How to mourn the passing of greatest film artist of our time

A.J. Goldmann

On Monday morning, the world mourned the passing of its greatest living filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman. His death comes as less of a tragedy and more of a shock, a jarring reminder of the frailty of human existence. Bergman outlived virtually every other cinema great of his generation – most notably, Federico Fellini (who died in 1993) and Akira Kurosawa (who died in 1998). And unlike those directors, Bergman seemed to be working constantly up until near the end. His last film, “Saraband” – a sequel-of-sorts to Scenes from a Marriage - was screened at the 2004 New York Film Festival.

Bergman also granted numerous interviews in his last years. In these, he projected a wizened and robust personality that showed no sign of letting up. For a while, it just seemed to me that Bergman would hang on for the next decade or so. Because of Bergman’s steady activity and ubiquitous interview presence, his death seems very sudden and unreal. There will never be another Bergman Film. The world has lost one of its greatest visionaries. But he left us a legacy of nearly 50 films. Together, they constitute a rich portrait of the human comedy every bit as persuasive and artful as Shakespeare, Dickens and Henry James.

Though much of Bergman has made it onto DVD- largely thanks to the Criterion Collection – there are still several titles that have yet to surface, notably The Magician, Face to Face, After the Rehearsal and From the Lives of the Marionettes. Last night, I held a screening of The Virgin Spring – Bergman’s first Foreign-Film Oscar – and invited a couple of friends over. I thought it best to celebrate his life and work, rather than mourn. Immerse yourself in Bergman’s confident and tragic-comic world. Discover or rediscover the poetry of his filmmaking. It will be more than apparent that no grave will ever be able to fully contain him.

Here are some viewing suggestions:

Early Bergman – Eclipse Series no. 1

Some months back, the Criterion Collection debuted a new line of DVDs. The Eclipse Series showcases lesser-known works by major directors, unadorned by the special features that have become Criterion’s hallmark. For their first set, they elected five early Ingmar Bergman films.

The earliest addition to the set is 1944’s Torment, directed by Alf Sjöberg (best known for his 1951 version of Miss Julie), to which Bergman contributed an original screenplay, based loosely on his own hellish schoolboy experiences. This first dip into movies also provided Bergman an unlikely directing debut: he unexpectedly shot the film’s final scenes himself, after being requested to alter the bleak ending he had originally written.

Bergman’s proper directorial debut, Crisis (1946), is also the most overtly melodramatic tearjerker in the collection. This story of a country girl dragged from her foster mother by an extravagant aunt (who turns out to be the woman who birthed her) suffers from stilted narration and overly theatrical dialogue. As seen often in Bergman’s other works, characters soliloquize about life rather eloquently. At this stage in his career, though, Bergman hasn’t yet found a way to successfully integrate such raw psychological content into a narrative film.

Port of Call (1948) was Bergman’s first collaboration with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer. Fischer would remain Bergman’s cinematographer throughout the 1950s and go on to photograph Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal. He brings a gritty, Rossellini-eque sensibility to this dark and sexually frank love story.

It is somewhat ironic that Port of Call, written by Olle Lansberg, is the most striking work in the box set as the only film that Bergman didn’t author alone. Perhaps at this early stage in his career, he benefited from the remove that directing somebody else’s screenplay allowed him. Of the films included in the set, it is the least theatrical. Bergman employs distancing techniques, such as multiple (sometimes confusing) narratives told in flashback, to present this story of a disintegrating marriage. The opening sequence is remarkable for its stillness, and points the way to his later forays into quiet desperation (see The Silence and Cries and Whispers).

The final film in the collection, To Joy (1949), stars Stig Olin (the irascible and charming star of Crisis) as a second-rate violinist unable to accept his own mediocrity. It features an incredibly mobile and fluid camera (courtesy, again, of Fischer) and is remarkable for how Bergman uses music-a crucial element in many of his later films.

Winter Light / the Silence / Through a Glass Darkly – Criterion Collection

The filming of the Trilogy marked a new era in Bergman’s career, when the director moved away from the expressionism of films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries and evolved a paired-down, more theatrical and minimalist film art. Keeping the films’ more subdued character in mind, it is perhaps appropriate that Criterion has resisted the urge to load this box set with thousands of special features. Film historian Peter Cowie (who provided wonderful and insightful commentary for Criterion’s releases of Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal) introduces each film with a 10-minute discussion of the film’s symbolism and how Bergman’s evolving sensibilities mark both the content and style of the Trilogy, as well as his later films. Brief as these video introductions are, they are highly informative and serve as suitable replacement for garrulous audio commentaries.

The Magic Flute – The Criterion Collection

Though Bergman was famed for his opera productions (notably his staging of The Rake’s Progess), he only made one opera-movie in his career, 1954’s “The Magic Flute.”
Bergman frames his Magic Flute as a theatrical performance playing to a live audience. The production he recreates on a movie set is meant to evoke the original production of 1791 at the Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna. The film ushers us onto the stage and into the opera, cutting between the audience and the quaint production and gradually leading us deeper and deeper into the opera.
While we are given a proscenium arch, his film feels far from stagy. Slowly, the action moves further and further backstage until the stage has become the world. Bergman uses arresting close-ups and profile shots of his singer-actors, often training the camera on characters who react rather than act (The Queen of the Night aria is a terrifying example of both devices).
There is a fair amount of spoken dialogue in Mozart’s Singspiel, which Bergman makes his singer-actors whisper in a way that both slows things down and reminds of film’s power to capturing subtle human psychology. That Bergman marries this potential to opera’s searing emotionalism is part of what makes his Magic Flute one of the finest of all Film-Operas.

Fanny and Alexander – Criterion Collection

Though Bergman is often associated with Sturm und Drang explorations of existential despair and marital discord, it would be limiting to view Bergman as a purely sinister filmmaker. Made in 1982 and intended to be his swan song, Fanny and Alexander is the director’s most optimistic and humanistic film. It also ranks among his most visually lavish and dramatically rich. At once epic and intimate, the film recounts a year in the life of an aristocratic theatrical family living in early 20th-century Sweden. Through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander, the audience follows the family through their trials and triumphs, witnessing a dizzying spectrum of human experience which includes love, death, suffering, the supernatural, and the transcendent power of art.

Criterion’s beautiful five-disc box set more than does justice to what is arguably Bergman’s greatest achievement. It contains restored transfers of the standard three-hour theatrical version and, for the first time on American video, the uncut five-hour version Bergman made for Swedish television.

There will never be another. A grateful world bids farewell to you. Thanks Ingmar, for sharing your vision with us.

I was hoping to blog about the Kirov’s production of Der Ring des Nibelungen while the cycle was still underway, yet it is only now, after the twilight of the gods last night that I have the strength and courage to offer my reflections on the 16-hour epic that entirely dominated my week and made me fairly unpopular with my friends.

Supremely desirous to see this – my first complete – Ring, yet unable to afford a proper subscription, I purchased a pair of standing room tickets on Monday morning to each of this week’s performances. I then did my utmost to sweet-talk various friends into braving the gargantuan operas on their feet. For even my most cultured friends, Wagner’s a hard sell even while sitting down. Nonetheless, I managed to find a date to three quarters of the cycle (Siegfried was universally unappealing to my friends).

Before I begin appraising the individual performances, allow me a few general remarks about the atmosphere around the cycle, to properly set the reader in the thick of things.

I had been told of genuine fanatics who come to the cycle dressed up in mythological Teutonic garb, wielding spears and the like. What I did, however, manage to observe, left my curiosity somewhat unfulfilled: a woman who wore a plastic Viking helmet to every performance; a tall, elegant woman in her 50s who – I hazard a guess here – was dressed as the World Ash Tree, with a black cocktail dress and a headpiece with branches and golden leaves; a heavyset woman with CDs as earring (what was she supposed to be? The Solti Ring?).

Both cycles were SOLD OUT, and mostly by those who had subscribed to the full cycle, which meant that you saw a lot of familiar faces by the time Götterdämmerung rolled around.

This presentation of the Ring was concurrent with three other events at Lincoln Center. The first was a raunchy Kabuki play, “Hokaibo,” which is still playing at Avery Fisher Hall. On their way to the Met, Wagnerians, Wagnerites and neophytes passed by small booths manned by Asian women in kimonos, where Japanese trinkets were sold, and travel information dispensed. While this made for an odd little detour on the way to the opera, the other events punctuated the evenings in surprising – though not always welcome – ways.

The first was Midsummer Night Swing, the nightly outdoor dance party in back of the fountain. As I walked out onto the Met balcony during intermission, I was greeting by raucous mambo, salsa and Brazilian music. The effect of having Wagner’s “total artwork” interrupted by infectious dance music was sometimes refreshing, sometimes irritating. I’m certain that Wagner would have not approved.

The second was an outdoor multi-channel video instillation of slow motion dancing projected on the New York State Theater (home to both the New York City Ballet and New York City Opera). The aptly-names instillation, “Slow Dancing,” greeted the weary operagoer on his way out of the Met. The silently suspended dancers made for an effective counterpoint to the hours of fiery musical bombast that had come before.

While the cycles had been completed subscribed, there was ample opportunity to score a reasonably priced ticket directly before curtain, from scalpers that loitered in front of the Met. Apparently, there had been cases of ticket fraud and other such scams. Still, the scalpers I encountered were having such rotten luck that one simply handed me a Family Circle Ticket ($65) to Siegfried free of charge.

The Met recently installed flat-screen monitors throughout the lobby that simulcast the evening’s performance. Tourists and other curious specimens loitered nearby the ushers, their eyes glued to the TV screens.

Excitement over the production was most palpable before Monday night’s presentation of “Das Rheingold,” the cycle’s prologue. Roughly half the length of the subsequent operas, Rheingold is performed without intermission (there is literally not a single break in the score). Though I hadn’t thought of it beforehand, I realized during the Rhinemaiden’s scene that I’d need to be on my feet the whole evening. Thusly, the tamest and most manageable – from the audience’s perspective - slice of the Ring, became for me (and my date) the most demanding and arduous. At least there was to be no danger of either of us dozing off.

I’ve often felt that the highest concentration of people who truly care about opera sit in the family circle or buy standing room. These are the sections where the audience rarely thins-out in the course of the evening (of course, people do leave in order to scout out better seats). It isn’t uncommon to see parterre boxes empty by the second or third acts. The frugal opera connoisseurs however, those who attend out of ardor rather than a sense of entitlement, are the medium’s truest patrons.

That said, there were few, if any, walkouts during Rheingold, which, incidentally, was the only performance that had a reasonable 8pm starting time.

As I walked towards the orchestra level, I glanced at the souvenir table. Among the various Ring recordings, opera glasses and libretti, I saw copies of a recent book “Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth” (which, incidentally, I wrote about not too long ago for the Forward). Does the publisher press the book on every house where Wagner’s playing? What a bizarre bit of marketing.

Stay tuned for my digests on the individual performances.