Remembering Ingmar Bergman

I must comment on Ingmar Bergman too. I feel I own a piece of him , even if the plots in his "art" films were sometimes dark and deep and full of symbolism and his characters' motivations were obscure and often perverse.When we were young and impressionable his movies made us feel grown up and intellectual, and so what if we couldn't always figure out what was going on in them, we knew we weren't in Hollywood anymore.

Now Ingmar is dead and everywhere you look today online, on TV, and in the papers, Woody Allen and everyone else is remembering him. On an international scale he is being recognized for the greatness of his achievements. .Only the death of a reigning monarch or national ruler could surpass in volume all the reports, stories, reminiscences, pictures, and praise for the Swedish maker of films who left us at the age of 88.

Out there in the blogosphere thousands are debating the contributions Bergman made to film as an art--some are denigrating his emphasis on the dark side of human nature. But Bergman didn't make only dark and deeply symbolic movies. Could anyone else have brought off his beautiful version of The Magic Flute--all color and lightness of spirit? Mozart would have loved it. Most often recalled today has been The Virgin Spring.

I was struck by how many commented on their first encounter with a Bergman film, recalling where they saw it (for the most part in little ratty art houses back in the sixties). For us to see a Bergman picture back in the sixties meant schlepping across town to the grubby little art cinema on Cuyahoga Falls.

Netflilx makes available many of Bergman's best films including Torment, a picture made so early in his career that he only wrote the screen play. Somebody else directed. In it are the themes that will follow in many of his later pictures: tormented characters caught up in traps of good vs. evil, symbolism, class struggle, young vs. old, revenge. The plot is simple. Virginal high school boy on the verge of graduation falls for a woman in town who is not as good as she should be, only to find that his malicious schoolmaster has already ensnared the girl , setting her up as his mistress. Since the teacher has the power to make or break the student (exam results, etc.) the boy finds himself out of his depth. Tragedy ensues. Today it's remembered for turning unknown Mai Zetterling into a star. In her older years she too became a director.

I read today that Bergman had no delusions about life after death. In the final analysis his life satisfied him and he said he was content with that.

Tomorrow we'll get out the tape of Fanny and Alexander and play it once again.
For more on Bergman go to Wikipedia