Ingmar Bergman’s death in 2007 (on the same day as Antonioni’s) inspired an unusual amount of front-page mainstream press for a non-U.S. artist well past his heyday, a last gasp of praise for a bygone era of popular cinephilia. Within days, as if in penance, the same newspapers that mourned him were publishing high-profile dismissals which tore into his legacy, painting him as an overrated and irrelevant pseudo-intellectual, whose stark and severe existential psychodramas seemed outdated next to Antonioni’s modernist and apparently enduring brand of ennui. Most distressingly and erroneously, he was portrayed as not really a filmmaker at all, but rather, a stodgy stage director who happened to have access to a film camera. Perhaps because this view of Bergman persists, even his most well-known films have rarely been screened in New York since his passing, and there has certainly been no wide-ranging career retrospective.
The stateside release of Dheeraj Akolkar’s candid and humanizing documentary Liv & Ingmar at Lincoln Center has provided a convenient and overdue occasion to revive his legacy, with a 9-film companion series containing most of the films he made with actress (and, later, writer/director) Liv Ullman – a fraction of over 60 theatrical and television films (not to mention plays and novels) he wrote and/or directed over the course of his career. Beginning with the 1966 masterpiece Persona, he made, with Ullman, some of his most enduring films, and though it is completely legitimate to view these works as a product of this particular relationship, it is a testament to the strength of Bergman’s collaborations that, with slight modifications, the same series could instead highlight other pairings: the great actor (and Bergman’s best friend) Erland Josephson stars in all but two of them, while other Bergman repertory members such as Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand appear frequently; and except for 2003’s Saraband, all of these films were shot by the brilliant Sven Nykvist, in what is surely one of the greatest collaborations in all of cinema history.
Still, there is no denying Ullman’s rich influence on Bergman’s life and work; their five year relationship and five-decade friendship/artistic collaboration, movingly recounted by Ullman, is the subject of Akolkar’s film. As opposed to the archetypically carnal or cerebral women played by Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom, who populated his earlier films, Ullman has a warmer presence, with a gaze both penetrating and deeply introspective. She would inspire and perform Bergman’s most complex roles. The series spans Bergman’s shift away from the allegorical films of the early 60s (which culminated with Persona), to more humane chamber pieces incorporating elements of domestic drama, a change certainly informed by their relationship (most obviously and harrowingly in Scenes From a Marriage).
The bulk of this series comprises films made from the mid-60s to the late-70s, a period in which Bergman moved from black & white to, exclusively, color; from theatrical films to, permanently, television; and from 35mm to 16mm (and finally, to video, Saraband’s format). This is surely one of the last opportunities to see some of the most beautifully made films of all time on 35mm (the 3 works originating from 16mm and video are screening from digibeta).
Today is the busiest day on the calendar, with four back-to-back screenings. Although atypical and often cited as a failure, 1968’s Hour of the Wolf is one of Bergman’s most personal films, a sinister piece of self-recrimination, resembling Strindberg’s A Dream Play by way of Val Lewton orVampyr. Named for the hour “between darkness and dawn, when most people die, most children are born, and nightmares come to you,” it concerns Johan Borg, the painter whose muse has abandoned him – or, rather, spurned and humiliated him, while his genius gives way to madness. His wife Alma, attempting to understand and save him, begins to see the very demons, real or not, who taunt him – the Bird-Man, the 216-year-old Lady With the Hat and removable face, his mistress Veronika Vogler, and Baron von Merkens, the owner of the secluded island they live on, who recastsThe Magic Flute as a Poe story and who throws a dinner party in Borg’s honor that isn’t dissimilar from the one Marilyn Burns would find herself attending six years later in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
