Ten Films of Ingmar Bergman

My second Ingmar Bergman Friend arrived yesterday with a magnificent collection of stills and provided the excuse to reread my film notes and remember why I came to regard his work as providing the greatest accumulation of truth about relationships between parents and their children, between adults, about old age and facing the loss of self aware consciousness and questions about God, sin, redemption and resurrection. Mind you only a few of his films can be regarded as entertainment in the Hollywood sense of Cecil B De Mille or Alfred Hitchcock. The experience is more like going to see an analyst and indeed in the case of Scenes from a Marriage the leading Swedish marriage guidance worker contacted Bergman for advice. Going through a score of his films is like a prolonged interrogation before the Spanish Inquisition or what is supposed to happen on the day of judgement, My general advice is to experience his work sparingly.

Since discovering that Carletto Di San Giovanni had brought the work of major film makers to MySpace I have been challenged to remember more than the films which have remained in the top layers of my memory banks, erring on the side of caution, not having made notes of the film experienced or my reactions to them until the past decade. There are two Directors who for different reasons I know precisely which films I have seen and have not and remember through my notes not just what the films are about but something of my feelings and experiences which they aroused in me.
The first is a director whose work I have mixed feelings about, the Spaniard Almodovar because of my recent Spanish family ancestry and connection with the family living in Gibraltar since the 1880's after the retirement of my maternal great grandfather, having married a Spanish girl when posted to Gibraltar as an army Corporal and went on to serve in Malta, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mallaca and Penang before returning to Ireland for discharge as Royal Hospital Chelsea Pensioner(out payments) and deciding to settle at the end of the Peninsular,

The other Director was Ingmar Bergman where two years ago I wanted to re-experience one film, which I had seen as young man on leaving school, and doing so realised the importance of his work and went on to experience a score of his films over two years, the majority I had not seen before, and to make rough notes of my first impressions.

Despite being taken to the local cinema every Monday and Thursday and going to see current releases on some weekends and going for a number of years to the Saturday morning shows especially for young people, I did not see a foreign language film until sometime between 1953 and 1955 when I was part of a coach load from the St John Fisher School to the Odeon Marble Arch, along with Catholic schools from all over London, to see a film about the life of the previous Pope. There was no room in the main auditorium for about a dozen of us and we were taken into the manager

's viewing area behind a glass screen. Accompanying the main film was an Italian film starring the French actor Fernandel as Don Camillo, a priest working in a village in Northern Italy and based on the books of Giovanni Guareschi, a copy of an English Omnibus edition I have since 1955. The film caused a great frisson titter or two when a fly settled on a naked female breast.

My second foreign language film was in French. Shortly after leaving school I had joined a Catholic cycling club and one weekend it was suggested that we invite friends for a short run Meet when catholic cycle clubs from all over London came together. I brought along a friend who I knew from the Preparatory School and from church, and a first cousin, and one of the girl members brought along her sister, who I was much attracted to. I asked if her sister had a boyfriend and this led to my asking her out to the pictures. This first ever date nearly never happened as we both waited at bus stops at each of her road and eventually she came to where I was and we decided to still go to the cinema although we knew we would arrived after the first feature commenced. We went to see a double X film showing at the suggestion of the girl. One film was Diana Doors in Turn the Key Softly and the other a subtitled Bridget Bardot film. We were both only sixteen, and she in the sixth form and on walking her home I was invited in to meet the parents and the older sister and was grilled about my work and family circumstances. My mother also phoned to enquire where I was, as it had long passed the time I was expected back home.
My next experience was (1)Summer with Monika (1956), also at the Academy Cinema in Oxford Street, where I was to see La Dolce Vita and L'avventura with two different beautiful and remarkable young women half a decade later, but on this occasion I went on my own for my first experience of seeing a young naked woman, albeit on screen. I remember finding the film very sad and was sufficiently perceptive of life despite my personal inexperience to grasp the main points being made. Even after my visit to Sweden in 1963 and visit to the university town of Uppsala where Bergman was born I did not attempt to see his films on visits to London although I do remember seeing Summer with Monika on TV as well as the Seventh Seal and the Virgin Spring, and others although these I am not sure about. I also saw Fanny and Alexander in theatre.

Although it was not the earliest of his films I have since experienced I will begin with Summer with Monika because of the impact of its theme on me at the time and subsequently on my future work. I had gone out of curiosity and because of publicity but understood that this was also a film about the problems that arise if young people have adult relationships when they have little in common and have different aspirations for their future, and that such relationships can result in one or more children growing up without one or both biological parents, feeling unwanted and different from everyone else. At the time I was also impressed that they had gone off together for the summer on Swedish Islands, in a decade before flower power, hippies, communes and Woodstock .

I also identified myself with the comparatively innocent young man who had lost a parent as a child and was raised by his father with the help of well intentioned but protective aunt. Monika was an inappropriate relationship and doomed from the moment of their meeting. Later in work I came across many such situations where young people were ill equipped for a serious relationship, for marriage and parenthood, although my experience was often listening to stories of young mothers left holding the baby rather than those of young men. In this film it is the girl who leaves and he, mirroring his father 's experience, is left to bring up their child, although because of his industry, studying at night to become an engineer, there is hope along with his sadness at the loss of idealism and belief in future romantic love lasting.

I debated whether to include my further thoughts on the films according to the order in which they were first experienced, on their present standing or their subjects. Having since seen and read something of Bergman's life, I have decided to follow his film making chronology and begin with (2)Crisis made in 1946 featuring the foster daughter of a piano teacher who is brought up in an estuary town with a sense of freedom and independence. The attention of everyone is on the Midsummer's Ball. The piano teacher begs and borrows money to provide the foster daughter with a dress only to discover that the mother is coming back to the town after 18 years bringing a sophisticated dress for the occasion and then offers her daughter a job in the city in the beauty parlour which she owns and to share in her life and that of a relative who is something of a Gigolo with an unusual relationship with the mother before turning his attention to the daughter at the dance. The girl's head is turned by the attentions of her biological mother and the man and she abandons her foster mother and the town where young people are in conflict with their elders, so that traditional music is played at the Ball and this music is drowned by the young people who play and dance to jazz music nearby.

The foster mother becomes incurably ill and goes in search of her foster daughter only to find that mother and daughter put on a bold front about their situation and she has to return disappointed accepting that she will die alone. The worthless young man is a good talker and persuader, being a professional actor, and threatening to take his own life if he cannot get his way. The older woman taunts him in one such situation and this time the young man blows his own brains out. The girl returns to her home, and to the conventional local man who had worshipped her from afar.

From the time the film was set, to my own visit to Sweden and from what I have gathered since it appears many young people find the country town life in Sweden unexciting and failing to offer the challenges and opportunities they are now growing up with to expect from Global TV and the Internet in what one can call the post Abba society. There is also the extent of suicides in the country and the constant introspection brought on I suspect living in a land of so much water and mountains, woods and sense of space and isolation.

Two years and three films later he made (3)Port of Call 1948. This is also a film about young people, barely adults. The girl is from the port and we learn a lot about her family and the way her life developed as a consequence. Father is sailor, often absent, drinks and is violent and mother takes out her dissatisfaction with her life on her daughter who she rejects, resents and is openly hostile. The reaction to her home life is by going with the first man who takes an interest, She then meets a nice boy from a nice home but this relationship ends when the family find out about background. The film opens with the girl throwing herself into the sea and being fished out. Mother reports her daughter to the police and she is taken to an institution which leaves under licence to a Probation officer and to work in factory where the work is monotonous and the machines dangerous. The boss appears sympathetic to the girl, possibly because he is having a relationship with the probation officer but this does not protect the girl when the foreman takes a sexual interest.
Her release from this life is to go dancing where she meets an man older than herself who has been to sea for eight years and we know little more about him except he stays with a friend who gambles and he goes to the dance hall hoping to pick up a girl of easy virtue. They become a couple and go for a weekend together in a country hotel. Alas the girl is recognised by a former fellow inmate from the institution and this and most of Bergman 's work reflects my mantra that what we do and say lives on for eternity in some form within us and with those with whom we have interacted, Life is definitely not a rehearsal and if you do not get it right you can quickly find yourself in trouble.

This seems confirmed through the story of this film when a friend calls in a terrible state having had an illegal abortion and she dies as the ambulance is called, The man runs away leaving the girl to face the authorities and her mother. The girl is given a choice of revealing information about the abortionist or going back to the institution. The man is also in trouble becoming violent, breaking up the premises where he has been staying as a reaction to having run away and left the girl to deal with the repercussions of the death which neither in fact had anything to do with. The two devise a plan to run away taking passage from the port but at the last moment the man first and then girl decide they that wish to stop running and confront their problems proving to the authorities and community that they should be able to take their place among everyone else. All three films end with hope.

After another film, Prison, I did see the 1949 made (4) Three Strange Loves which concerns a journey back to Scandinavia by a couple through post world war Germany with the train besieged by hungry people passing through ravaged towns and cities. At one moment a train passes in the opposite direction and the wife sees a former lover with his wife and they have a conventional social chat devoid of all the emotions of their relationship and its ending.

The film has opened in a familiar Bergman landscape of water, boats and, countryside, the setting for a weekend away from town and city and a young woman is with a soldier only to find that he is married with three children as she informs him of her pregnancy and the relationship ends when he questions his paternity. She loses her child and although subsequently marrying she is haunted by her early experience until the meeting on the trains.
The relationship between the woman and her husband is tempestuous but they appear conjoined returning home on Midsummer 's day, traditionally twenty four hours of party. Perhaps life will work out for her better.

The woman becomes a widow and breaks with her doctor when he attempts to seduce her, pressurising that she will have a breakdown if she does not respond to his advances. The widow meets a former female school friend who attempts to seduce her and in a situation where I believe the friend had a previous relationship with her husband when he was alive. This was one of the films where I had great difficulty in understanding is overall purpose and intended impact and should see again.
In 1951 Bergman made Summer Interlude a film in which a woman looks back on a relationship with a boy who dies, and on the mistakes she has made in her life since. I was not able to see the film recently and cannot be certain that I saw it before.

(5) Waiting Women or Secrets of women 1952 is about four sisters and a sister in law who spend the summer with their children and waiting for the arrival of their partners from their work in a family business. The women talk for the first time about their relationships. The first person no longer experiences passion in her relationship and meeting with a former teenage friend she sets out to recapture past experience. However this only make the everyday more difficult to cope with and she tells her husband about what has happened and he goes off to kill himself, and is only talked out of doing so by his elder brother on the grounds that being alone is worse than being with someone who has been unfaithful. The two stay together although wounded by the experience.

The second wife lived in Paris prior to university and had a relationship with an American service man. She is young and adventurous, taking up a challenge an erotic night club which upsets the boyfriend who smashes the champagne she wins as the prize. She returns to the hotel/pension where she lives and is seduced by a guitar playing painter artist. They have romantic time in Momartre and along the River. The young man is then forced to return to his family as his father is dying and other family members threaten to cut off his income if he does not. She lets him go without telling him she is pregnant. She bears the child alone and gives it to adoption and she goes to university.

There is the story of a long standing couple celebrating 100 years of the family firm who become locked in a lift on their way back up to their apartment and decide to use the time telling the truth to each other about their lives, one has a mistress, not the first, and the other has had lovers to make up for his girls. They have a passionate moment and he promises to take her on future trips but soon they are back to where they were before.

The youngest woman in the party is having a relationship with the son of one of the brothers who want him to university and study commerce and go into the family business. The girl threatens to kill herself if he does this and they decide to run away to Paris and onto Italy where he has a friend who they will be able to stay with when their money runs out. Without knowing, the plan is found out but it is agreed that they should not be stopped and allowed to go off believing that their action was forbidden, returning after their summer together and learning to cope with what happens as it works out in practice.

Summer with Monika was his thirteenth film made in 1953.

The following year, 1954 (6) Lessons in Love, or A lesson in Love, billed as light hearted comedy of human behaviour unusual for Bergman and the story is told in flashbacks and involves one man who marries the intended wife of his best friend. The film is notable for the one line that when men gain sexual experience they are regarded as Jack the lad but when a woman does likewise she is regarded as whore.
I also believe I have seen Smiles on a Summer Night 1955, a film about switching partners and which brought him to international attention and has been the subject of various other work before and after, including Desperate Housewives. This was the year when I left school to go to work in local government.

Two years later he made what many regard as his most important film (7) The Seventh Seal. A knight returns from the battles of the Crusades questioning his motivation and faith. Her finds part of his homeland ravaged by plague and he meets death who he challenges for a reprieve in a game of chess. On his way back to his estate, and to his wife, he encounters a small band of strolling players, a couple with a child who are shown happy with their life and good parents. The husband is devout in his faith and sees the Virgin Mary with her child. This family appear blessed.

The third adult member of the troupe has an affair with the wife of the village blacksmith and the villages then turn on the devout Christian who is rescued by the knight 's squire. The couple offer their simple hospitality to the knight, wild strawberries and milk, and this touches the knight and has a bearing on the outcome of the story. They encounter a young girl who is to be burnt at the stake as a witch. Critics argue that the plague represents an evil force sweeping people away before their natural time if they do not live their lives more appropriately and this is borne out as death takes away the errant player. The knight devises a plan to lose the game of chess in a deal which will enable him to return to his wife and the others of his community to face death together, but which will leave the young couple escaping the same fate. However the knight, his wife and his people find the true faith and are saved from hell and damnation. I saw this film in theatre and at last once before the DVD but it is still the one I would not select as representing the work of Ingmar to take on the dessert island or place in my top 100 films.

This will have to be his next film (8) Wild Strawberries 1957 The film affected me greatly and I have the DVD. The film focuses on the night before the day a Professor of Medicine is to be honoured for fifty years of work. That night he experiences a dream which reveals his death and he is able to stand outside of the experience and observe as well feeling the emotions of the situation, something which is part of the human condition, but experienced more by some than others.

Instead of travelling by train/plane he decides to go by car, making detours, giving lifts and re-examing aspects of his life when he was happy and speculating on what might have been and this includes going back to the house of a family and to a patch of woodland with wild strawberries.

He visits his old and lonely mother who comments about living longer than her children and not seeing her grand children and great grand children. The is a mixture of joy and sadness at this meeting knowing you are likely never to see each other again. On the journey made with his daughter in law they encounter others who provide opportunity to debate the question: Can God exist in the world of science?

This is a film about the possibility and nature of resurrection, the need and possibility of absolution, reparation and redemption.

During the trip he stops for petrol and is recognised by the garage owner, Max Von Sydow, and his wife, from the time when he worked as a local doctor in the area and they refuse payment because of his service to them and the area. This leads him to wonder if he made the right choice to leave for professional advancement. As with all Bergman films what happens in relation to other characters is also important and they give a lift to an adult couple whose relationship is to have significance in a subsequent film and to students who are able to see his life more objectively than his own son. There was so much in this film which I was able to identify with, assessing one's life in an object way, concerned about legacy and the imminence of death in a way not previously experienced in that it remains ever present.

When Bergman was working wholly in the Theatre during the first eight years of his adult life and living a bohemian form of existence with Bibi Anderson in a small flat provided by the theatre in Helsingborg, the towns people invited them into the their homes for meals and once a week they would have free cakes and chocolate with whipped cream at the local pastry shop. They were invited to local castles to read and act and this is represented as a wonderful time which he looked back on with affection. This contrasted with what happened when he move to Malmo with the people keeping their distance. He uses this experience in his next film made in1958 (9) The Magician.

The film is about a troupe of players and Max Von Sydow as the mute Magician and his Androgynous assistant and spokesperson played by the actress Ingrid Thulin. The company includes his aunt, a 200 year old witch figure selling dubious love potions but who has some supernatural powers.

On their way through a dark and frightening forest the troupe encounter a dying actor who they take to the nearest town for burial. They are asked to do a private performance for the Consul (Mayor) and other civic heads including a Health official and the chief of police before they are allowed to perform for the public given the advance reports of their work They are believed to be tricksters and towards the end of the film we learn that they have been imprisoned for two months after displeasing their previous host.

Bergman admits that the only time he deliberately drew on real life people for his characters was with the figure of the Health official which is based on the partner of Ingrid Thulin who wanted the actress to give up films and the theatre. Bergman had invited the man to Malmo where they were playing and regarded him as arrogant. It is said that they became friends in later life. While the troupe are accommodated at the Mayor 's castle, they are required to eat in the downstairs kitchen while the Mayor and his friend eat upstairs and plan to unmask the Magician as a fraud.

Bergman alleges that he was only able to get the film produced by presenting it as an erotic comedy centring on the male assistant, played by Thulin being his lover. The Health official becomes an enemy when he finds that his wife has invited the Magician to her room. The Police Chief also becomes an enemy when he finds that his wife has revealed aspects of their married life, his secret behaviour and annoying habits.

When the magician is then killed by a strong man servant for his trickery, the Consul and the town officials are enthusiastic about cutting up the body to find out if the man had supernatural powers. The Magician proves this by surviving, having switched his own body for that of the actor they found dying in the forest, Their escape is delayed because their coachman decides to run off with the kitchen maid, (Bergman 's wife at the time), while an assistant decides to run off with the cook housekeeper. At this point other police arrive because although they had displeased their previous host he had promised to arrange a Royal Command Performance and this has now been agreed and they are escorted to the Palace where it is take place.

I have seen the Academy awarded best foreign language film, (10) The Virgin Spring 1960, at least on TV but do not think it was seen in theatre given that 1960 was the year of full time non violent direct action activity in relation to the potential use of weapons of mass destruction and protest about Apartheid in South Africa and elsewhere, and poverty in the world in general, and spending six months as a voluntary guest of Her Majesty. The film is about violence, revenge and seeking redemption, set in Medieval Sweden. One of two sisters representing the light is Christian and virgin daughter of a prosperous Christian, while his other (foster) sister, representing the dark side, is pregnant and worships the ancient Norse deity Odin. The kind daughter offers to share a meal with two herdsmen and their young brother as she makes he way to bring candles to the their church having been left by the other sister who should have travelled the full journey with her. The girl is raped by the two adult herdsman and killed and then they ask for shelter at the home of her parents and attempt to sell her clothing to the mother. The father in a rage kills all three including the younger innocent brother. The father while saying he does not understand God decides to build a church in the ground where she lays and on lifting her body a Spring appears and her sister washes herself in the water. One can see why this film attracted the approval of Hollywood and middle America in the midst of the cold war between free market capitalism and state authoritarian communism and where taking revenge even if there was "collateral damage" is regarded as Ok for states and for individuals.

The films of Ingmar Bergman part two

In this second part I come to what I regard as the most brilliant, challenging and moving I have experienced in sixty years of experiencing film. This is the work of Ingmar Bergman between 1961 and 2003.

(11) Through a glass darkly 1961 is a moving and frightening portrayal of schizophrenia and disintegration. There are four characters in two families on one of Bergman's islands. A practical man who appears to earn his living from fishing living with his young wife who had retreated into childhood and returned from what has been a long period of hospital treatment. The film begins with the return to the island of the girl's father who unable to cope with illness ran away to another country to complete the writing of a book. He is an intellectual who tries to write the truth as he sees it, writing about the experiences which interest him. To mark his return, his daughter and his son who live in the adjacent house perform a play.

At one point the son talks of being an artist, he has written fifteen plays. He wants to be a pure artist, the original concept artist, the writer who only thinks his writing and the painter who only visualizes his work. But for me I need to produce something which has physicality and which realises the original concept.

Father, son and daughter are not able to communicate although responsibility appears to be apportioned to their mother, his wife who appears to have taken her own life.
As with Autumn Sonata which he created later, some things are better left unsaid, or in this instance unread, as the daughter reads he father's diary in which he states that her illness is incurable and that the psychiatrist has warned that a relapse is likely. She also reads that her father wants to record her disintegration, such is his apparent detachment from the reality of her experience.

The son in law criticises the father when he finds out what has happened and was written. The film also centres on the son and his fear that he is going the same way as his sister, but he is able to communicate something of his fear to the extent that the father realises that he must give priority to his son and the film ends on a more positive note as the son is thrilled by having a conversation with his father. Bergman is able to depict the heightened self awareness of the illness and for me the most memorable and haunting moment is when the daughter explains that there is nothing worse than to be aware of yourself and your illness without being able to prevent the relapse and return to institutional care. Bergman brilliant uses the camera and sound to depict the heightened self awareness and general awareness of individuals in such predicaments.

In (12) The Silence 1963, (the year of my visit to Sweden and Uppsala), two sisters are travelling by train somewhere hot in central Europe on their way home, with a young boy who becomes the focus of attention as he watches a train of tanks pass by in the build up for war. The sisters are forced to get off the train when one becomes ill with a consumptive illness. She cries out, I do not want to die here among strangers, but also I do not want to die. The mother is restless in the heat and the boy is used to being on his own. The hotel is the best in town, vast with grand rooms and a service waiter on each floor.
The ill and dying sister is an artist, a writer and a lover of words confesses that she hated the physical aspects of marriage, but also find being alone unbearable. The mother goes out leaving her son in the care of her sister and the hotel and visits a variety theatre where a troupe staying at the hotel are on stage but her attention is attracted by a couple making love in the auditorium and she goes back to a café where a waiter had taken an interest in her body and they become lovers although they do not speak the same language. This scene shocked audiences in the 1960's although I once knew a young women who had a similar experience after meeting someone in the desert in central Europe. The boy and the waiter communicate, a lonely man showing photos of his wife, his mother and tries to teach the boy some words in the language of the country. There is also communication between the boy and his aunt before she dies and the mother and son return to the life back at home both changed.

After watching the film I learn it is the third in a trilogy and that while there is no discussion about religion and spiritual beliefs it is about the two competing sides of human nature, suggesting that the two sisters each represent to sides of human nature, similar to the sisters in the Virgin Spring. The film is talked about by serious critics alongside Last year in Marianbad and L'avventura but made some money because of the controversial sexual scenes.

Bergman is alleged to have said it a film about hell on earth, his hell.

I first attempted to experience (13) Persona in 2006 but it was not until September 2007 that I was sent a copy which did not freeze midway. It is arguably one the great Bergman films. Bergman is the master of turning people in side out exposing their souls as well as their psyche, and featured his two great actresses Bibi Anderson and Liv Ulmann with Ingrid Bergman the third. Bergman argued that making the film saved his life. The film begins with flashing images which merit being slowed down and considered.

The story appears straightforward Bibi Anderson is a nurse charged with caring for Liv Ulmann an actor who has become mute during a performance and they go together to her doctor's summer house on the coast. The nurse does all the talking, about herself, and then about the patient, whose silence gets under her skin and it is the nurse who has a breakdown and ends up attacking the patient. I am immediately reminded of the psychiatrist in charge of a large institution which he admired on one hand because of the resourcefulness of everyone within in bounds but where also he admitted that his main was the staff - At least the patient understand that they are ill.

The breakdown is precipitated by the nurse finding out that the patient has been writing letters reporting what she has been saying and commenting on her work as a nurse and relationship towards her.

Before I received any social work training the course requirements demanded that I spent a summer in a practical social work placement and spent two to three months with the Manchester Family service Unit working primarily in Salford where as it happens I knew the Member of Parliament and future Chairman of the Labour Party who I had met on a bus the an Aldermaston CND march in 1961 prior to the Holy Loch demonstration. I was asked to visit a family with multiple problems in another part of the city who was famed for having been on television, living in two council houses knocked together because of the size of her family and sitting at one end of an enlarged sitting room where she held court and I listened for close on two hours while she went through all the social workers and social worker students who had been to see her and told me of her judgements about them. I concluded that the visit was a glorious test which hoped I passed learning that whatever is written and whatever we think of patients/clients, they have just as strong a view of their social workers, doctors, and officialdom, in general. Look into the abyss and the abyss looks into you.

I also experienced (14) The Hour of the Wolf released in 1968. I liked this film which also has Max Von Sydow as the husband of Liv Ulmann, a poor but known artist who spends the summer in a cottage on an island except for a castle with an aristocratic owner and guests.

The film is story of the man's disappearance told by his wife talking direct to camera, and making reference to her husband's diary which she has found. Although heavily pregnant she has remained on the island. The man did not like company and during their relationship of seven years he would spend his day walking and painting alone. He liked his wife to administer to his needs and say little. Liv poses the question which many in long relationships face. Is it better to yield to the merging of identities in a relationship, sharing each other's thoughts and nightmares, or better to live more individualistically and been less complicit. On one hand for the marriage to work and last, a bond is required which will survive their separateness, the temptations of others, and the nightmares of life. But the vary closeness can lead to a feeling of imprisonment and desire to break loose.

The husband attempts to show some drawings to his wife but she turns away nor are we the audience shown, The husband insists that they stay up all night until dawn unable to sleep afraid of the darkness. He becomes fixated on the nature and length of time of just one minute.

The wife encounters a woman who could be 216 years of age or 76 who tells her to read his secret diary and stop him destroying the sketches. Is the woman real or a figment? From the diary we learn of three encounters. He is taken back to the Castle home where one beautiful woman seduces him and a psychoanalyst who turns souls inside out tells him to slow down. The couple go to the castle for a meal and they sense they are part of some game in which while the hosts and other say they like the work of the artist they talk of him as if the was not there. They mention his earlier relationship with a woman who was married and caused notoriety.

The aristocrat then invites the artist to a party, giving him a gun saying he should kill his wife as his former lover will be at the party waiting for him. He goes to the party and he believes that not only the former lover and the aristocratic have become lovers but have found the ability to walk on walls an ceilings he knows he is going to have to watch while the two make love. The former lover is in fact dead but comes alive only to make love to him.

When he tells his wife of this experience she tries to explain that he has only been away for a matter of minute. Earlier when talking of the past relationship he describes this as a snake bite. Out the following day he sees a boy watching him and getting closer and he bludgeons the boy to death after being bit by him.

When he goes off in the night for the last time and she goes after him she meets the aristocrat. After waiting throughout the autumn and as Winter approaches she leaves the island to have her baby, How much of what we have been watching is mental and emotional madness communicated between the couple mutually experienced as real? How much has been real?

I also liked (15) Shame also released in 1968 in a post world war northern country and a couple, Max Von Sydow and Liv Ulmann are having relationship problems after their orchestra is disbanded. They become caught up in the middle of a civil war. When one side takes over there is no regard for conventions and the local leader uses his position to buy the wife for his pleasure paying the husband substantial money. When the other side gain power the man is offered his life for the money and the wife pleads to her husband to hand it over. The husband has been criticised by his wife for his sensitivity, being a coward and for failing to give her a child, and he denies knowledge of the money and this leads to the destruction of their farm. He attempts to kill the former local leader and then he does execute a military absconder who has held them hostage. He proposes to use the money for he and his wife to leave the war zone on the island but this is an illusion. Both sides ask about their political affiliations and they genuinely declare their indifference which is taken to refer to the neutrality of Sweden in the World War. The film is photographed in black and white and attempts to show that war brings out the worst and that there is never neutrality when the home becomes the battlefield. The wife is wanting her husband to grow up and sees a child as the future. The husband has a more negative but realistic approach to life, and the film shows that whatever the personality and experience if cornered people can behave in ways very different to the normal persona.

(16) Cries and Whispers 1973 is about two sisters who have married and gone their separate ways. One sister had a prior affair with a local doctor and when her husband is away she engineers a visit and gets him to say overnight with her. Her husband although outwardly successful is anxious to kill himself but does not have the courage to do so.

The second sister is married to a diplomat and is yet another wife who hates physical intimacy and mutilates her own body. These two return to the family home where their other sister has a disease similar to tuberculosis consumption and is cared for by a loyal servant with whom she has a close relationship which the other sisters resent. Their sister dies and one of the visiting sisters, played by Liv Ulmann attempts to bridge the gulf between the other, but runs away when she realises the potential implications involved.

The local preacher arrives and calls on the departed sister to intercede for him as her faith was stronger than his own. The family reward the maid by giving her only a month to find somewhere else and the choice of a possession This is Bergman showing that the outwards appearance of people and their relationships is very different from the reality and even the departed sister is shown not to have the saintly figure believed by the vicar.

(17) Scenes from a marriage(1973) is the second film I acquired on DVD because it speaks with such truth and clarity about adult relationships. The film was originally a TV series of six fifty minute parts and had such an impact that a leading marriage counsellor approached Bergman for advice. The work was transformed into a stage play of two hours and then in 1983 the present film lasting 2 hours 40 minutes. The film open as photographs are taken of a couple for an article about the ideal marriage. They have a dinner party with close friends who are on the verge of divorce after twenty years of marriage. The wife, played by Liv Ulmann finds that she is pregnant and is persuaded to have an abortion which she regrets.

In the second scene we learn that the wife, Marianne, is a lawyer specialising in divorce who has a client wanting to end her marriage after twenty years. When Marianne returns home she and her husband discuss their sex life and Marianne admits she has lost interest in physical intimacy with her husband. In the third scene the husband visits his wife at the summer home to reveal that he has been having an affair and is leaving his wife. She contacts her closest friends who reveals they were aware of the situation.

In the fourth episode the couple meet again when the husband has become dissatisfied with his new relationship. The couple spend the night together although Marianne is in a new relationship. The couple meet again prior to signing the divorce papers and this time she seduces her husband just to prove that she is no longer emotionally involved, but he does not want the marriage to end and they have a physical fight and agree to sign the papers. In the last scene they come together again although both are married to others. They spend another night and reach an understanding that although there is a strong bond it is not enough and they part, perhaps never to meet again. The facts of the story as set out fail to communicate the depth and the sensitivity of the interactions between the two. I was reminded of the play and the film Whose Afraid of Virginia Wolf and electric exchanges between the characters played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor but in Scenes, the exchanges, and the truth are relentless and deeper.

(18) Saraband 2003 is the sequel thirty years later and also stars Liv Ulmann as Marianne, thirty years in real time after Scenes and separating finally from her first husband Johan, looks back at her life, pouring over photographs following the loss of her second husband who disappeared in his plane. She comes across the photo of Johan, remembers their good times and wonders what has become of him, knowing that his second marriage also failed.

She visits him living alone in the countryside with his books and only a woman from village coming to attend to him. He was a generation older than Marianne when they married so now he is significantly into old age while she is at the beginning. They look back at their relationship and admits that a priest had told him that for marriage to work there had to be a good relationship and unshakeable eroticism. Marianne admits that her problems related to her parents and the insistence of her father that she become a lawyer suppressing her wish to become an actor and that the sense of curiosity and adventure had been take from her only to be found in her subsequent relationship.

The sub plot of the film concerns the son of the first husband who had become a conductor of an orchestra and the over protective father of a daughter who he is tutoring in her career as a concert cellist. Relations between father and son have never been good and both admit to dislike bordering on hate, but grandfather does offer to help him gain a position for his grand daughter which meets with the approval of her father. However the grand daughter wants to get away from her father and chooses to study with a female friend in Germany and live with people of her own age.

Marianne has also had relationship problems with her two daughters, one who has married a lawyer and lives in Australia while lives in an institution, Marianne and her former husband and have one more night together and Bergman is brilliant shows the nature of what a an adult relationship can be in old age. However there is to be no old age happy ending for this couple and the film ends with Marianne making the effort to establish a relationship with her institutionalised daughter.

The films are important because they cover the full circle of life, how our adult relationships are formed and affected by the relationship with our parents and our childhood and how in turn the accumulation of issues affects grand children and subsequent generations. At one point the son of the first husband expresses the pain of knowing that he is like his father but this was only one of a number of moving and sometimes harrowing moments in these two films.

This brings me back to the chronology after Scenes and what for me is the most moving and terrifying of all his films as it strips the psyche and the soul to its core. (19) Autumn Sonata(1978) is about the relationship between a mother, a professional musician, played by Ingrid Bergman, and her daughter, played by another outstanding actress Liv Ulman, and who have become distant and never communicate about their earlier relationship and the cause of the gulf in understanding. The mother makes the journey to see her daughter, and her husband, because she is failing as a concert pianist. wracked with physical pain and is losing her best friend through incurable illness.

The mother has in fact two daughters, one who physically as well as emotionally disabled and was placed in an institution but removed by her sister, unknown to the mother. The able bodied daughter has lost a child of her own and her husband, a country vicar is aware that he can no long communicate with his wife at a level which will help her, and him. The daughter practices piano in the hope of one day impressing her mother and has written two books about her experience and at one point the husband reads a passage about her search for identity and the hope that through a relationship she will come to understand herself, On finding that her other daughter is also in the household, mother comments that she never had a taste for people who are unaware of their motives. There is a succession of statements made between mother daughter- daughter mother which are at times brutal" You tied me down because you needed my love"," You damaged me for life as you are damaged", "I wanted to love you but I was afraid of your demands"., " Is the daughter's unhappiness mother's triumph, " I spent my life accumulating experience", "But I was only a child."

The nature of the exchanges between daughter and her mother drives the mother away, leaving her to come to terms with her life as it has become. The daughter writes in the hope of undoing the consequences of speaking out but it is too late. I believe Bergman was making the point, whether intentional or not, that it sometimes better to live with uncertainty, with a relationship as it has become however fragile and however difficult and painful especially when we encounter others whose relationships appear so much better, than press the truth and go beyond the point of no return, yet for others for their own survival and development they may need to confront their demons whatever the consequences for existing relationships.

(20) The life of the Marionettes 1980 has a colourful prologue and is a reflection on the murder of a young girl by the patient of psychiatrist who has discussed his urge to kill his wife in graphic terms. The psychiatrist believes what is said to him and warns the man's wife. The film switches back and forth so that we learn something of the young man and his relationship with his mother, with his wife and the wife's relationship with a homosexual friend.
Bergman explains that he has been haunted by situations where couples are united but also try to break from what they have come to regard as bondage, We have met this couple before as they are from the opening scene of Scenes from a marriage. The film was made in Germany and Bergman believed that although the sophisticated German people had always indulged in exploring sexuality and doing so in a public way it had become crude commercial exhibitionism losing its subtly. It evident he has been influenced by Brecht. What affected me was the conduct of the psychiatrist and his part this tragedy with horrific its conclusion.

(21) Fanny and Alexander 1982 also won the Oscar for best foreign language film and three other Academy awards and was the last of his films I saw in theatre, on TV and more recently on DVD. The theatre version lasts 188 minutes and the TV edition 312 mins.

Alexander and his sister live as part of a middle to upper class family in Uppsala where their parents who part of the theatrical company at a theatre owned by his mother. Every tear there is a Christmas Pageant at the theatre which is the social event of the community after which there is a grand dinner party as the family home where there is much eating, drinking and sharing of presents as well as goings on associated with such a family.

The first crucial moment in the film is when we see the relationship between the creative, imaginative and insightful father and his son, although unaware of how this relationship is going to affect the future of Alexander and his sister.

The boys father then dies and the widow quickly succumbs top the advances of the Bishop. In order to make this important component of the film plausible it is necessary for Bergman to paint the Bishop into more of a monster than he really is and the widow to be more of a victim than she is. In truth she sacrifices the future welfare of her children for her own gratifications and needs and refuses to understand the situation she is placing herself and her children. The Bishop is a fundamentalist Christian no different from your average fundamentalist Jew or Muslim with exacting standards and who believes that his faith should govern every aspect of his life as diocesan leader and of his family. This has three components which will set Bishop in conflict with his step son. Fundamental Christian, Jews and Muslims believe that their duty is to serve a human form of interventionist God and where what happens during earthly life is not only secondary but subordinate. If you have such faith everything else is clear if you have not you are lost and everything is justified if its enables you to be saved. Secondly in order to establish the required state of grace it is fundamental to deny earthly pleasures and earthly wealth and possessions, especially as so many in the world are starving, diseased and without the basic of living. The Bishop of all people should set the example and its being unchristian, unjewish and unMuslim when church leaders behave and indulge to the contrary. Thirdly it is the duty of the fundamentalist to protect others from temptation and this means limiting their access to those who do not have the same beliefs and standards. It is also the duty of the religious teacher and the good Muslim, Jewish and Christian parent to ensure that their children are brought up in the true faith.

It is understandable that Alexander, full of his father's spirit, individuality and liberating creativity should hate the Bishop's way of life and rebel at every opportunity especially as he has his father spirit to lead him, and that in turn the Bishop should lock horn in a determined effort to break the boy's will. The boy has dreams -visions, in which he wills the death of the Bishop. Fortunately someone outside their immediate situation realises the danger this put's Alexander in and fortunately the mother, although pregnant comes to recognise the mistake she has made, Arrangements are made for the children to escape and then for the mother to leave, and she drugs the man to do so. A fire breaks out and the Bishop is burnt to death and although they have escaped and are able to go back to their former life with all its privileges, comforts and freedoms. Alexander becomes haunted by the knowledge that what he wished for and imagined has come to pass. The reflects the panoply of Bergman's beliefs and interests.

Ingmar Bergmann was in my judgement the most important filmmaker there has been, because of his consistency in making films in imaginative ways which function as stories, and some likely to be accepted as popular entertainments, and as vehicles for dealing with the fundamental issues of life. When he creates films about human relationship, parents and children, hetro sexual adults and relationships within nuclear and extended families his work is almost faultless and at times both painful and breath taking. When he moves on to religious issues, the spiritual and supernatural his films reflects his own contradictions and uncertainties. When he creates work about the behaviour of human beings he enlightens, but on other matters he has interesting points of view but they are no more important that that.