Ingmar Bergman, the melancholy Swede who died Monday at the age of 89, is easy to mock in our irony-drenched age. His metaphysical themes: Playing chess with death? C'mon. And his tortured characters, reflective of his own self-confessed demons, don't make for casual viewing. Yes, he probably took himself, and life, a tad too seriously.
But Bergman was a rite of passage for the art-house generation, those college kids who came of cinema age in the '50s and '60s. Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa, Antonioni: Strange as it seems now, when a knowledge of Tarantino passes for film culture credibility, the international giants were once deemed hip.
Today, Bergman is no longer hip. He's just timeless. The magic and mastery of the medium that entranced the art-house kids remain palpable to anyone lucky enough to discover him today for the very first time.
I still remember my first time.
I walked into a repertory house (remember those?) in the early '90s to check out Persona (1966), about which I knew nothing other than that I was supposed to see it. Eager to sponge up a drop of the canon, I sat down to do my duty.
I didn't know what I was in for. Eighty-three minutes later, I left the theater with my brain rearranged, my sense of time and space completely disoriented. From the eerie opening montage laden with Christian symbolism to the last shots, which slyly remind us we've been watching a film all along, I felt as if I was in the hands of a mischievous conjurer.
The most famous, perfectly composed shot in this chamber drama of identity combat and transference shows the faces of a nurse (Bibi Andersson) and her patient, a mute actress (Liv Ullmann), at a bisecting angle. The image suggests the merging, or exchanging, of personalities. But for me, the film's "Oh, no, you didn't" moment comes when the intensity of emotion between the two characters appears to burn a hole in the screen. Reality, or the illusion thereof, has been ruptured. Like all magicians of the movies, Bergman broke the rules and bent the medium to his own whims. He turned the act of making movies into a character in itself.
That emotional intensity – captured by a revolving troupe that included Ms. Andersson, Ms. Ullmann, Gunnar Björnstrand, Erland Josephson and Max Von Sydow – was a Bergman hallmark, even if it didn't always burn a hole in the screen. And the filmmaker always found a visual corollary to the passion. In a later classic, the devastating, Oscar-winning Cries & Whispers (1972), the transitions between scenes are rendered in searing fades to white. Sometimes, a fade to black just won't do.
Such raw emotion and high style are precisely what make Bergman such a ripe target for lampoon. Even Woody Allen, the most public of all filmmaking Bergman worshippers, turned the elegiac Wild Strawberries into a road-movie farce with Deconstructing Harry. Then there's the uproarious short tribute The Dove, which re-imagines The Seventh Seal's deathly chess game as a badminton match.
But the film buff who dismisses Bergman as a relic does so at his own risk. Today, when pain and earnestness are so often cut with a joke or a wink, his deeply personal glimpses of spiritual doubt and torment are timelier than ever. Even if they're not hip.
