EARLY LIFE AND PATH TO THE THEATER

Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, during the final year of the Great War, which also saw the population of Europe ravaged by the Spanish flu, and Sweden in particular suffering from severe food shortages due to the disastrous harvest of 1917. Frail from the outset, Bergman would for the rest of his life be prone to hypochondria. His father, a Lutheran pastor who rose to become chaplain to the Royal Court and a favorite of the Swedish Queen Victoria, treated his children with sometimes alarming severity. Ingmar, an imaginative boy, sought escape from this harsh regime.

He built a puppet playhouse in the nursery, and acquired a magic lantern from his elder brother, Dag, in exchange for a collection of toy soldiers. He bestowed his inherent affections on his maternal grandmother, who lived in a rambling apartment in Uppsala, some forty miles north of Stockholm. (He would later recreate this mysterious, richly furnished apartment in 1982’s Fanny and Alexander, one of the many films for which he drew directly from his own early years.) Ingmar also enjoyed the family’s summer holidays in the province of Dalarna, where his father had when young helped to construct the local railway. Here he could indulge his daydreaming, a habit he retained throughout his adult life. Indeed, no greater fantasist has graced the Scandinavian cinema.

While enrolled at university, he finally rebelled against the often crushing discipline meted out by his parents, striking his father during an argument at home and then fleeing to Stockholm’s Old Town, where he slept rough and flung himself into stage production. By the age of twenty, he was directing one student production after another. Even well after he started making films, Bergman remained involved in the theater and achieved a mastery of the form. He came to use lighting brilliantly and paid great attention to production design. When he brought Goethe’s Urfaust to London in 1959, a young Max von Sydow as Faust entered a theater plunged in darkness, apart from a single spotlight on his face. In his 1970 production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, the deep crimson of Bergman’s decor and costumes created

what one British drama critic called “a bloodshot, brooding nightmare.”

A CAREER IN THE CINEMA

In 1942, following the premiere of his play The Death of Punch, Bergman was contacted by Svensk Filmindustri and offered a position in the studio’s script department. By 1944, the veteran Alf Sjöberg had agreed to direct Bergman’s screenplay for Torment, and the film’s eventual success led to SF offering Bergman the chance to make his own first film, Crisis (1946). Thus began a career governed by two irrepressible forces. One was a work ethic that insisted that every hour of every day should have its appointed task, which helps explain his remarkable level of productivity. The other was his creative partnerships, including regular collaborations with actors such as Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Erland Josephson, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, and Harriet Andersson. (Bergman, who would marry five times, also became romantically involved with the latter three.)

Although the films of the 1940s remained largely unseen outside his home country, the 1950s forged Bergman’s reputation, yielding a stream of masterpieces that responded to the zeitgeist. This decade gave us lyrical films like Summer with Monika (1953), which became a hit in the United States after it was reedited by its distributor into a shorter and more sensational form, and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which was Bergman’s first film in competition at Cannes. The director finally achieved worldwide fame thanks to the triumph of the more philosophical The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (both 1957), with the latter’s screenplay earning him the first of many Oscar nominations. By March 1960, Time magazine featured Bergman on its cover.

Bergman’s Nordic austerity, in the tradition of Søren Kierkegaard, Edvard Munch, and Carl Dreyer, offered a sober alternative to the freewheeling works of the French New Wave and British kitchen-sink realism. He became known for tackling a range of subjects in a wide variety of tones—turning to nineteenth-century mesmerism for the clever The Magician (1958), for example, and conjuring up the mood of medieval Sweden in the harrowing The Virgin Spring

(1960). The 1960s saw Bergman paring his technique even further to the bone in stark, unadorned chamber dramas like Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963). Persona (1966), a psychological duel between two women, struck Bergman’s followers like a blow to the solar plexus. Only eighty-three minutes in length, Brechtian in its distancing effects, and perplexing in its intuitive attitude toward human relations, Persona showed that the director could experiment with the medium to stunning effect.

TELEVISION WORK AND RETIREMENT FROM FILM

It was at this juncture that Bergman turned to television, creating with Scenes from a Marriage (1973) one of the finest and most popular European miniseries of all time, and with The Magic Flute (1975) arguably the best screen rendition of Mozart’s opera. When he was unjustly accused of evading taxes, he went into self-imposed exile in Munich, producing several plays and directing films that reflected his anxieties and frustration. The Serpent’s Egg (1977) was set during the catastrophic collapse of German society in the 1920s and the ominous rise of Nazism, and From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) dwelt on the murder of a prostitute by a businessman and has a jagged intensity born of Bergman’s unhappy situation outside his home country. With the fiscal charges against him dismissed, Bergman returned to Sweden to make a crowning masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander, which won four Academy Awards, including one for Bergman’s longtime cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.

“Retiring” officially from the cinema, Bergman then devoted his energies to the theater and television in equal measure, starting with the compelling chamber work After the Rehearsal (1984). His swan song came in 2003 with Saraband, a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage made for Swedish TV but released in cinemas abroad. Bergman’s final decades were spent in almost monastic isolation on the island of Fårö, north of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. He had discovered the island while seeking locations for Through a Glass Darkly in 1960, and its bleak, rocky shores brought him the peace he needed to write until the very end of his life. He died there on July 30, 2007.