Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) - An appreciation

Fittingly, a final film, Saraband (2003), shot initially for television but then released theatrically – long after Bergman had said he had done with theatrical films – dealt with death (including the death of relationships) and aging and (as was so often the case at the end of his films) a kind of wistful hope. Bergman called Saraband a ‘concerto grosso’ – a concert in 10 dialogues (with prologue and epilogue). It takes the Marianne and Johan of Scenes From a Marriage (1973) 32 years into their futures, and in so doing deals with power, liberation, and reconciliation. In other words, it provides powerful parentheses for characters, themes, and, indeed, Bergman’s whole career and life.

As with Saraband all of his films found their genesis in deeply personal roots, and – paradoxically – this very subjectivity gives them a universality that allows the viewer to enter into the creative process along with Bergman. Even when the story is primarily about women, it is Bergman’s subjective self that shows through. Eva Reuschmann argues that Bergman ‘is the director most consistently engaged with the exploration of female subjectivity.’1. His story has been our story.

Because this is so, Bergman has been the filmmaker par excellence who has spoken to theology and the church in our time. He, of course, would eschew any idea that he is a ‘closet believer’, and his films dealing with the death of God and the failure of faith offer powerful arguments. In fact, Bergman’s special genius is to meld psychological and metaphysical themes in such a way that the human-human, human-divine drama is illuminated as being all of a piece.

Bergman’s principal method in showing this illumination, though, is questioning – very little of direct affirmation can be found in his films. And while this means that his films deny any cheap grace to be easily found if one just looks in the right place, it also means that the viewer must enter into the creative process with Bergman, asking the questions he asks, working out his/her own responses to this metaphysical/psychological questing.

Bergman’s films assist Christian theology by consistently dealing with the theological principle of paradox. Christians are constantly dealing with paradox: God is both transcendent and immanent; Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine; the basic criteria for being human are to love and to be loving, even though the basic characteristics of the world are evil and suffering; those who lose themselves will be found and those who find their lives will lose them (Matthew 10:39); God is all-powerful (creation) and totally powerless (crucifixion) in relation to humanity, and yet it is God’s complete powerlessness that is struggling humanity’s best hope for redemption (resurrection).

Discovering God

In the 20th century religious thinkers continued to develop these paradoxes: God is ‘“the wholly other”; but he (sic.) is also wholly same; the wholly present’ (Martin Buber); God is both being and becoming (Alfred North Whitehead); it is impossible to prove that God exists, for God is ‘being-itself beyond essence and existence’ (Paul Tillich) – while in other places Tillich speaks of God in highly personal terms, even as the essence of pure personality; human love is history’s ‘impossible possibility’ (Reinhold Niebuhr).

A God who is both being and becoming, a God who is silent and yet the essence of communication, a God who has died and yet conditions frail humanity’s every move; a human creature who strives toward the ‘impossible possibility’ of real loving, men and women who are innocent though guilty – forgiven though shamed – free though with responsibility – open and vulnerable yet always humiliated – silent but struggling to communicate; a demonic which is powerfully evil yet laughably ludicrous – these are the absurd, contradictory, paradoxical images for our time which Ingmar Bergman proclaims, by constantly dealing with them, to be the reality within which we must live.

Even Bergman’s ‘commandments’ for himself as an artist have a paradoxical flavor to them: 1) ‘Thou shalt be entertaining at all times’ – from the film director who above all others proffers dark, introspective, difficult filmic images. 2) ‘Thou shalt obey thy artistic conscience at all times’ – ‘however,’ he goes on to say, ‘I am allowed to falsify if it is artistically justified’. 3) ‘Thou shalt make each film as if it were thy last’; yet, ‘Some may imagine that this commandment is an amusing paradox or a pointless aphorism or perhaps simply a beautiful phrase about the compete vanity of everything. However, that is not the case. It is reality.’2

For paradox to be the chief cornerstone of reality means that full and final knowledge is never really possible. In Wild Strawberries (1957) Bergman first prefigures the paradoxical status of knowledge with the delicious image (in the first fantasy sequence) of twin daughters writing a song for their deaf Uncle Aron. Later, toward the end of the film the contemporary Sara presents Isak Borg with some flowers she has just picked saying, ‘We know, of course, that you are a wise and venerable old man... One who knows all about life….’ Borg has just progressed through his cathartic dream/fantasy experience to the point where the one thing he is convinced of is that he knows very little, really, about life – and the gentle, unintended irony in Sara’s assertion bemuses him, but also causes him to look for the truth behind her statement.

Paradoxical images are present in Bergman’s earliest films – even in that first screenplay for Torment in the character of Bertha, a prostitute who nevertheless retains a kind of virginal innocence. By Summer Interlude (1951) the impact of the images is more subtle: a sense of profound happiness is linked to the deepest despair. Jonas Sima has identified the main theme of this movie in pure paradoxical terms: ‘As I see it, the film’s thematic idea is: to forget something that’s happened, and be reconciled to it, one must first recall it.’3

Struggling against paradox

The themes for which Bergman is best known – death, the silence of God, taking the demonic seriously, humiliation, woman as archetype – grow out of this sense of the paradoxical. Almost all of Bergman’s main characters are struggling against the paradoxical nature of their existence – trying to determine what it might mean to be truly free. Yet, in one of the greatest of all paradoxes, Martin Luther identified what this struggle means for the Christian: ‘A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.’4

While we have no indication that Berman ever actually read Luther’s ‘Treatise on Christian Liberty’, it is a fair bet that the paradoxical nature of Christian freedom and servanthood infused his Lutheran upbringing and informed his filmic work. To struggle for freedom, then, is equally to struggle to learn how to become a servant – a struggle which Bergman’s characters, for the most part, do not want to make.

These characters – these films – therefore, can be seen as a form of what Tom Driver has called ‘negative witness’ (yet another paradoxical term) – that is, a way of examining human existence through the arts without overt Christian symbols or answers or hope, but which demands a response by the very accuracy of its depiction/analysis of the human condition. Ingmar Bergman’s refusal to allow paradoxical tension to be easily removed makes his ‘negative witness’ to reality particularly compelling for the Christian who also understands that reality is based on paradox.

But if ‘negative witness’ and paradox were all there were to Bergman’s work he would not be as important for Christian thinkers as I believe him to be. ‘There is a level of hope that rises up through all the dark and despairing images. There is a kind of mercy after all... I’m going to persist! I won’t give up, even if it should be too late. I don’t think it is too late. It must not be too late.’

Those final lines of Eva’s in Autumn Sonata in her letter to her mother point to the one over-arching theme that pervades Bergman’s work: life goes on – it perdures – the most important thing is simply to be alive. In this and most of his recent films Bergman refuses to let go of his ‘impossible possibility’ of realizing human wholeness. Thus, Bergman will not accept one logical outcome of a despair-filled view of life’s activities and involvements: that we are better off not living on this earth, in this life. Such an acceptance can lead at one level to a total nihilism and the obvious election of suicide (the choice rejected by Camus and other existentialists).

Bergman identifies his sense of life enduring in this preface to Brink of Life (1958): ‘There is a secret with life, with life and death, a secret as to why some are called to live, while others are called to die. We may assail heaven and science with questions – all the answers are still only partial. But life goes on, crowning the living with torment and with happiness.’5 Perhaps no other statement comes closer to capturing Bergman’s life-philosophy.

When Bergman speaks of ‘assailing’ heaven (God) and science alike with questions, he is summing up the futile struggle of Antonius Blok and Tomas Ericsson and Anders Vergerus and Hans Vergerus to know – to finally know the mystery of God and the meaning of life. To such as these will be given only the unsatisfying answer: life goes on. ‘Persistence without certitude, then, is the quintessence of Bergmanism.’6 It is this sense of persistence without certitude – of life going on – that pervades the lives of Johan and Marianne (Saraband); clearly, Bergman chose this theme for his last film as a way of emphasizing the necessity of holding to that ability to perdure, no matter what.

Simply going on may not be sufficient for Johan and Marianne as they face their dark night of the soul in that ‘hour before dawn’. But to others this same answer becomes more satisfying because it betokens some hopeful possibilities to be found in the midst of despair. Stig Eriksson loses his wife and child at the beginning of To Joy (1950), but by its end his remaining child sneaks in to watch him rehearse Beethoven’s Ninth. Life will go on for them. The sense of despair is even bleaker in Summer Interlude (1951) where images of encroaching death abound, but again Marie pushes herself to a realization that life must continue.

Gosta in Port of Call (1948) is portrayed as primarily a survivor (‘when the ship sinks you jump overboard’), but when the crucial moment of decision comes, he stays with Berit even though his life-enduring impulse goes against his survival instincts. When Valborg approaches Viola with obvious homosexual overtures in Thirst (1949), Viola recoils in disgust and despair, but Valborg indicates that the world goes on – which becomes a key line for the interrelated lives in this movie.

The early film that most significantly advances this world-view, though, is The Naked Night (1953). It is so unremittingly bleak and despair-oriented in its conception and realization that it would seem to cry out for a nihilistic resolution. Yet, throughout the last third of the film there is a balancing outlook to the bleakness of these characters’ lives: after Albert nearly shoots himself and Frost in their tent he unaccountably bursts out into the daylight exclaiming, ‘Look at all the life around us’, and begins to sing.

A most powerful image for the enduring of life is that fresh spring that issues out from under Karin at the end of The Virgin Spring (1960). Again, this is a film that is unremittingly despair inducing in mood and content right up to those very last images – which are multifold.

Philosophy of love and life

Love, as well as life, perdures. After a long period of presenting the endurance of love only in fits and starts, Bergman comes back strongly to this central reality in Face to Face (1975). Jenny first perceives it in the relationship between her grandparents, but then as she works through some of the consequences of her – and their – rejecting behaviour in the past, she is enabled to see that their love for her and vice versa is able to endure even past the breaks which such rejection might ordinarily cause.

As he works to pull her out of her suicidal depression Tomas focuses in on the life-enduring quality of the individual: ‘The world begins and ends with yourself. That’s all there is to it.’ And as Jenny resists his efforts (‘It’s more than I can bear. I can’t go on.’), he pushes his (Bergman’s) point even more forcefully: ‘You must. Nothing is more important.’ But going on, Jenny discovers, is only possible if love is a part of that process. If ‘the world begins and ends with yourself’, then it is not possible to continue going on.

Tomas is a good friend but a false prophet, and Jenny rightly perceives that his leaving, rather than pulling her support out from under her, is just the push she needs to link up with that love which ‘embraces everything, even death’. This embrace is the ultimate conviction that life and love do perdure – far beyond any normal boundaries that human thought and feeling can erect.

In Fanny and Alexander (1982) Bergman makes explicit how crucial this philosophy of life and love perduring is for him. He provides an ellipse of his whole career and life-philosophy when Emilie says to Helena, ‘Now it’s up to us, isn’t it’ and Helena then quotes the key line from Strindberg’s A Dream Play, ‘Anything can happen...anything is possible and probable’ – recalling Eva’s line in Autumn Sonata ‘There are no limits’. Nevertheless, Bergman cannot let us relax into a simplistic view of life-continuing: immediately after this scene Alexander experiences the ghost of his step-father knocking him down and proclaiming, ‘You can’t escape me’. The demonic powers we will also always have with us.

Bergman’s films are inherently theological, not in the sense that they reference a Supreme Being but in the sense that they ask ultimate questions about the meaning of human existence. In the years following Winter Light and The Silence Bergman made films that, he says, have no reference to God or God’s silence. This was also a time of much ferment and faddism in theology (‘death of God’, ‘theology of hope’, ‘theology as autobiography’; followed by ‘black theology’, ‘feminist’ or ‘womanist theology’) in which a sense of transcendence was often lost.

But the connections were always there. They occur not at the level of affirming a vertical, reaching-out-to-heaven transcendence, but at the level of lateral, proximate, penultimate signs that the transcendent God is to be found.

Bergman offers no simple solutions – no deus ex machina – even from the beginning of his career (the Swedish critic Bengt Chambert wrote about his second directorial film, It Rains on Our Love (1946), that it seemed to deny ‘the intervention of all transcendental powers in meaningless life.’7

But since ours is a time of blocked communication between human-human and human-divine Bergman does try out some possible answers – all of which revolve in some form around love – down through and including his last film, Saraband, in which Marianne goes to see Johan simply, profoundly because ‘I thought you were calling me.’

His has been a wondrous career and life through which he has offered us insights into living and the doing of theology in our time. Thank you, Ingmar Bergman.

Notes

1. Eva Reuschmann, Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2000, p. 127.

2. Stuart M. Kaminsky, ed., Ingmar Bergman: Essays in Criticism, Oxford University Press, New York, 1975, pp. 95-96.

3. Stig Bjorkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, editors, Bergman on Bergman, A Touchstone Book, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1970, 1973, p. 54.

4. Martin Luther, Three Treatises, Muhlenberg Press, Philadelphia, 1960, pp. 277-278.

5. As quoted in Jorn Donner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman, translated by Holger Lundbergh, Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1964, 1972, p. 23.

6. Arlene Croce, ‘The Bergman Legend’, Commonweal, March 11, 1960, op. cit., p. 649.

7. As quoted by Jorn Donner, The Films of Ingmar Bergman, op. cit., p. 38.

Dave Pomeroy is now a part-time pastor with the First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, having retired from 33 years of communication work with the National Council of Churches (USA) and Faith & Values Media in November, 2005. He is a long-time member of WACC and has served on the WACC Central Committee.