For all his failures as a household archetype, Bergman as a director sought to become his ideal father, just as he had sought in all his marriage scenarios to identify himself with the ideal female and mother. But Bergman's pleasant memories have as much influence on his work as his tragic ones. His deepest fascination, however, is with the disparity between words and acts. His films close relentlessly in upon rationalizers and self-deceivers, unconscious hypocrites and wordy intellectuals, people burdened by conventional fictions of themselves and only dimly aware of their real feelings.
Bergman's vision and shameless literary expression, rather than technical innovation that makes his work a gut-wrenching experience. He breathed his last on July 2007. In his words: No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
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