SMORGASBORD: An Ingmar Bergman retrospective.

"Like Wagner and Proust, Bergman suffers woefully from his admirers. When I pick up Jörn Donner’s “The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman” (1964) and find “Summer Interlude” described as “above all a profound intellectual analysis,” or read in Frank Gado’s “The Passion of Ingmar Bergman” (1986) that Bergman’s heroine, in the same film, is “not an extrusion from his throbbing node of Oedipal complexity but a fully developed, independent being,” I ask myself: Is it possible to see so much in a film that you end up not seeing the film? Bergman is not a metaphysician, or an analyst; he chose celluloid, not paper, on which to inscribe his obsessions, and what is most neurotic in him is not the quality of his worrying, or even the throbbing of his node, but the intensity of his wish to register the world, plus a small throng of its inhabitants, through the force of physical impact.
A test case would be “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), the first of a trilogy. (“Winter Light” and “The Silence” came two years later.) Again it stars Harriet Andersson, but the free spirit of Monika has faded from view. She now plays a schizophrenic, living with her husband, brother, father, and, worst of all, herself, on a barren island. There is no avoiding the pains undergone in this picture, and, to be fair to Frank Gado, his exhaustive Freudian reading of Bergman seems far from groundless. Not only is the schizophrenic named Karin, after the director’s mother, but so is the Knight’s wife in “The Seventh Seal” (1957), the girl who is raped and murdered by medieval hoodlums in “The Virgin Spring” (1960), the pastor’s wife in “Winter Light,” and, even more troubling, the sister in “Cries and Whispers” (1973) who mutilates herself sexually with a shard of glass. Nor are we allowed to forget that Bergman was the child of a minister; together with his other films of the period, “Through a Glass Darkly” submits God (often absent, never nonexistent) to lament and imprecation and, sometimes, to a spitting rage. Nevertheless, this is not a chunk of dramatized theology, and it is never more wrenching than when deprived of words. Wait for the end of a dying day, as Karin’s long-suffering husband turns down the oil lamp beside their bed and the camera moves unhurriedly to the window, the focus shifting from the lace that edges the curtains to the bewildering light of the sky beyond. Nothing the script has to tell us about hope or despair has a hundredth of the power of that glimmering.
That is something to keep hold of as you surrender to Bergman’s art. Like Samuel Beckett, he is never as abstruse as you have feared. Both men are earthed in particular places, and both reach unflinchingly back into the scenes of their childhood and youth. Bergman, it is true, guides us through infernal regions that are closed to most filmmakers, and he has been much mocked in the attempt, but let nobody tell you that he does not share—with Truffaut, with Fellini, with Welles—the sharp, regretful taste of everyday experience. See the fire smoke rising and trembling through the roof of the house in “The Virgin Spring”; give yourself up to the gusty, sun-brightened picnic of strawberries and milk in “The Seventh Seal”; feel the mother splash water on her sleep-warmed neck and breasts in “The Silence”; and listen to the words of Pablo, the servant of Don Juan, who is summoned from the underworld in “The Devil’s Eye,” Bergman’s little-known comedy of 1960. Pablo seduces the wife of a minister, and then, sorrowful and sated, falling to his knees, he addresses her thus:

First, I’ll finish off that half-dug vegetable patch I saw. Then I’ll sit and let the rain fall on me. I shall feel wonderfully cool. And I’ll breakfast on one of those sour apples down by the gate. After that, I shall go back to Hell."