Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

Last updated on: July 31, 2007 at 9:32 am by Peter T. Chattaway

Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007 2007-07-31T09:32:00-07:00 Peter T. Chattaway

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Ingmar Bergman died yesterday at the age of 89. I have seen quite a few of his films but none of them often enough or recent enough to comment on them in any detail. (Though I did jot a few notes here on 1973’s Scenes from a Marriage and 2003’s Saraband a couple years ago.) However, Bergman did represent an interesting point in the history of the relationship between film and faith — by encouraging filmmakers to engage in theological and spiritual matters more deeply than they had ever done before, and by encouraging people of faith to engage with film more deeply than they had ever done before — so I need to note his passing here.

Many tributes and obituaries are already out there, and they have all expressed the essential points much better than I ever could. Victor Morton at the Rightwing Film Geek blog is especially eloquent and passionate on the topic. What follows are some excerpts from the other tributes that have caught my eye.

Stephen Holden, The New York Times:

An existential dread runs through the entire Bergman oeuvre. Among the major directors who spearheaded the international art film movement after 1950, he was the one most closely in touch with the intellectual currents of the day. Freud and Sartre were riding high, and Time magazine wondered in a cover story if God were dead. Attendance at Mr. Bergman’s films was a lot like going to church. Though many of those films are steeped in church imagery, God is usually absent from the sanctuary.

As a college student and avid art-film goer in the early 1960s, I was overwhelmed by Mr. Bergman’s films, with their heavy-duty metaphysical speculation and intellectual seriousness. In those days, you would no more argue with Mr. Bergman’s stature than you would question the greatness of the modern Western literary canon; like Mann, Joyce, Kafka, Faulkner, et al., Mr. Bergman was an intellectual god whose work could reward a lifetime of analytical study.

Today the religion of high art that dominated the 1950s and ’60s seems increasingly quaint and provincial. The longstanding belief that humans are born with singular psyches and souls is being superseded by an emerging new ideal: the human as technologically perfectible machine. The culture of the soul — of Freud and Marx and, yes, Bergman — has been overtaken by the culture of the body. Biotechnology leads the shaky way into the future, and pseudo-immortality, through cloning, is in sight. Who needs a soul if the self is technologically mutable? For that matter, who needs art?

Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere:

I wonder how many under-35s have even seen a Bergman film. The Bergman art- house aesthetic of the ’50s and ’60s is about as far from the Tarantino film-geek attitude as you can get. Film Snob Dictionary authors Martin Kamp and Law- rence Levi wrote a couple of years ago that “watching a Bergman film is so PBS tote-bag, so Mom-and-Dad-on-a-date-in-college, so baguettes-and-Chardonnay.”

John Podhoretz, New York Post:

The darkness of Bergman’s vision of the world and his uncompromisingly bleak expression of that vision resonated with those who viewed art not as a form of the most sublime entertainment – entertainment that transcends the merely pleasurable to offer a transformative experience – but rather as the secular version of a stern sermon.

Art, in this view, wasn’t supposed to be easy to take or pleasurable to take in. It was supposed to punish you, assault you, scrub you clean of impurities. . . .

As for the society of people who needed Ingmar Bergman to stand as the greatest example of what the cinema should do, they too had had their day by 1982. For the basic truth is that the critics who described Bergman as the greatest of film artists were people embarrassed by the movies.

They didn’t admire the medium. They were offended by its unseriousness, by its capacity to entertain without offering anything elevating at the same time. They believed the movies were a low and disreputable art form and that its only salvation lay in offering moral and aesthetic instruction to its audiences about the worthlessness of existence.

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail:

Bergman, who died yesterday at his home in Sweden at the age of 89, was a litmus test for cinematic seriousness, and, perhaps, in the long run many people, including critics, have preferred not to face the demands of his work. He has been parodied and dismissed as puritanical, misanthropic and, as Joe Queenan said in a 4,000-word for The Guardian last March, “resolutely non-life affirming.”

All this, of course, is reductive and exaggerated. In Fanny and Alexander (1982), Bergman proved he wasn’t above a good fart joke. And even in a world where God is apparently AWOL and hell is other people, Bergman’s films hold their own form of exhilaration. As Aristotle recognized, other people’s tragedies, in fictional form, help to place our own pity and fear into proper balance. . . .

Though it may sound facetious to say the themes of despair and Godlessness can go out of fashion, there is some truth to it. It has been 41 years since Time magazine created a furor by asking, “Is God dead?” on its cover. The vogue for the quest for spiritual authenticity has been displaced by postmodern questioning of authenticity and “the meaning of life” is more a question of linguistics than destiny. That doesn’t make Bergman any less significant than, say, Goethe or Shakespeare, but perhaps a similar kind of historical figure.

Glenn Kenny, Premiere.com:

One sometimes heard the complaint that Bergman’s films are peopled with characters who can’t see past the bridge of their own noses, and that they’re reflections of Bergman’s own self-absorption. That we rarely if ever hear anyone bemoaning the lack of “social engagement” in, say, Samuel Beckett’s work is, among other things, indicative of how cinema is still regarded as a stepchild of the fine arts in some respects. . . .

Well, what can one do? The self, and one’s negotiation/war with it, is one of Bergman’s great themes. As in Beckett, some of Bergman’s most powerful scenes are of one person in a room, or two people in a room. And the same thing over and over again. . . .

“Today, we are aswarm with Antonioni imitators, but no one seems to want to be the new Bergman,” Michael Atkinson notes. That’s partly because nobody can be the new Bergman. And not just for the obsious reason.

Unlike a lot of younger filmmakers today, Bergman was a highly, richly cultured individual. He knew the Bible backward and forward, Shakespeare too; fine art, music, and so on. All of his knowledge did more than inform his workâ€”his work is suffused with it, it gains much of its texture and heft from it. Of course, Antonioni is similarly cultured, but his depth in this area doesn’t play so much upon the surface of his work; it motivates the form, rather than thickens it. Today’s young filmmakers aren’t, for the most part, as polyglot. For a lot of them, all the culture they’ve got is film. And Antonioni’s got a signature style that’s accessible to them, and seems imitable: shoot some architecture and negative space, have characters disaffectedly utter banalities, and you think you’ve got it. To emulate Bergman, you’ve got to know what he knew, and knowing that…go on to be yourself.

How ironic, in light of this last excerpt, that Michelangelo Antonioni himself also passed away yesterday, at the age of 94.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

July 31, 2007

Maxim magazine developing Virginity Rocks

Next Post

July 31, 2007 Have we lost the "appetite for difficulty"?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Anglican Planet Articles BC Christian News BC Report Bible Movies Bible Review Blog Books & Culture Campus Times CBC Radio Christianity Today ChristianWeek Essays Faith Today Festival Cinemas Guide Film Journals Georgia Straight Interviews MB Herald National Catholic Register Salvationist Today's Christian Two Chairs Ubyssey Uncategorized Vancouver Courier Vancouver Sun

Select a Month August 2025 April 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 May 2024 February 2024 December 2023 May 2023 March 2023 November 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 September 2019 July 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 April 2012 January 2012 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 October 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 September 2004 August 2004 July 2004 June 2004 May 2004 April 2004 March 2004 February 2004 January 2004 November 2003 October 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 March 2002 January 2002 December 2001 November 2001 September 2001 August 2001 July 2001 June 2001 April 2001 March 2001 February 2001 December 2000 November 2000 October 2000 September 2000 August 2000 July 2000 June 2000 May 2000 April 2000 March 2000 January 2000 October 1999 August 1999 May 1999 April 1999 February 1999 January 1999 December 1998 November 1998 October 1998 August 1998 July 1998 June 1998 April 1998 March 1998 January 1998 November 1997 September 1997 July 1997 June 1997 April 1997 March 1997 February 1997 January 1997 December 1996 October 1996 September 1996 June 1996 March 1996 February 1996 January 1996 April 1995 November 1994 September 1994 September 1991

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Which Christian holiday is celebrated on December 25th in most Western churches?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Epiphany Advent Pentecost Christmas