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.