Landscapes of the mind

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman died in July this year, leaving behind a compendium of work that tells us as much about ourselves as him

Mehru Jaffer Vienna

In the summer of 1975, the films of Ingmar Bergman dominated discussions on the campus of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune. Scenes from a Marriage, a domestic drama of a middle-class marriage falling apart, was a favourite among both teachers and participants attending the course in film appreciation.

Naturally, I watched Scenes from a Marriage too. But I found the latent tension between the sexes so cruel when compared with my own conclusions about romance that I failed to appreciate the film then. After all, those were the days when I waited for Rajesh Khanna, the hero who would transport me lovingly across the waters of the Dal Lake in Kashmir to the strains of O P Nayyar's background score.

Towards the close of the decade of that fantastic wait for my Bollywood hero, when disappointment matured into relief, I was most glad that Rajesh Khanna never came and that I had continued to watch Bergman's films. More enlightened, I nodded in agreement with the character of Liv Ullman who visits her husband from Scenes from a Marriage, 30 years later in Bergman's 2003 film  Saraband, to conclude wisely that the desire to change others is futile. The road to happiness is paved instead only with changes made to the self.

Because Bergman spent his entire life concentrating on his nightmares and dreams, he is accused of being obsessed with the self and of projecting his demons and paranoia upon his audiences. But Bergman made an art of doing so and therefore he is great. In the process, he also healed himself as a human being.

As a young man he was angry and arrogant and did not think much of people who never flung furniture around when faced with the frustrations of life. Those who knew Bergman in his early twenties describe him as talented but difficult. The Swedish film director, dramatist and author, is remembered as rude, shabby and with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.

Bergman, the film maker, is also criticised for being apolitical. “It is the politics of relationships and the sociology of the psyche that is really Bergman's concern,” says Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times literary critic. For a long time, Bergman's private life was so shameful that he did not dare to pontificate about anything in public.

“On Saturdays I got drunk, sought out bad company and got mixed up in brawls. Sometimes my wife came to see me. She was pregnant. We quarrelled, and she left. I also read plays and prepared for the coming season at the theatre,” Bergman writes in  The Magic Lantern, his 1987 autobiography. This was a decade or so after Bergman went to Germany as a 16-year-old student and returned home, very impressed with Adolf Hitler, to Sweden.

'I asked the pastor whether I should raise my arm and say Heil Hitler like all the others. He replied, 'My dear Ingmar that will be regarded as more than mere politeness.' I raised my arm and said Heil Hitler, and it felt odd,” he writes of his brief stay in Germany. This incident was to haunt him for a long time. He talked of many such periods of darkness throughout his life that often confused both body and soul. As he continued to work upon his wicked self, he explored the most elusive emotions on screen. Bergman came to believe that self-knowledge was the most one could hope for and that anything more was mere pretence.

His films deal with all kinds of doubts — of faith in The Seventh Seal, of self in Wild Strawberries, the double self in Persona, with self-introspection culminating in a happy ending, almost, in Fanny Alexander.

Bergman reached these heights only because he tried to see himself as he was and allowed his sensitivity to surface in the face of hesitation, humiliation and the cruel use of power by one human being against another. The film maker made huge efforts to bridge the contradictions between his private and public life before it split his personality permanently.

Throughout his career, Bergman examined all kinds of personal problems and put them on the screen, as if inviting audiences to be part of the process of his outgrowing the problems. If it was not for his work, he said, he would probably never have cured himself of the terrifying fear he had nursed as a young man about death, and earlier, of guilt and humiliation. After Ingrid, his wife, died in 1995 he missed her all the time. One day he saw his own death as an occasion to meet with Ingrid again.

Bergman's films are best enjoyed as landscapes of the mind, the drama played out in the interior of human beings, hidden behind the hypocritical mask of calm on the surface. Asked why he made films, he said that it was out of a desperate need to communicate. It was the burning desire of Bergman to touch the emotions of other human beings, to enter the lonely and isolated recesses of their souls, especially since he found it so difficult to reach out to people externally.  He felt that the greatest tragedy of life is the inability of human beings to communicate real feelings to each other.

He realised that he communicated best through cinema in which were included other arts that were also dear to him — like music, painting, and poetry. The dreamlike world of cinema provided Bergman security to expose his double self and to try to make himself whole by first identifying his fantasies and then making them fit reality. “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul,” he writes in The Magic Lantern.

According to Kakutani (who wrote two decades ago from the desolate island of Faro that was Bergman's home for many decades and where he died at the age of 89 years on July 30, 2007), Bergman, in chronicling his own anxieties and fears, found a parable for both Sweden's peculiar afflictions of the spirit and those of the modern world…where  everything, on the surface at least, is orderly and serene. But Bergman's Sweden is not the paradise envisioned by idealistic social architects. Rather, it is a country given to atavistic rhythms and quickly shifting moods; a country of short, brilliant summers and long winters of despair; a country where even the most sophisticated city dwellers live much the way their ancestors did on farms — isolated and trapped within their homes. Here, money and technology have wiped out poverty and war, yet have failed to lower the suicide rate or alleviate despair. 

Bergman made his first film in 1964 and his last in 2003. In between, he wrote books, directed plays and made more than 60 films that tell us a lot about him. But I love his films because they tell me much more about myself.