The great, gaunt magus of European arthouse cinema, Ingmar Bergman, who has died at the age of 89, finally declared that even he found his own films too depressing to watch. But his passing doesn’t leave us any more cheerful. On the contrary: there’s a horrible sense that the world has lost the last filmmaker willing or capable of explicitly taking on the big themes: the nature of God and the nature of humanity.
His greatest film is probably Winter Light, in which a suicidally depressed Max von Sydow confides in his pastor that he read somewhere that the Chinese hate his country and would have no compunction about annihilating its inhabitants. The pastor fatefully fails to reassure his unhappy congregant. The poor working man’s horror has spoken to his own crisis of faith, his own abyss of despair.
It is redolent of the tormented boyhood of Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer in Annie Hall: little Alvy is agonised by the expanding nature of the universe — surely one day it’s going to rip itself apart? A Brooklyn doctor cheerfully reassures Alvy: “It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we’ve gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we’re here!”
Very different from the attitude of Bergman’s pastor, crucified by his conviction that the poor childlike flock are indeed on to something with their dimly perceived fears — and that they don’t know the half of it.
Like the pastor, Bergman was concerned with looking the terrible truth full in the face. God is not here: if not non-existent, then he is absent; he has turned his back. And it is hard to know which is the more unbearable.
Bergman himself was the son of a strict Lutheran pastor who beat him and locked him in dark closets. He said he lost his belief at the age of eight, and in his work asked if it is meaningful to behave as if God existed, if we suspect he does not — though did not offer the answer “no” with any certainty.
Winter Light is in some ways the perfect title for a Bergman film, with its connotations of severity, of purity, of religious observance. It was probably the light that he saw all around him in the remote island of Faro where he made his home, and very, very, different from the sensual, exciting neonish kind of light that it is Hollywood’s business to convey.
Bergman’s death robs the cinema of an unapologetic high seriousness, sometimes rather stolidly expressed, about the nature of God and the nature of man. Dreyer, Tarkovsky and Kieslowski were filmmakers who were comparable, and they are gone.
Bergman, despite his avowed withdrawal from cinema after the triumphant Fanny And Alexander in the 1980s, was in fact a working presence until very recently, and in his movie Saraband, made five years ago for television, showed that his artistic muscle and sinew had not deteriorated. His masterpiece The Seventh Seal, with its chess-game with Death, much discussed, admired and spoofed, was re-released last week and it’s completely fresh.
No one makes films like Bergman now; even Woody Allen withdrew years ago from his experiment with the sombre chill of seriousness and prefers light comedy. Of course, Bergman could make comedy himself, as seen in his Smiles of a Summer Night, but there is always the sense that this comic register is a variant on his darker, tragic idiom — and not a respite from it.
At the end, Bergman was utterly alone. In an age of digital video, reality-TV-influenced post-modern media, his gaunt, ecclesiastical presence was out of time. He had fallen out of fashion long ago, often derided for stiffness, for miserabilism, for elitism.
Really, Bergman has no disciples (no other word will do) in modern Europe or the United States; in Iranian and African cinema, there is arguably something of Bergman’s steady, un-ironised filmmaking, though without its explicit, pitiless chill.
Now he is gone: his personal stock may now be diminished a little by more revisionist attention paid to his troubled personal life; he had a number of wives and mistresses, and a definite fondness for casting unfeasibly beautiful young women in his films. His Persona (1966) was an intensely sensual, and very male, investigation of womanhood.
Bergmanolatry is sometimes an excuse for grumpy denunciations of the decline of arthouse cinema and the decline of any media to support it. But it’s difficult to think of a movie-maker who really does believe in the urgency of moral questions the way Bergman did. This is the end of an era. — Â