Ingmar Bergman

The late Robin Buss's review of Saraband appeared in the TLS of October 14, 2005

It is now sixty years since Ingmar Bergman directed his first film. He had been working in the cinema since 1942, having gained a small reputation as a student theatre producer and playwright. His first script for Svensk Filmindustri, Frenzy, was filmed by Alf Sjoberg in 1944, and the followingyear Bergman was invited to direct Crisis, an adaptation of a play by Leck Fischer. Today, with around sixty films for cinema and television to his credit, he is nearing the end of his career. His latest statement, Saraband, may also be his last.

Bergman's astonishing achievement has not been without its difficulties. It took a long time for him to establish his mature reputation. Crisis was not a success and, according to his autobiography (The Magic Lantern, 1987), nearly lost the director his job at the studio. The ten films that followed, mainly melodramatic love stories such as It Rains on Our Love (1946) and Music in Darkness (1947), are interesting as works of their period and because they show the extent to which the young Bergman had been influenced by Marcel Carne, Jacques Prevert and Jean Renoir; but they are unremarkable. On their individual merits they deserve reassessment rather less than the work of Frenzy's director (and Bergman's mentor), Sjoberg.
Bergman was in any case lucky to have been allowed such a long apprenticeship. The Swedish film industry, in the early 1950s, was all but crippled by a ten-month producers' strike. At one point, Bergman was reduced to making soap commercials.

The suspension of filming hit him particularly hard because by this point, in his early thirties, he was already supporting two wives and five children. But when filming resumed, he returned to the studio with renewed energy and in August 1952 made Summer with Monika, one of the "happiest experiences" of his career. This adaptation of a novel by Per Anders Fogelstrom starred Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg as working-class lovers escaping to the Stockholm archipelago for an interlude of happiness before returning to reality and disillusionment. The influence of French 1930s poetic realism was evident, but the narrative was better controlled than Bergman's earlier work. And its homage to French cinema was a favour returned by the directors of the Nouvelle Vague: Jean-Luc Godard wrote in Cahiers du Cinema of Summer with Monika's "lucidity in dramatic and moral construction" and Francois Truffaut copied one scene for the final freeze frame of Les 400 Coups.

In fact, Summer With Monika, instead of pointing the way ahead, was to mark the end of Bergman's immersion in poetic realism. In another memoir, Images (1990), he describes his next film, Sawdust and Tinsel, as "a well-organized pandemonium".

Again starring Harriet Andersson, it is set against a background of circus life, and tells a story of sexual jealousy. It's not hard to see why such a subject might have been on Bergman's mind at the time: his third marriage was only a year old and he had started a relationship with Andersson. He wrote the film, he says, in "a burst of unusually profound misanthropy". But the most important thing about Sawdust and Tinsel was its emerging style of construction: the deliberate mixture of fantasy and reality. Oblique references to the director's private life were also to become characteristic: Bergman has always had a fondness for "clues" which can be understood only by those close to him. In Saraband, for example, we see a black-and-white photograph of the house where most of the action takes place; it shows Varoms, the Bergman family's country home in Dalarna, where the director spent much of his childhood. His autobiographical writings confirm many such references -for example that Eva Dahlbeck, who plays Marianne in A Lesson in Love, is the actress Bergman casts in roles based on his third wife, Gun Hagberg.

As he absorbed the lessons of poetic realism, Bergman's films gained in confidence and diversity. Though caricatured in his heyday as "the gloomy Swede", he first gained broad international recognition with a reinterpretation of French farce, Smiles of a Summer Night, which won a prize at Cannes in 1956. The Seventh Seal (1956), an allegory set in the Middle Ages, integrated the dreamlike and the literal in a reflection on death, art and the purpose of life. (Even Bergman was surprised at the success of the film's most daring conceit, the incarnation of Death.) And in its successor, Wild Strawberries (1957), we find the same combination of the literal and the fantastic, the two modes representing the inner and outer lives of the central character, an ageing professor (Victor Sjostrom) confronting his own mortality. Another medieval film, The Virgin Spring (1959), about death, evil and redemption, ends on a perverse note of optimism.

Commercial success liberated Bergman to make his most individual works: Persona (1965), The Shame (1967); and the trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly (1960), Winter Light (1961) and The Silence (1962), films that address problems of communication and emotional sterility. He had begun to conceive of cinema as closer to music than to literature, paring down dialogue and plot and reaching instead for an ideal of "chamber" proportions, with a reduced cast. The two sisters in The Silence (played by Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lind-blom) find themselves in a nameless foreign country, unable to communicate in the local language and enclosed for most of the film in a hotel bedroom. Inside this trap -something like the setting for Sartre's Huis Clos -they confront their deepest fears and aggressions.
Bergman has said, rather unflatteringly, that The Silence was inspired by his own memories of a three-month escapade in Paris in 1949 with Gun Hagberg. At any rate, the film successfully combines personal and existential preoccupations in a narrative that can be read literally, as a story about the relationship of the sisters, or allegorically as a fable about the human condition. And, undeniably, it takes risks: the audience is expected to sit through ninety-five minutes of anguish, set in an imagined country, with no recognizable plot. One has the impression around this time of a reduction in energy and, perhaps, a failure to find new ideas. Some of the films have stood the test of time: Persona (1965), the two-hander with Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, recently revived; or Cries and Whispers (1971). But the unremitting quality of Bergman's view of life had itself begun to seem familiar.

Not that artistic exhaustion was the only threat to his success. Bergman had left his affairs in the hands of a financial adviser and, in the mid-1970s, allegedly signed some documents without reading them. In January 1976, the Swedish tax police burst into the Royal Dramatic Theatre where rehearsals for The Dance of Death were under way, and arrested the director on allegations of fraud. The result was that Sweden's most famous cultural export exported himself to Germany, saying a lot of unpleasant things about Swedish social democracy along the way. It seemed, in any case, as though his great days were over. Bergman was doing more work for television, a medium that favoured smallness of scale and, perhaps, of ambition.

Then, in 1982, in his mid sixties, he made Fanny and Alexander, a glorious celebration of life and art that runs for more than three hours in its shortest version. Many Bergman regulars were reunited for this evocation of Christmas in a Swedish pastor's household at the start of the twentieth century: Andersson, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Erland Josephson, Borje Ahlstedt. It is hard to think of another director who has closed a large-scale career with such a life affirming testament and summa of his previous work.

Since then, Bergman has continued to work in the theatre and on television.
Saraband takes up the story of the couple in Scenes from a Marriage (shown on Swedish television in 1973), with Josephson and Liv Ullmann reprising their original roles. For thirty years, the university professor Johan (Josephson) and the lawyer Marianne (Ullmann) have been leading separate lives. Now, on an impulse, Marianne decides that she would like to see her former husband again. Johan is in his eighties, living in comfortable retirement off a large inheritance in Dalarna.

Johan's son, Henrik (Borje Ahlstedt), and his granddaughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius), rent different parts of the estate and are both musicians: Henrik is a conductor and instrumentalist at the end of his career; Karin is a promising cellist at the start of hers.

Saraband consists of a prologue and an epilogue, spoken by Marianne, and ten dialogues between the four characters. Bergman has described it as a "concerto grosso" with four soloists, but it bears a more obvious resemblance to the formal dance of the title. Each numbered "chapter" is a movement involving two members of a cast who seem to be circling one another according to some predetermined pattern. In the course of these dialogues, it emerges that Henrik's wife, Anna, died two years ago, and that he and Karin are both still mourning their loss. The relationship between them has become dangerously intense, possibly physically incestuous. Karin's ability to escape becomes a central concern of the film.

The dead Anna, present only as a black-and-white photograph that each of the four characters interrogates, will emerge as the key to each of their lives, even though death has made her an absent participant who can speak to them only through this image and in a letter written shortly before her death. To Marianne, the mystery of how this woman could have brought herself to love the unlovable Henrik becomes all-consuming, as does the means of ensuring the survival of Anna's influence through memory (made concrete in the photograph) and art (the letter).

Beyond death, then, Anna is destined to have an effect on the life of Marianne. The two women never met, but the survivor is deeply affected by something in what Anna has left behind. Is it too fanciful to see Anna as a "figure" for Bergman, a seer pointing forwards by calling her audience back, a part of the past to which we are all headed - the artist whose work resonates through time?