In nearly 20 years of programming films-at university, in film festivals, on television-I have never shown a single work by Ingmar Bergman. This is the first time I have written about him. Of all the art movie auteurs who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s-Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Bunuel, Godard, Satyajit Ray, Pasolini, Bresson, Truffaut, Oshima, Imamura and so on-Bergman is the only one I have ignored. I have seen all his famous films but to many critics of my generation (born in the 1960s), he was the most overrated of these directors. We dismissed Bergman as a passionless patrician even when, in 1983, he re-imagined one of our favourite films, Meet Me in St Louis, as the grand and gorgeous family saga, Fanny and Alexander. But, as the National Film Theatre mounts a retrospective of his film work and his production of Ibsen's Ghosts appears on the London stage, Bergman's disappearance from the canon of post-1960s film criticism is due for reappraisal.
He was born in Uppsala to the sternest of parents in a year, 1918, when Swedish cinema was booming. His Lutheran father, a pastor to the Swedish royal family, disciplined his theatre-obsessed son by locking him in dark cupboards. Bergman became a screenwriter in 1944, directed his first film in 1945 and in 1955 had his first international success with Smiles of a Summer Night, a grand country-house comedy, set in the 1900s, about the infidelities of middle-aged couples. Derived from Jean Renoir, it in turn was the basis for Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy. By 1957, with The Seventh Seal, Bergman's tone had darkened. A medieval allegory about a knight returning from the crusades who is challenged to a game of chess by Death himself, it drew even more attention than Smiles of a Summer Night, won prizes at Cannes and led to the first retrospective of Bergman in London.
I hated The Seventh Seal when I saw it in 1982. High on Welles, Hitchcock, Pasolini and Godard, I found it stolid and academic. Why had older critics been so blind to its dreary aesthetic calculations? They saw Bergman as the messiah of new art cinema, a godsend after decades of Hollywood brainlessness. The 1950s were the high watermark years for his reputation but by 1960, when Godard had refreshed movie language, Bergman's sober, middle-class metaphysics seemed, even to some of his supporters, dated and irrelevant.
In 1966 he made Persona, a film about an actress who becomes mute and is treated by a nurse, whose identity she absorbs. Gone was the obsession with religion and marriage. This was an intense, modernist work full of unexplained images. Its six-minute pre-title sequence is startling-we see the death of a sheep, its guts, a nail going into a hand, a tap dripping, a phone ringing, a boy lying on a slab. Robert Altman, Woody Allen, John Sayles and Martin Scorsese admired the mastery of such sequences and the film marked a shift to the theme of female hysteria which would become central to Bergman. Persona was as iconic as Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, but how does it stand up today? Where is the simplicity, joy or adventure of Godard and Truffaut, the rage of Pasolini, the excess of Fellini? Persona is structure, refinement, mannerism and symbolism.
In 1969, shifts in film theory left Bergman high and dry. The idea of "Third Cinema" emerged, neither industrial (like Hollywood, the "First Cinema") nor auteurist (like Bergman, the "Second"), but oppositional and politically engaged. Pasolini filmed among peasants, Bunuel explored the disruptions of desire, even the aristocratic Visconti was a Marxist. Bergman, by contrast, looked haughty and misogynistic.
In 1976, he was arrested for tax fraud and had a nervous breakdown; he moved to Munich, where he worked in theatre and television. When the charges were dropped, he returned to Sweden and directed Fanny and Alexander, which won four Oscars. He then announced his retirement and became a semi-recluse on the island of Faro. In Sweden his mystique grew, like Garbo's, with every interview refusal.
Then the critical tide turned back in his favour. The disdain some of us used to feel started to seem as cold and lofty as his films. In the late 1990s, the NFT embarked on a reassessment of the art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s which it was initially so instrumental in canonising. Second Cinema was under the spotlight. When Visconti's films are explored later this year (however much you love Rocco and his Brothers), it might reveal the leadenness of his erotic imagination.
But now that it is Bergman's turn, I think it will show that he is better than my generation thought. We read him too politically. We ousted him because his middle-class, middle-aged themes didn't appeal to us. Now that we are middle-aged ourselves, and have seen the tragic side of love, his films seem more alive.
But the retrospective will also show that Bergman is not as good as his early advocates believed. He opened cinema up to theories of mind and theology, but there was something of the pedagogue in him. Cinema has benefited from the iconoclasm which pitched him from his pedestal; Bergman's talent, rather than a false image of genius, is what remains.
