The history of the cinema has seen directors whose works have been more "original" or "groundbreaking" (such as Eisenstein, Ozu or Godard). And there are plenty of directors who have made as many, if not more films (Griffith, Hitchcock or Chabrol). Yet the question remains: is there anyone who so epitomises the concept of the auteur – a filmmaker with full control over his medium, whose work has a clear and inimitable signature – as Ingmar Bergman?
One of the reasons one immediately recognises a Bergman film is that he is one of those rare filmmakers who has created his own cinematic world. (This is also the reason that we have a section on this website under the heading Universe.) Through recurring environments, themes, characters, stylistic devices, actors and film crews, Bergman has created his own kind of film, almost a genre in itself. If Alfred Hitchcock is the epitome of the psychological thriller (despite the fact that he also made films in other genres), Bergman has become the hallmark for the existential/philosophical relationship drama (although he, too, has made other kinds of films).
Without underestimating the impact of Ingmar Bergman's own work, his standing has also been influenced by a number of external factors. He wrote his first screenplay at the end of the Second World War, and started to make his own films during the post war years. In terms of film history, this was a time of radical change (with prevailing styles such as Italian neo-realism and film noir in the USA) which has occasionally, somewhat lightly perhaps, been referred to as a watershed between "classic" and "modern" films. In Bergman's case, however, no such division can wholly be said to exist. His films often (yet not always) use the narrative techniques of "classic" cinema with the addition of "modern" stylistic devices.
If Bergman's debut came during a period of major change in cinema history, his international breakthrough came just prior to the start of another such period. It is hardly a coincidence that it was in France in the mid 1950s that Bergman received his first genuine recognition outside Sweden. The "New Wave" was about to break, and budding directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer were influential film critics who heralded Bergman, up until then relatively unknown, as the "world's foremost director". Quite simply, Bergman fitted in perfectly with the ideal they wished to promote: the auteur who uses the film camera as a writer uses his pen.
In this mould Bergman's films rapidly came to typify the concept of "art house cinema". In a period when film was once again striving for legitimacy, Bergman demonstrated that film could be something more than entertainment: it could indeed be art. As such, it is important to remember that Bergman immediately preceded the other "modern" European directors with whom he is often mentioned: Antonioni, Buñuel, Fellini, Godard and others. The fact that film studies emerged at the end of the 1960s as an academic discipline in its own right is in many respects down to Bergman, whose films of existential exploration naturally lend themselves to systematic analysis.
To a large extent, Bergman's themes laid the foundation for his fame. His Strindberg-like conviction that marriage äktenskapet is hell on earth, and his recurring doubts about God gudstvivlet were, ironically enough, and to put it crassly, not much more than a summary of the Scandinavian cultural tradition at the time, with its budding sexual freedom and its already far-reaching secularisation. Yet abroad at the time, not least in the catholic European and South American countries, or in the morally conservative United States and Eastern Europe, Bergman's films appeared revolutionary.
Neither can one totally ignore the contribution to Bergman's success of what were, for the time, quite daring depictions of nudity and "natural" sexuality. Bergman' films, with their unfathomable language, scenes of unspoilt natural beauty orörd natur and blonde women blonda kvinnor, were widely regarded as the embodiment of a Scandinavian kind of exoticism.
If one ignores the surrounding factors that contributed to the impact of Ingmar Bergman and looks instead at what makes his films unique, one can begin to discern the thematic and stylistic developments of his career. Although any attempt to compartmentalise any artist's oeuvre is of necessity a simplification, one can nonetheless divide Bergman's film production roughly into five periods. Such a division into periods requires a certain amount of omission (and in fact, the periods are often intertwined), but it does provide a snapshot of his development.
A highly important director, Ingmar Bergman today seems ironically to have been virtually forgotten. His impact has been so all-pervasive, his influence so great and his films such obvious benchmarks, that his work has almost become invisible. Yet just as one occasionally has to revisit the Bible to understand something of western culture, one needs to see Bergman's films anew. For many it was a long time ago; for others it will be for the first time. Whichever it is, the films will feel familiar. - Source: From © Stiftelsen Ingmar Bergman
