Blu-ray Review: Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema on the Criterion Collection

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema may be exhaustive, but with all the indelible beauty it contains, it's never exhausting.

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema“Man is an abyss,” German dramatist Georg Büchner once wrote, “and I turn giddy when I look down into it.” Ingmar Bergman included this quotation, a line from Büchner’s play Woyzeck, at the opening of his 1977 screenplay for The Serpent’s Egg, and it could just as well serve as an epigram for the legendary Swedish director’s entire body of work. Bergman’s films have a reputation—not entirely undeserved—for being somber, humorless, and relentlessly miserable, and yet even his bleakest work has a way of making one feel strangely exhilarated, buoyed by the beauty of the images, the playfulness of form, and, above all, the staggering intensity of feeling. There’s an almost childlike fascination with the human condition that runs throughout the whole of Bergman’s oeuvre, and it’s his stupendous and at times even naïve quest to access the fundamental mysteries of the human condition which lies at the very heart of his cinema.

Bergman’s work speaks to the viewer with remarkable clarity and forthrightness, creating an extraordinary sense of intimacy between his characters and his audience. And it’s this deeply human desire to connect which accounts for the quality of Bergman’s work that has been least recognized: its accessibility. That Bergman’s films exist not simply to be studied, but to be watched—even enjoyed!—is amply confirmed by the Criterion Collection’s definitive new boxset devoted to the director’s work. Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema doesn’t quite contain everything the Swedish master ever directed—a few early films and television works are missing—but it comes close. The 30-disc set includes 39 of Bergman’s features, a few of his rare shorts, numerous documentaries on his life and work, and a gorgeous 248-page book of photographs and essays.

As a consumer, the whole thing can seem rather daunting. So kudos to Criterion for grappling with how to invite a us into this massive body of work by boldly presenting the films not as a dull chronological retrospective, but rather in the spirit of a film festival, kicking things off with an “opening night” spotlighting one of Bergman’s most likable films, Smiles of a Summer Night, wrapping the set up with the filmmaker’s nostalgic masterpiece Fanny and Alexander, and featuring three “centerpiece” presentations of some of Bergman’s most acclaimed works along the way (a double feature of Scenes from a Marriage and its sequel Saraband, The Seventh Seal, and Persona).

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Smiles of a Summer Night, though written by Bergman during a bout of extreme depression, is an uncharacteristically light-hearted work for the filmmaker, a story where all of the characters’ problems can be solved simply by bedding the right mate. With its depiction of open relationships, sapphic undertones, and references to orgies, the film has the sophisticatedly raunchy vibe of a ’70s swingers party, a quality that undoubtably allowed it to resonate with international audiences at the time of its release. But the film is also studded with disarming moments of raw despair, such as Countess Charlotte’s (Margit Carlqvist) quivering rage as she repeatedly insists that she hates her husband. There’s a jaded, world-weary quality to the film’s view of relationships that reflects the pessimism of Bergman’s larger body of work.

Though Smiles of a Summer Night was one of Bergman’s first international successes, the frank sexuality and conflicted attitude toward marital relations on display throughout was evident in the filmmaker’s earlier work. To Joy, for example, made in 1950, features pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, and candid conversations about abortion. The film’s wrenching depiction of the clash between love and artistic ambition is clearly modeled on Bergman’s own personal struggle to balance his love life and his work. It presents marriage as a cruel and tumultuous battle of wills, anticipating the epic survey of domestic turmoil in Bergman’s 1973 miniseries Scenes from a Marriage. In contrast to the claustrophobic chamber drama of that film, however, To Joy is a comparatively expressionistic work, finding moments of visual and aural beauty in the midst of the characters’ suffering. The title may at first seem bitterly ironic, but in the end it’s appropriate, as the depressive violinist at the film’s center (Stig Olin) ultimately finds what eludes so many of Bergman’s characters, “a joy that lies beyond pain, beyond understanding.”

So much of Bergman’s greatest work, including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Cries and Whispers, is preoccupied with the search for meaning in a world without God. But perhaps no film depicts this theme so intensely as the second entry in Bergman’s “Silence of God” triptych, 1963’s Winter Light. A simple, unadorned study of a rural pastor’s (Gunnar Björnstrand) crisis of faith, the film finds Bergman wrestling deeply with the stultifying Lutheranism of his minister father. Shot in wintry grays by master cinematographer Sven Nykvist—who famously sat in a church watching the sunlight for an entire day to study its subtle shifts in effect—the film presents a cold, dour, joyless vision of a Christianity that offers many questions but no answers even to the ultimate human dilemma: Why go on living?

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One possible answer to that question is implicit in all of Bergman’s work: the power of human connection through art. Bergman was a poet of his own pain, but he did not suffer in silence. Rather, he gathered together friends and collaborators and made films, which he then shared with the world. And nowhere did Bergman address the issues of connection through cinema more directly than in his experimental meta-fiction masterpiece Persona.

Ostensibly a drama about the mysterious relationship between two women on an isolated island, Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), who’s been stricken silent, and Alma (Bibi Andersson), who never stops talking, Persona’s true protagonist, as critic Miriam Bale has suggested, may be the young boy who appears at the film’s beginning and end. This child, an avatar of the director himself—who, it should be noted, also appears briefly in an insert shot late in the film—seems to have conjured the entire film out of thin air. It might be tempting to write this all off as a manifestation of Bergman’s narcissism, but then one has to account for the vividness of Elisabet and Alma as people. Bergman may have conjured these characters up, and he may continuously call our attention to that fact, most famously in the mid-film rupture where the celluloid appears to catch in the projector and burn—but these women have a vivid, undeniable existence of their own, one that stands apart from the film’s formalistic tricks.

In other words, Elisabet and Alma are bigger than Bergman himself. And what’s so indelibly fascinating about Persona is that the film’s meta-fictional hocus pocus serves not to distance us from the characters, but to bring us closer to the mystery of their existence. Bergman spent the better part of his career wrestling with the incomprehensible torment of human existence in the face of a silent creator, but Persona finds the filmmaker playing God himself. For Bergman, making films was perhaps an attempt to understand his creator by embodying him. While it’s unclear if he ever did develop such a comprehension of God, unmistakable was his extraordinarily complex apprehension of his fellow human beings—their tortured psychology, their difficult relationships. Perhaps we will never understand the meaning of our own existence, Bergman’s films suggest, but through art we can at least discover the contours of our own suffering.

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Image/Sound

As might be expected in a boxset that contains no less than 39 feature films, there is a variance in audio and visual quality throughout Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema (some slight image shuddering and audio crackling in To Joy, for example). However, with several new restorations one can rest assured that Bergman’s films, some of which have never been released on Blu-ray before, are looking better than they ever have before on home video. The set provides a unique opportunity to luxuriate in the progression of the director’s imagery, from the high-key naturalism of his earlier works to the haunting, shadowy close-ups of his middle period through to the blazing use of color in his later films. One need only compare the stark contrast of The Seventh Seal’s black and white images (presented here in a brand-new 4K restoration) to the rich, detailed colors of Fanny and Alexander to understand both the diversity of Bergman’s images and the meticulous care with which they’ve been preserved.

Extras

One could spend days poring through the mountain of supplementary materials provided by Criterion. The set includes six audio commentaries, countless hours of interviews with Bergman and his collaborators, video essays, and a beautifully illustrated 248-page book featuring enlightening essays on each film by a diverse range of critics and scholars. While few of the extras here are new—Peter Cowie’s commentary on The Seventh Seal dates back to 1989, for example—they’re nevertheless hugely insightful into Bergman’s creative process. In fact, despite his dour, solitudinous reputation, Bergman was quite open to allowing people into his creative process, a point evidenced by the numerous behind-the-scenes documentaries including here on the director’s work, including feature-length films on the making of Winter Light, Autumn Sonata, and more. Some of these Bergman docs, such as Stig Björkman’s …But Film Is My Mistress and Marie Nyreröd’s Bergman Island, are even notable works in their own right.

Overall

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema may be exhaustive, but with all the indelible beauty it contains, it’s never exhausting.

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Score: 
 Cast: Inga Landgré, Marianne Löfgren, Birger Malmsten, Holger Löwenadler, Gertrud Fridh, Bengt Eklund, Nine‑Christine Jönsson, Birgit Tengroth, Stig Olin, Maj-Britt Nilsson, Victor Sjöström, Anita Björk, Jarl Kulle, Eva Dahlbeck, Gunnar Björnstrand, Harriet Andersson, Lars Ekborg, Åke Grönberg, Yvonne Lombard, Ulla Jacobsson, Margit Carlqvist, Max von Sydow, Inga Landgré, Nils Poppe, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson, Stig Järrel, Lars Passgård, Allan Edwall, Jörgen Lindström, Liv Ullmann, Sigge Fürst, Anders Ek, Erik Hell, Elliott Gould, Sheila Reid, Kari Sylwan, Jan Malmsjö, Josef Köstlinger, Irma Urrila, Håkan Hagegård, Elisabeth Erikson, David Carradine, Ingrid Bergman, Robert Atzorn, Christine Buchegger, Börje Ahlstedt, Pernilla Allwin, Ewa Fröling, Bertil Guve, Lena Olin  Director: Ingmar Bergman  Screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 4477 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1946 – 2003  Release Date: December 27, 2018  Buy: Video

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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