Two facts define the phenomenon of Ingmar Bergman: the twenty-one films he has made since 1945 (he wrote fourteen himself, of which eleven were original screenplays), and the striking popularity he has commanded since 1957 in the United States. Bergman makes “art” films, a term used by movie-goers and critics alike more or less to set apart those films which emphasize the texture of things from those which emphasize plot; and Bergman may well be the first art-film director whose name has the public resonance of a film star’s, and whose work is not only approved by the large general movie audience, but by people who ordinarily are not interested in films at all.

Bergman is a skilled craftsman who fashions his pictures with great care. Of the two films he made in 1957, the one which tells the story of an old man looking over his life, Wild Strawberries, is woven through with surrealistic dream-memories; while the other, the story of three expectant mothers in a hospital, Brink of Life, is told with straightforward naturalism. But such a careful fit of form to story has not always equalled excellence of course, and the quality of the pictures has varied no less than the style.

What has remained consistent in these films, however, is Bergman’s stern vision. His characters do not face economic privation or repressive social conditions or extraordinary psychic maladjustments, yet many of them long for death, or attempt or actually commit suicide. Their lives seem enervating, their world is unrelievedly harsh, and the business of living from day to day is a terrifying one. Bergman sees individual isolation as the bedrock experience of every human being.

In his last five films (beginning with The Seventh Seal), Bergman has deliberately sought to “universalize” this vision. Where his films once portrayed men, now they portray Man; where they once observed, now they argue. The change might be called a shift in genres—from the “documentary” to the “parable.” His characters continue to smart under the isolation imposed by life. Their struggle is still the struggle to connect. But in these later films, the context is no longer a given time and a given place, but, so to speak, the whole of man’s history.

Three Strange Loves was the first of Bergman’s films to be shown in the United States. It offers with clinical exactitude a single day (clearly meant to be typical) in an exhausting and abnormally painful marriage; both husband and wife work almost continuously on each other’s emotions and with abrasive effects. For the most part, the film has the fascination of a case study, though like most case studies it does not seem to speak with much relevance about any but the extremely disordered. But I want to discuss it here because, although it was made in 1949, Three Strange Loves contains practically all of the themes with which Bergman has been so obsessively concerned throughout his career, and its characters and even some of its physical types reappear in his films again and again.

For a relatively minor but intriguing example: Bergman has a clear, if not entirely understandable, repulsion for mustached men; he seems to take these small growths of hair to be a sign of the most unwholesome vanity. To see a mustache in a Bergman film is to know that the man wearing it will not be lightly treated. In Three Strange Loves, the bearer in question (a secondary character whose upper lip, attitudes, and some of whose remarks are reproduced almost exactly by one of the main characters in Smiles of a Summer Night) is a married man with whom the wife of the film’s central couple had had an adolescent affair several years before her own marriage. In the course of the affair, she had become pregnant, but her lover, out of selfishness and cowardice, had forced her to abort the baby. As a consequence, she can no longer have children, which is one of the reasons she is very much like a spiteful child herself.

In Bergman’s world, birth is the holy of holies; it is the act of human creativity and love. Three Strange Loves never asks whether this particular girl might have made a good mother; or whether the man, despite his selfishness, might not have been justified in forcing the abortion. She has been deprived of the largest meaning and purpose her life can have—this is the crucial fact and the unforgivable outrage.

Second to Bergman’s celebration of giving birth is his celebration of art. The wife had been a ballerina during her adolescence, and except for the early stages of her affair, these days as a dancer were the only other time she had ever been happy. But now she has hurt her leg. We are never told whether the injury is real or imaginary, physical or mental; it does not matter. All that matters is that she can no longer dance. Without her art she is doubly sterile.

Her husband is far from being sympathetic to her condition. A bookkeeper with a bookkeeper’s habits, he counts pennies and hugs order; and he treats his wife with a disdainful lack of seriousness, as one might treat an incorrigible child. At night, however, he dreams of putting a stop to her “endless chattering” by rising from his bed to smash her head in. And precisely at this moment, the tone of Three Strange Loves is suddenly transformed; we are no longer observing, but learning; we are at Bergman’s moment of truth. Wakened by his dream, the husband clutches his wife anxiously. He explains—as perhaps he does every night—that the hell they share, their life together, is far better than the hell of being alone.

Such a pronouncement, of course, hardly penetrates the knot of need and desire that holds the marriage in Three Strange Loves together; and as a statement about life, it seems neither true nor false, only rhetorical. But it is Bergman’s answer, the essential salvation offered by all his films, and there is no doubt that he intends it most seriously. With the death of another minor character (the husband’s former mistress who was left with no one), the film underscores the consequences of being alone; the woman drowns herself.

Thematically, only a small turn of the screw separates this film from The Seventh Seal—which Bergman made in 1956, seven years later. The “togetherness” that he sees here sustaining life is replaced in The Seventh Seal by love. But the essential meaning of the two films is exactly the same. Just as the solitary woman in Three Strange Loves must die because she is solitary, so, in The Seventh Seal, unloving men and women must die because they do not love.

_____________

Bergman directed ten films between Three Strange Loves and The Seventh Seal and among them are his two best pictures, The Naked Night (1953) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). The Naked Night contains the first example of the charlatan-artists who have since come to play so large a role in Bergman’s films. Here it is a ringmaster (and owner) of a circus, in The Seventh Seal a juggler, in The Magician a mesmerist: all of them belong to groups of traveling entertainers. With these men, Bergman has jumped from the world of high art—the world of ballerinas, say—down to the world of “popular culture,” where success depends upon the crowd, and the fake often merges with the real. The ringmaster, the juggler, and the mesmerist are all half charlatans, but they are artists as well, representing, obviously enough, something of Bergman himself. “I am really a conjurer,” he writes in the introduction to the recent collection of four of his screenplays:¹ “I have worked it out that if I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness. . . . I use an apparatus . . . with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional manner. . . . I am either an imposter or, when the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer.”

A grotesque and stunning fantasy-flashback—a microcosm of the entire film—that looks, quite literally, like a Mack Sennet two-reel comedy, occurs soon after The Naked Night begins. On a beach lined with soldiers who sport the uniforms and the florid mustaches of the Keystone Cops, the wife of the circus clown performs a strip tease. The sun is blazing, and the film itself looks bleached and faded. The only sound one hears is raucous circus music blaring in the background. The soldiers are laughing, but the laughter is noiseless, and the shooting of their cannons can only be seen. The clown comes for his wife, but he still wears the makeup and the costume of his trade; and dressed thus he carries her away, nude, over his shoulder. The entire seashore seems to roar with the laughter of the soldiers and with the sound of their cannons—as if the whole horrifying episode had simply been an ordinary circus act.

_____________

One achievement of The Naked Night is that the rest of the film does not seem anti-climactic. The owner of the circus has returned to the small town in which, some years before, he had left his wife and child. He has grown tired of the circus life, it has exhausted him, and he longs to be taken back into the home he once deserted. In the course of the single day that the film spans, he is lectured to by a theater director on the relative, unequal merits of their different “arts”; he is rejected by his wife at the very moment his mistress is being unfaithful; he is viciously beaten—during the evening performance of the circus, before the towns-people—by the man who seduced his mistress; and he fails, after all his humiliations, in an attempt to kill himself. He does not have the will or the courage to commit suicide; or, perhaps, he is not as defeated as he imagines. The wagons set out for the next town; he falls in silently behind them, and his mistress timidly comes to walk by his side.

The Naked Night is a film at once sad and bawdy and cruel. Bergman has put it together with a relaxed, almost lush ease that is untypical of his work. He does not seem ridden by his thesis, and can take the time just to watch the exaggerated, hip-swaying strut of the circus owner’s mistress. The work she does in the circus—she is its classic femme fatale, the bareback rider—as well as the supposed artistry of her seducer—he is an extremely melodramatic stage actor—represent the satirical counterpoint of the film. And when the film is done, it has offered no precepts for living. Good men and bad alike, wise and foolish, all live within the same world, suffer the same agonies, and win or lose their individual battles according to no single rule. Yet if they simply stay alive, each of them will earn a prize: the same tattered dignity.

Smiles of a Summer Night, on the other hand, is a charming and witty film, done with grace and verve; and it allows Bergman’s eye for the pompous and self-deceiving to focus on eight men and women whom he sets in motion exchanging partners. More important here, though, is the fact that Smiles is the last of the three comedies Bergman made after The Naked Night, and it immediately preceded the first of his “parables,” The Seventh Seal. It is from these comedies that Bergman learned how to create the characters which people his most recent films.

_____________

The trick of the comedies lies in having characters who are as articulate as intellectuals, but whose self-knowledge happens to be false. The male protagonists of Smiles, for example, are always inflating the most characteristic trait of their respective professions into whole ways of life: the lawyer his Dignity, the officer-aristocrat Honor, the minister Righteousness. They invariably justify emotional reactions with professionally appropriate epigrams. “I can tolerate my wife’s infidelity,” the officer cries to his wife the morning after he has found his mistress with another man, “but if anyone touches my mistress, I become a tiger.” (He is the mustached man first seen in Three Strange Loves.) Later he spies his wife going off with someone else, and he wildly expounds a slightly modified principle to his mistress: “I can tolerate someone dallying with my mistress, but if anyone touches my wife, then I become a tiger.” When self-knowledge no longer is false—and so a form of self-delusion—but is, quite simply, accurate, then we enter the world of Bergman’s parables.

The subject of these parables is nothing less than the good life. In The Seventh Seal, an anguished knight has just returned from ten years of fighting the Crusades, and he is presented from the beginning of the film as a kind of everyman. “My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning. I feel no bitterness or self-reproach because the lives of most people are very much like this.” He longs now for certitude. “Is it so cruelly inconceivable,” he asks, “to grasp God with the senses?” The knight’s squire, who has traveled these ten years beside him, has no such desire; he is a simpler man, a proto-positivist in the grip of “scientific” cynicism. “I could have given you an herb to purge you of your worries about eternity.” And when Death comes for him, the squire’s last bravado pronouncement is, indeed, an exaltation of materialism. “Feel the immense triumph of this last minute when you can still roll your eyes and move your toes.” But Death also takes the knight. The differences between the two men, it turns out, were less significant than their similarities: their lovelessness, their detachment, their rationalism.

Death by-passes only one group in the film, a family of traveling players: Joseph, a juggler, his wife, Mary, and their young son, Michael—who Joseph hopes will some day perform “the one impossible trick”: “to make one of the balls stand absolutely still in the air.” These three are, obviously, the Holy Family; they have both love and art; and they do not reason about life but experience it with spirit and enjoyment. They embody Bergman’s alternative to the knight’s futility, the same alternative offered by other of his parables.

Thus, in Wild Strawberries (which Bergman made in 1957, a year after The Seventh Seal), the main character, Isak Borg, by choosing to detach himself from his fellow men and commit himself to science, experiences a life-in-death—until he is transformed by love. And so the mesmerist in The Magician (made a year later), through the love of his wife and his own devotion to art, finally triumphs. All three films end with parallel scenes: their victorious heroes bathed in the bright warmth of a peaceful sun.

Visually, The Seventh Seal is a tour de force; nothing else by Bergman—except, perhaps, the early flashback in The Naked Night—can compare with it. From the first shot—of a gull hanging motionless against a sky densely covered with clouds, both the sky and the bird seeming to hover over some doomed and wasted land—it is at once stunning and graceful to watch. And in such scenes as the one showing a group of religious flagellants suffering the agonies of their penitence, or that of a young girl who is convinced she has seen the devil and waits to be burned at the stake, or the one of a man dying of the plague, the film can be brutally compelling.

But if the best thing about The Seventh Seal is its visual quality, the worst thing in Wild Strawberries are the scenes which are meant to be the most exciting visually, the surrealistic dream fantasies of Isak Borg. In Wild Strawberries, it is Borg, the main character, who represents the film’s strength. Borg is an egoist, cold and unforgiving, withdrawn and intellectually condescending. The following is said by his wife—in the only scene in which she appears—after she has committed adultery.

Now I will go home and tell this to Isak and I know exactly what he’ll say: Poor little girl, how I pity you. As if he were God himself. And then I’ll cry and say: Do you really feel pity for me? and he’ll say: I feel infinitely sorry for you. . . . And then he’ll say: You shouldn’t ask forgiveness from me. . . . And then he’ll suddenly be very tender and I’ll yell at him that he’s not really sane and that such hypocritical nobility is sickening. . . . And then I’ll say that it’s his fault that I am the way I am, and then he’ll look very sad and will say that he’s to blame.

It can hardly be accidental—for a writer-director as deliberate and as conscious as Bergman—that Borg’s initials should be the same as his own; beginning with a demonic psychiatrist in Three Strange Loves, all of his films contain at least one coldly aloof egoist. Borg is their apotheosis, the kind of man Bergman does indeed seem to know best.

Compared with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, The Magician is badly paced: the camera lingers painstakingly on backgrounds, scenes last longer, the photography is more ostentatious. (In The Virgin Spring, made in 1959, the pace becomes even slower.) But after a murky opening of forests, dying actors, castles, witches, and so forth, The Magician begins to turn comic, and ends with an almost slapstick reversal that marvelously turns the film on its head, as if Bergman at some point had decided that it should really be a joke on the audience. The mesmerist, now destitute, humiliated before his troupe, his audience, and his wife, suddenly receives a request to play a command performance; the rain pummeling his coach stops; and in the happiest of happy endings, this ostensible charlatan becomes the artist who is finally triumphant.

_____________

Whatever their individual merits, these films clearly and deliberately mean to illuminate basics: the life-giving creativity of art and love; the death of feeling and soul which must follow in their absence; earthly salvation and earthly hell. Here Bergman’s answers, far from being divulged in a last-minute rhetorical flourish as in his earlier work, provide, in effect, the plot of the films; they determine the characters and control all their behavior. The perspective of these films is turned not so much on the actions of particular people as on the good life itself—of the Holy Family, that is, or, in Wild Strawberries, of Borg’s pregnant daughter-in-law, or, in The Magician, of the mesmerist and his wife.

The difficulty remains that it is a very arbitrarily vindicated “good life.” The bad guys die in The Seventh Seal according to a logic that is no stronger—for all of Bergman’s intellectuality—than the logic which controls the outcome of an ordinary Western. Those who love, live. But it is only Bergman’s fiat that saves them; they do not earn it themselves. So, similarly, it is through Bergman’s manipulation that success comes to the mesmerist; and it is by his will that Borg’s character changes—permanently, we are given to understand—at the end of Wild Strawberries.

Bergman’s vision is not only arbitrary; there is something fundamentally unreal about it. The answer Bergman gives to the questions he himself poses is, in effect, the Holy Family—which is made up of a husband who is a man-child, a juggler-artist, an innocent with second sight; a wife who is a composite mother-lover-protector shouldering all the burdens of everyday living; and a baby son who never cries. But these are dream characters; no one would take them to be anything else. They are fictions of the mind, and everything that Bergman asks is simply avoided in the answer they represent. The knight has watched a girl burn at the stake; she believes she has seen the devil. What will the Holy Family say to this? “It is always better when one is two,” Mary tells the knight. She may be right, but it makes little difference in a world that burns witches. And in such a world—the one most of us in fact live in—the sudden rush of feeling that finally wells up in Isak Borg would simply ebb away, and in not a very long time he would be left the cruel, cold man Wild Strawberries tells us he always was; in such a world the mesmerist of The Magician most probably would be destitute a month after his command performance. The Naked Night could deal with this world, but not these later films. The vision of life which created them is graced by a remarkable pictorial talent, and by a perceptive comic imagination; but these are not enough to sustain it. And in the end it depends on too many impossible tricks to be believable.

_____________

II

There is, of course, a kind of magic about Bergman’s films. Whatever his camera sees, it beautifies. The unclassical and rough faces of ordinary men and women become lovely and strong; even flagellants take on a cruel visual beauty. And just as the camera finds loveliness in the ordinary, so the films find ultimate meaning in the most typical of feelings. The sufferings of Bergman’s characters are not meant to be at all extraordinary; they are the result, almost, of breathing. “The lives of most people are very much like this,” the knight explains.

Even so, one might have supposed that Bergman’s determined intellectuality would have cut him off from any large audience. But audiences seem to respond to the aura of tough-mindedness that the intellectuality of the dialogue gives to the films and respond as well to the quality of seriousness that it gives to Bergman’s vision. And perhaps the ambiguity of many of Bergman’s symbols only adds to a general impression of “deepness.”

What is more important in understanding the success of these films in America, however, is the popularity of their main theme: love as the be-all and end-all. Any number of recent popular successes have driven their ailing characters into the soothing toils of love—and to love-in-the-family—there to solve the problems of business, of personal identity, even of religious belief. To know precisely the reason why may be tantamount to understanding much of American experience. Is it that Americans are a people who cannot handle conflict? (Might love—and pragmatism—be two ways of avoiding it?) Or is it that love is so thoroughly democratic, standing as it does beyond no man’s means? Whatever the reason, it seems clear that the popularity accorded those who love love and the family is now being accorded to Bergman, who brings to this love of love—a hope really for everything that is better in life—all the distinction and status art films can confer.

Bergman’s “love” is particularly intriguing because it is so bitterly anti-male and anti-sex. The juggler lives when other men die, and the mesmerist holds a greater truth than that of his denigrators; yet they are both children, both innocents: both would be lost without the protection and love of their wives. (The mesmerist does not even earn his command performance through his own talents; typically enough in Bergman, the wife of the mesmerist had once impressed a member of the royal court sufficiently to win this favor from him.) Ever since The Naked Night, art in Bergman has become the province of men, but only because they are capable of the intolerable egotism that art demands—as women are not. When men are not children (that is to say, not artists) but men in fact (that is to say, self-sufficient), they can cause only misery. Despite all the talk of sex in Bergman’s films, despite all the lovely women in them, they do not depict a single joyous sexual encounter, nor one that has any happy consequences. Birth is holy to Bergman, but the business of impregnation is not—his sexual double standard in a phrase.

How much or how little this attitude has to do with Bergman’s popularity is difficult to say. The demand in the films for something like a community of love is certainly more explicit. Yet the main source of Bergman’s popularity, I think, lies neither in his “male-baiting” nor in his idea of salvation, but in the type of life and the kind of person he portrays.

_____________

Behavior for Bergman is forged in the heat of inner needs. A scene in Wild Strawberries puts this very plainly. Borg’s daughter-in-law has just told her husband, Evald, that she is pregnant. He demands that she choose between him and the child: “This life disgusts me and I don’t think that I need a responsibility which will force me to exist another day longer than I want to.” She tells him he is “wrong.” Evald’s reply does more than defend his own statement; it explains the behavior of Bergman’s characters from Three Strange Loves on: “There is nothing which can be called right or wrong. One functions according to one’s needs; you can read that in an elementary-school textbook.” In his introduction to Four Screenplays, Bergman lists the various influences upon his work—Strindberg, the middle-class home against which he rebelled, individual film directors; he concludes with the mention of one thinker. “Philosophically, there is a book which was a tremendous experience for me: Eiono Kaila’s Psychology of the Personality. His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs—negative and positive—was shattering to me, but terribly true. And I build on this ground.”

One consequence of this belief is the total absence in Bergman’s films of any social order. His characters live in some eternal place, not in particular societies. In Three Strange Loves, which takes place soon after the Second World War, the young couple see a great crowd of hungry children imploring some train passengers for food. But the children are Bergman’s creation, not the war’s, and they are meant to symbolize the couple’s barren love, nothing else. Or to see how little the knight of The Seventh Seal is a product of medieval society, one need only note how effortlessly his torment is taken to represent the torment of modern man. Here, as in all of his films, Bergman has created individuals who live in a social vacuum. They are affected and conditioned only by inner needs which are both universal and eternal, and exactly the same in the Middle Ages as in the 20th century. I have said that Bergman’s films contain neither the socially oppressed nor the politically revolutionary; more important, they do not contain either the possibility for such people or even any need of them. They offer a world, instead, of men and women who might do whatever they want, but because of a terrible restlessness and a profound confusion do not know what to do. This is the world David Riesman has defined by its crowds, and J. K. Galbraith by its affluence, and it is to the actual inhabitants of this world, I would argue, that Bergman speaks.

The college-educated, the younger members of the middle class, the men and women who know more Freud than they do Marx, who often feel themselves isolated and who find their behavior charged by emotions which are not fully explicable and yet cannot be put to rest: Bergman is their film-maker. In the characters who dominate his films—the knight, Borg, the mesmerist, all lost and driven—he has caught a profound self-image of this audience. The tremulous questions his characters ask are the questions that lie un-articulated within it, just as the eventual goal they achieve expresses something of this audience’s largest hopes. Bergman is popular in this country because he speaks to and for those well-behaved Americans, both guilty and hostile, who try to hold in their emotions and ride with their enervation as politely and as quietly as they can, and who find in the images of a triumphant still moment in the sun, a great longing of their provisional, curiously disquieted, unfulfilled lives.

_____________

* * *

I want to add a final observation. To admirers as well as critics, Bergman’s name has become a red flag of sorts. For example, one critic has compared Wild Strawberries to Remembrance of Things Past, and while other Bergman admirers do not resort to so specific a comparison, they agree with its import: that Bergman’s presence signifies the indisputable arrival of the film as an “art form.” At the same time, Bergman has also been put down as a guilt-ridden Protestant with a bag of unoriginal movie tricks, and friends of this judgment, though they usually avoid its nastiness, agree with its implication: that film still has a long way to go. These and similar pronouncements are all addressed to the old argument of whether or not film—which is to say, really, movies in general—can be taken seriously and not merely as a sociological bellwether. But is this question—to which all discussions of Bergman refer in one way or another—a meaningful one? I doubt if it is. The truth seems to be rather that Bergman’s popularity and the widespread discussion of his films are only the most obvious signs of a larger and more general phenomenon: the increasing relevance and force films have in portraying the way we live today. The important question concerning film now is not whether it speaks significantly but, indeed, whether, as a medium, it does not speak more significantly than fiction. But this is a question that arises out of the work of American film-makers—such as Irving Kershner and Nicholas Ray—as much as it arises out of the work of Bergman. And to it, then, an analysis of Bergman alone provides no answer.

_____________

¹ Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman: Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician. Translated by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner (Simon and Schuster, 330 pp., $6.00).