..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Five Ways To Think About Bergman
As A Genius
by Larry Gross.

In 1974, I got a job interviewing movie directors with films premiering in New York for a magazine called Millimeter.  Over two years, I got to interview around two dozen active Hollywood pros - some great ones like Altman, Polanski, Rafelson, and Frankenheimer and some mediocre ones.  When I asked them, "Who's your favorite director?" about ninety-nine percent instantly replied, "Ingmar Bergman."

I offer this as an empirical fact, but it is far more important as a statement about a kind of status that Bergman enjoyed, that for various reasons can not exist today.

Bergman was one of the heroes in an era when the distance between the best of European art cinema and the practices of Hollywood was much less great than it has now become.  
His films had an inarguable level of craftsmanship and beauty in their cinematography, costume, design, and of skill in performance and plot construction that, in those days, took them out of a purely cinephilic, arthouse ghetto.  Along with Kurosawa, Fellini, and Bunuel, Bergman in the 50's and 60's had accomplished something new and unprecedented.  They were part of a period where European film-as-art was able to exert a considerable persistent direct influence on Hollywood's film-as-commercial entertainment.  

The machinery for this influence at the time was the newly influential concept of The Auteur:  The visionary director with a consistent personal vision of the world.  The director as brand-name, if you will.  Bergman clearly was the author of his films' scripts as well as being their director, and he was one of the most authentic, least disputed embodiments of that notion.  The notion of director-as-author was partly embraced to develop a vocabulary for describing Bergman.

For good or ill, we are still living with a myth of the director-as-hero, though there's little chance that someone making films like Bergman's, if such could even exist, would today be considered eligible for the position.

One of the definitions of being a genius in an artistic medium is that you have the skill to do as well in areas of the medium in which you're not particularly interested in as others who devote their life to it.  I once saw a show of realistic figurative drawings by Matisse that were superb.  Yet, as a painter Matisse wasn't even INTERESTED in realistic figures.  Shakespeare's career was as a dramatic poet, yet his sonnets are lyrics of genius.  When you watch Shadow of A Doubt, you realize Hitchcock could have had a whole other career, if he'd wanted to making realistic family dramas.  When you see Mr. And Mrs. Smith, you see he could have spent his time making successful skillful mainstream comedies.

In Bergman's case, we all know that the core of his achievement are devastatingly painful psychological dramas of the kind he started making with Wild Strawberries and The Silence, work essentially derived from the traditions of modern theatre invented by Ibsen, Strindberg and O'Neill.  But such was Bergman's genius that he could move in a completely opposite direction and make, for example, entirely vivid and convincing "externalized"  historical films dealing with the middle ages like Seventh Seal, and Virgin Spring, or set in the 19th century like The Magician or Cries and Whispers.  In a film like Shame, Bergman could basically forego psychologically interiority and construct a lucid objective fable narrative about modern warfare that is completely apart from his typical psychosexual concerns.  (Shame had, I would guess, a huge influence on Cuaron's Chldren of Men.)  

Bergman could also make comedies like The Devil's Eye and Smiles of a Summer Night.  The latter is particularly amazing for the way in which it teases and makes fun of characters with all the pretensions that later critics would discover as flaws in Bergman.  He was way ahead of his critics in laughing at himself and seeing his own capacity for narcissistic folly.  When he wanted to make a film purely for his own pleasure he decided upon filming The Magic Flute, emphasizing the Disney family entertainment aspect of the Mozart classic. 

No matter what he turned his attention to, Bergman almost involuntarily applied his genius for film craftsmanship.  David Salle, a painter friend of mine, summed it up succinctly once in conversation.  "Bergman never made any bad shoes."

Bergman wrote at length and more eloquently than any of us ever could on the importance of making close-ups of actors in his films, how for him, the landscape of the human face was inexhaustible in its richness.

Another way of saying this is that along with George Cukor and Elia Kazan, Bergman was the greatest director of actors in the history of cinema.  The emphasis, partly for reasons of biographical myth, is on the actresses - a number of whom were wives  and/or lovers. Eva Dahlbeck, Harriett Anderson, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullman, and Lena Olin are certainly an astonishing bunch of ladies.  Though not a feminist, Bergman took women's interior lives wholly seriously, insisting that women could symbolize consciousness in the modern world as decisively as men, and that probably has some historic importance.   But then the cluster of great performances by Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max Von Sydow and Erland Josephson demonstrate that Bergman had no lack of a gift for directing men or turning them into the symbol of modern consciousness on-the-edge.

The last film of Bergman's I would claim as indisputably great, which happened to be the first film performance of Lena Olin, was made for Swedish TV and was called After the Rehearsal.  It was done on a single stage set, written to be played in virtually real time.  An aging director napping after a rehearsal is wakened and confronted by the gifted and angry young actress he is working with and they hash out many themes about the costs and pleasures of acting and the troubled lives actors are susceptible to.  She doesn't know whether she wants to fight with him or fuck him.  It's the closest thing Bergman ever came to an affirmative testament.  It's his version of The Tempest.

In this film, the fictional director declares his reasons for loving actors explicitly.  He admits that in "so-called real life" he has caused actors and others pain and had it inflicted in turn upon himself, but insists that insofar as they actors,  his impulse to protect and love them is unconditional and absolute.  You believe the character means it when he says it.  And in this case, for once, you believe that, at the end of his career. Bergman is speaking literally in his own voice.

  An anomaly of film history is that a number of directors most honored (legitimately) for being "cinematic" are also at the same time, the most steeped in theatre, and the conventions of theatricality.   The first great auteur of whom this was true was Orson Welles whose theatre-radio-experiments did so much to inspire his cinematic experiments.  For decades, every year that Bergman made film, he went back to Stockholm to put on plays.  It allowed him to reconnect with his literary inspirations, it allowed him to train and discover new acting talent. 

I also think theatricality was at the core of his conception of human personality.  I think theatre lent credibility to the extremities of human expression and feeling, the willingness to confront the violent, the hysterical.  Shakespeare, Pirandello, and Strindberg, as much or more than Freud, define Bergman's conception of how human beings behave.  In this ontology of life-as theatre, human beings adopt the masks of bourgeois decency, intellectual coherence, and normal sanity, until a ritual dance ensues where the masks are torn away.  It's partly an allegory of the theatrical process itself.  Truth is not the end-point as much as the process, the dance itself.

I also think that just on a pure competitive level, steeping himself in theatre classics forced Bergman to constantly confront his own artistic ambitions.  How would what he created on film from out of himself live up to the theatre classics he dealt with every year in Stockholm?

Three great film makers have seriously pursued the Bergman model of making theatre the metaphysical inspiration/basis for their films.  One, Fassbinder, flamed out early, but two are among the most significant still actively making films today, Pedro Almodovar and Lars Von Trier. The one who took the idea most seriously in American films over the last three decades just left us.  His name was Robert Altman.

The greatest artists convey a body of cultural and historical information about a certain subject matter that assumes real weight in the world.  For instance, Michael Herr's book about the Vietnam War, Dispatches, is so much the best thing written about that war, that many people truly to assume it "was" exactly the way Herr's book describes it.   Kubrick and Coppola used Herr to work on their Vietnam movies because they knew their own thinking about the war was already so informed by that book.   To use the Shakespeare example again, does anyone seriously imagine that Richard III wasn't the villain Shakespeare described him as being, since the vividness of that description has usurped the facts, as has his positive heroic description of Henry V.

The world's post World War II conception of the Scandinavian countries - prosperous, sexy, vaguely liberal and well-educated, cosmopolitan and neurotically suicidal - was more or less derived from Ingmar Bergman's films.  There were times when angry journalists or politicians from those countries took exception to Bergman's depiction, as one sided or narrow or unfair.  And no doubt, there were things he left out.

But this is, in part what a genius does.  He helps to create the taste by which he will be judged.  We have a hard time identifying the "truth" about modern Scandinavian life, apart from Bergman's representation or conception of it.  That is what it means for a creative vision to have authority.   This is the deepest and most fundamental way in which works of art sometimes, slowly and quietly, over time, change the world.

- Larry Gross
July 31, 2007

Larry Gross is a 25 year screenwriting veteran and Winner of Sundance's Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his most recent release, We Don't Live Here Anymore.

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