Ingmar Bergman

AP

WHEN he was filming “Winter Light”, in 1961, Ingmar Bergman made a tour of the churches of northern Sweden. He and his cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, would sit in the hard pews from 11 in the morning till two in the afternoon, watching the light change. In the Swedish winter, there was no sun. A dim grey illumination came from the clouds, casting no shadows. The subtleties of the shifting light entranced Mr Bergman, who decided that his whole film should be lit that way.

Strong sunlight, in contrast, filled his nightmares. A sudden lurid glare in his films—from a naked light, from an empty street—usually marked the entry into psychosis. That was why he never considered going to Hollywood to make movies, though by the 1950s his reputation as a film-maker was already impressive. He needed clouds, trees and net curtains veiling the light, softening it and making it move. He needed light in small increments: flaring and fading in a paraffin lamp, or dimming with extraordinary slowness on a face (as it dimmed on Liv Ullmann's face in “Persona”) until only a silhouette was left. From childhood, he had got up at six and noted the track of light on the wall opposite his window. After two months of darkness, a thread would reappear in January.

Lack of light was reinforced, for Mr Bergman, by the isolation of Swedish life: so few people scattered over a large country, in houses here and there in the forests and the fields where, round some dining table, decorous conversation hid the loneliness and tension that could not be expressed. In Mr Bergman's films, characters would often be silent, or scenes would unroll with no sound but the whimper of wind, the drip of water or, especially, the tick and chime of watches and clocks. He saw people as puppets, controlled by some pitiless force much as he, in boyhood, had controlled his own marionettes in his toy theatre, making Mr Punch jibber and squawk in nonsense-language. Life decayed towards “a state of absolute nothingness”, while his characters, clinging on, tried urgently and clumsily to communicate their feelings to each other.

He had been brought up with Lutheranism, a pastor's son subjected to sermons, beatings and high piety, and for all his protestations his films were full of it. His trilogy of the 1960s, “Through a Glass Darkly”, “Winter Light” and “The Silence”, were described by him as a “metaphysical reduction” in which God's absence was unmasked. Without God, he turned to self-examination. His characters saw themselves through windows and in mirrors, divided selves gazing on their darker aspects or their pasts. He let his camera rest unsparingly on faces until all masks dissolved, and the lips and the eyes seemed to express some unaffected truth.

Sex and wild strawberries

The man himself often lived up to his bleak dream-world: lean, intense, racked by stomach complaints, and with a special fondness for the rugged limestone island of Faro, off Sweden's east coast, where he built a low stone house on an empty sweep of rock. Though he adored film, and had done so ever since he had swapped half his tin soldiers for his big brother's magic lantern, film-making made him “bleed too much”. Eight hours of waiting might be rewarded, he once said, with ten or 12 minutes of real creative work. He demanded total immersion both of his actors and of himself, and complete control of both the shoot and the script. He was sparing both with budgets and with film, and compulsively private.

Lighter moments surfaced sometimes. His long, lesser-known career in theatre directing, in Gothenburg, Malmo and Stockholm, included comedies alongside his favourite Strindberg. Explosions of directorial frustration were followed by gales of laughter. Pretty women surrounded him, several of whom he married and two of whom (Ms Ullmann and Bibi Andersson) starred in “Persona”, in 1966, as different aspects of the same self. He delighted in female subtlety, slyness and fecundity. Summer idylls in the woods featured milk and wild strawberries, as well as al fresco sex, to show the sweetness and brevity of passing time.

On the edge, in the corners, darkness waited. Death loitered in many films—as a stranger, a crone, a ballet-master and, most memorably, as a cloaked and white-faced figure in “The Seventh Seal” of 1957, with whom the hero-knight plays a drawn-out game of chess. Mr Bergman admitted that death terrified him. And short of that he had “the demons” to contend with, anxiety, rage, regret and shame, which kept him company like “flocks of black birds”. Panic at his own dark aspects kept him alert and drove him on.

Critics wondered whether there was a general message in his films. Mr Bergman sometimes denied he had one. Yet he usually found a saving moment in the misery: a selfless communication, in word or gesture, between two human beings. At the end of “Wild Strawberries” the hero, an aged professor, is belatedly reconciled with his family and his past. As the scene was filmed, Mr Bergman noted, the old actor's face “shone with secretive light as if reflected from another reality”. That secretive light, or hidden love, was just what the director had been searching for.