Bergman: International Acclaim

This is the second in my series of posts on the films of Ingmar Bergman, which I'm either revisiting or finally getting around to seeing (nothing like the death of someone to light a fire). This time I'll be discussing his landmark films of the 1950s, which made him an international sensation and went a long way in establishing the reputation that would stick with him always. I'd seen three of these films before, all while I was at college. A large tip of the hat goes to the kids who ran Tuesday Night Flicks, which was a film organization at SUNY-Stony Brook that showed mostly art films on Tuesday nights (I believe the charge was fifty cents). I got quite a film education from their efforts.

The first film to launch Bergman on the international scene was Smiles of a Summer Night, a thoroughly charming romantic comedy. Most people don't associate Bergman with comedy, but he made more than you think, and this was his best. It has four different couples spending the evening at an estate in turn-of-the-century Sweden, and some of the people end up with different people than they started with. It is the basis for Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music (which gave the world Send in the Clowns) and is clearly the inspiration for Woody Allen's A Midsummer-Night's Sex Comedy. The film is irresistibly delightful, particularly because, in the context of seeing Bergman's entire career, it plays like a self-parody. Amid all the frolicsome buffoonery, there are a couple of stern wet blankets whom he sends up as pompous fools. Consider this line, by Madame Charlotte, wife of an equally absurd military officer: "Men are shallow, vain and arrogant...and have hair all over their bodies."

Bergman followed this film with probably his most famous, The Seventh Seal, which is in the pantheon of the greatest films of all time. Even people who have never heard of Bergman might be familiar with the image of a man playing chess with Death (the scene has been parodied in everything from a play by Woody Allen called Death Knocks, in which a man plays gin rummy with Death, to Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. My favorite reference is in the film Diner, when an uncomprehending Steve Guttenberg says, "I've been to Atlantic City plenty of times and I never saw Death on the beach").

In the film, Max Von Sydow plays Antonius Block, a knight who has returned from the Crusades to find his homeland ravaged by the bubonic plague, which killed about a third of the population of Sweden. He is in torment, a devout man who questions the suffering of man and struggles to find meaning to existence. Belief, he says, is suffering, like "loving someone in the dark who never answers." In contrast, his squire, Jons, is an agnostic, and has some very clever, sardonic lines. People who haven't seen this film might be surprised to find how funny this film is at times, particularly the death scene of Skat, the womanizing actor, who climbs a tree only to look down and find the black-hooded Death patiently sawing at the trunk.

Gunnar Bjornstrand plays Jons, in one of the better supporting performances I've ever seen. He was a Bergman regular, also appearing in Smiles of a Summer Night and Bergman's next film, Wild Strawberries, which told the story of one day in the life of an old professor of medicine as he makes his way across country to receive an honorary degree. This film is about old age and confronting one's mortality, and features as good an acting performance as you're likely to see by Victor Sjostrom as the old professor. He was a major figure in Swedish theater and silent films.

The film begins with a dream sequence, always a tricky thing in movies, but this one is genuinely spooky. For one odd thing it's in bright sunlight, which is a bit of a switch, because Bergman detested bright sun and thought it oppressive. The professor ends up dreaming that his own corpse is pulling him into a coffin. He then awakes and drives to the university in Lund to receive his degree, accompanied by his daughter-in-law. He revisits the summer home where he spent his youth and finds a wild strawberry patch. Summers are very special to Swedes since they are so short, and wild strawberries are symbolic of summer. He sees the people of his youth, especially the first girl he loved, played by Bergman regular Bibi Andersson, who also plays a teenager hitchhiker that he picks up along the way. The film is very moving and expertly crafted.

I'll end this post discussing The Virgin Spring (the other major film of Bergman's this period was The Magician, which is unfortunately not available yet on U.S.-format friendly DVD). Bergman called this film an anomaly, and disappointed many of his admirers, particularly in France, but it was popular in the U.S., and won the first of Bergman's three Best Foreign Language Film Oscars. The commenter on the Criterion disc speculated that it is because the U.S. is a "Christian nation" (I'll bet Jefferson and Franklin would be appalled by that, but she's essentially right) and The Virgin Spring has heavy religious overtones. It's a story that juxtaposes paganism with Christianity, and evil and innocence, in adapting a medieval ballad about a girl who is killed by goatherds, who in turn suffer the vengeance of the girl's father. The film was adapted by of all people Wes Craven for his early slasher film, The Last House on the Left.

This was the first time I had seen the film, and it is quite powerful. The attack on the girl is very brutal, considering it was released in 1960, and the scene of vengeance, although tame by today's standards, is still ferocious in its intensity. There is a scene involving a boy that is particularly hard to watch. Von Sydow plays the girl's father, and he prepares his vengeance by felling a birch tree and beating his naked body with the branches, a ritual that is almost surreal.

All four of these films are terrific, and are all available as Criterion discs, with accompanying commentaries. The Wild Strawberries disc has a long interview for television Bergman did about ten years ago.