The Reel Argument: Ingmar Bergman

By Bergotte

Ingmar Bergman made films about the things we cannot say to each other, and he made them with a directness that is almost unbearable. He is routinely described as a difficult filmmaker — demanding, austere, heavy — and this reputation has kept more people from him than it has drawn in, which is one of the great losses in contemporary film culture. The truth is that Bergman is not difficult at all. He is simply honest, and honesty, when it reaches the depths he was willing to go, can feel like an assault.

There is a scene near the beginning of Persona — made in 1966, the film that sits at the centre of this essay and at the centre of Bergman’s entire achievement — in which a woman stops speaking. Elisabet Vogler is a famous actress who, in the middle of a performance of Electra, has simply fallen silent. Not fainted, not collapsed, not suffered any diagnosable crisis. She has looked out at the audience and found she has nothing to say to them. She closes her mouth and does not open it again. The doctors find nothing wrong. She is, one of them tells the nurse assigned to her care, simply refusing. The nurse, Alma, is baffled. The audience is baffled. And Bergman, characteristically, offers no explanation, because he knows that the most terrifying human silences are the ones that cannot be explained — the ones that arise not from incapacity but from a sudden, devastating clarity about the futility of speech.

This is where Bergman begins, and it is also, if you follow the thread all the way back, where he always begins: with the failure of communication between human beings, and the question of whether that failure is a wound or simply the truth of what we are. He spent fifty years and more than sixty films — features, shorts, television films, theatrical works — circling this question, and he never resolved it, because it cannot be resolved. What he did instead was find ways to make the question visible, to put it on a face, to catch it in a moment of silence between two people who once loved each other, to let it fill an entire Swedish summer with a dread that has no name.

The face as the first landscape

Bergman discovered, early in his career, that the human face was the most expressive landscape available to a filmmaker, and he pursued this discovery with the obsessive discipline of a scientist. His cinematographer for the most celebrated stretch of his career was Sven Nykvist, and together they developed an approach to the human face that has never quite been replicated. They lit faces not to beautify them but to reveal them — to catch the moment when a smile does not reach the eyes, when grief moves across a set of features like weather, when two faces in close proximity cease to be two separate people and become a single, terrifying composite.

This is most explicit in Persona, in the sequence — one of the most analysed in all of cinema, and rightly so — in which Bibi Andersson’s face and Liv Ullmann’s face are merged in a single split-frame image into something that is neither of them and both of them at once. It is a moment of pure cinema: something that could not be achieved in any other medium, that requires the camera and the editing table and the interplay of two specific women’s specific faces to exist at all. And what it says — what it makes you feel before you have the words for it — is that identity is not the stable, bounded thing we spend our lives pretending it is. That the self bleeds. That under enough pressure, in close enough proximity to another person, we become uncertain of where we end and they begin.

But the face in Bergman is never merely a philosophical proposition. It is always anchored in something urgently physical, urgently emotional. Harriet Andersson in Monika — the 1953 film that announced to the world that Bergman was doing something new — turns to look directly into the camera in a close-up that lasts long enough to become uncomfortable, and in that look there is defiance and sorrow and appetite and resignation all at once, a whole complicated life concentrated into a single held gaze. Ingrid Thulin in Wild Strawberries, sitting in the back of a car while her marriage quietly annihilates itself around her, her face doing everything the screenplay will not allow her to say. Liv Ullmann, over and over again across a decade of collaboration, finding things in her own face that most actors never find at all.

What Bergman understood was that audiences come to cinema looking for recognition — looking to see themselves returned to them in a form that makes sense of what they feel but cannot articulate. And the place where that recognition happens most powerfully is not in plot, not in dialogue, not even in music, but in a face held on screen long enough to become real. This is why his films do not date. The faces he filmed, and the feelings those faces carry, are as contemporary as they were fifty years ago, because the feelings themselves — loneliness, longing, the exhaustion of love, the terror of mortality — have no historical period.

God’s silence and the silence after God

The question of faith runs through Bergman’s work like a geological fault — sometimes hidden, sometimes splitting the surface open. He was raised by a Lutheran pastor father in an atmosphere of religious severity, and while he lost his faith as a young man, he never lost his argument with God, which is a different thing entirely. His early masterworks — the so-called faith trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, made between 1961 and 1963 — are the most sustained examination of religious collapse in cinema, and they are devastating precisely because they take the collapse seriously. These are not anti-religious films in the comfortable, dismissive sense. They are the films of a man who genuinely wanted God to exist, who felt the absence as an absence rather than a liberation.

In Winter Light, the film that may be the bleakest of the three and the one Bergman himself considered his most personal, a pastor delivers a Sunday service to a nearly empty church. He is in the grip of a crisis of faith so complete that the rituals he performs have become hollow to him, and he knows it, and the people around him are beginning to sense it, and nothing can be done. A troubled parishioner comes to him seeking comfort about the threat of nuclear war, and the pastor, who has no comfort to give, destroys him. Later, in the most extraordinary scene, his devoted if unloved companion reads him a letter in which she articulates, with full lucidity, the precise nature of his failure to love her, and he sits and listens, and we sit and watch, and the camera does not look away. It is one of the cruelest and most compassionate scenes Bergman ever made, and at its heart is the connection — unmistakable, deeply felt — between the silence of God and the silence between people who cannot reach each other.

This is the argument that Winter Light makes, and it is the argument that underlies the whole of Bergman’s cinema: that the crisis of faith in the twentieth century was not merely a theological crisis but a relational one. When the shared framework of meaning collapses — when God goes silent, as Bergman’s characters experience it, or simply ceases — human beings are left alone with each other in a new and unbuffered way, and they find that they do not, on the whole, have the equipment for it. They reach for each other and miss. They wound each other with their honesty and wound each other more with their silence. They perform love while experiencing its absence. These are not abstract themes. Bergman found their precise physical texture — the light in a winter church, the sound of a clock, the specific way one person cannot meet another person’s eyes — and fixed them on film.

Marriage as the long examination

If the faith trilogy is where Bergman conducts his argument with God, his films about marriage and romantic love are where he conducts his argument with us. And here he is at his most uncomfortable, because here he refuses entirely to be kind.

Scenes from a Marriage, made for Swedish television in 1973 and subsequently edited into a theatrical film, is the work for which Bergman is perhaps most widely known outside the art-house circuit, and justifiably so. It follows Marianne and Johan across six episodes — meeting, conflict, separation, divorce, aftermath — with a precision and a refusal of sentiment that is almost surgical. Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann play the couple, and they are extraordinary, but what is most extraordinary is what Bergman asks them to reveal: not the drama of a marriage’s failure, but its texture. The specific quality of boredom within intimacy. The precise moment when one person looks at another and realises they have been maintaining a performance for years. The way tenderness and cruelty can exist in the same sentence, in the same gesture, offered by the same pair of hands.

There is a scene — there is always, in Bergman, a scene — in which Johan tells Marianne that he is leaving her for another woman. She has not seen it coming, or has chosen not to see it, and the scene that follows is not the scene a lesser filmmaker would have made. There is no operatic breakdown, no slamming of doors. Instead there is something worse: a long, painful negotiation in which two intelligent people try to handle the destruction of their shared life with dignity and find that they cannot, quite, manage it. The cruelty leaks through. The love leaks through. By the end of the scene you are not sure whose side you are on, because Bergman has made it impossible to take sides — has made you understand both of them so completely that judgment becomes unavailable.

This refusal of judgment is one of Bergman’s most distinctive qualities and one of his most demanding. He does not offer the audience the comfort of a villain. Even his most destructive characters — and there are some genuinely destructive characters in his films, people who do real harm to the people who love them — are rendered with enough interiority that condemnation becomes complicated. This is not moral relativism. It is moral honesty. People are, in Bergman’s cinema, capable of great tenderness and great cruelty, often simultaneously, and the camera stays close enough to both that you cannot pretend otherwise.

What Persona does

To return to the film at the centre of this argument: Persona is, by some distance, the most formally radical film Bergman made, and it is also, paradoxically, the most emotionally direct. It begins with a projector starting up, with fragments of old film, with a boy in a morgue-like space reaching towards a blurred image of a woman’s face — images that seem to announce their own artificiality, that say to the audience, this is a film, these are images, the apparatus is showing you itself. And then it turns into something entirely different: one of the most intimate psychological dramas ever put on screen.

The story — to the extent that it has one — is of the nurse Alma slowly losing herself in proximity to the silent actress Elisabet. She talks, Elisabet listens, and as Alma talks she reveals more and more of herself, and the revelation is both liberating and annihilating. There is a sequence in which Alma recounts a sexual encounter from her past with a candour that is startling even now, and Ullmann listens with an attention so complete, so hungry, that you begin to understand it as a form of consumption — that silence can be predatory, that listening can be a kind of taking. The boundaries between the two women — who is influencing whom, who is absorbing whom — become genuinely impossible to determine.

What Persona is about, ultimately, is the terror of self-disclosure. The risk of letting another person fully see you, the vulnerability that creates, and the violence — subtle, psychological, devastating — that can be done with what you are shown. It is also about the way identity is, to a greater degree than we find comfortable, a performance: that Elisabet’s refusal to speak is a refusal to perform, and that this refusal is both an act of integrity and an act of aggression against everyone who depends on her to keep playing the role. In this sense it is the most compressed statement of Bergman’s overarching subject — the failure of human communication and connection — and it achieves its effect not through argument but through sensation, through the slow accumulation of unease, through Nykvist’s extraordinary light and two actresses working at the very edge of what performance can do.

The Swedish light and the rooms it falls into

It would be a mistake to discuss Bergman without dwelling on the physical world his films inhabit, because it is not incidental to their meaning — it is part of it. The Swedish landscape in Bergman is never picturesque. It is existential. The long flat light of the Swedish summer, which appears in Wild Strawberries and Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny and Alexander, carries within it an awareness of the darkness that will return, the winter that is always, in Sweden, not far away. The interiors — the summer houses, the churches, the bare rooms where people sit across tables from each other — are photographed with a patience that makes them feel fully inhabited, real in the way that only the places where important things have happened feel real.

Fanny and Alexander, the 1982 film Bergman announced as his last (though he continued to work in television and theatre), is in some ways the summation of everything he had learned about light and space and the way the physical world holds emotional memory. It begins in warmth and abundance — a bourgeois Swedish household at Christmas, overflowing with food and colour and the specific texture of a family that loves each other — and moves into constriction and darkness as the children encounter the world beyond the family’s warmth. It is the most autobiographical of his films, the most generous, and in some ways the most mysterious, because alongside its naturalistic family drama runs a current of something genuinely inexplicable — magic, or what functions as magic, the possibility that the imagination can reshape the material world.

It is also the film in which Bergman is most explicitly tender about childhood and about the way children experience the adult world as a place of incomprehensible power and incomprehensible cruelty. Alexander, the boy at the centre of the film, watches adults with an intensity that is itself a kind of indictment — he sees what they do not know they are showing, registers the gap between what is said and what is meant, feels the full weight of beauty and terror that adults learn, over time, to carry more lightly. Bergman always remembered what it was to be a child in this way — helpless, perceptive, unable to intervene — and it is this memory that gives even his darkest films their quality of raw feeling, their refusal to be sophisticated about suffering.

Why now, why still

Bergman died in 2007, on the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni, and the coincidence felt like a statement — as if a certain kind of cinema, the kind that trusted its audience to sit with difficulty, had decided to make its exit in a single gesture. There was a period in the years following his death when his reputation felt like something preserved in amber: universally acknowledged, rarely visited. The intimidating image of the chess-playing Death in The Seventh Seal — probably the most parodied image in film history — had come to stand in for the whole of his work, confirming the prejudice that this was cinema for people in polo-necks who wanted to feel bad about being alive.

This is a travesty, and it is worth saying so plainly. Bergman is not a filmmaker who punishes his audience. He is a filmmaker who respects his audience enough to show them the truth, and the truth he shows them is not merely bleak — it is also, insistently, beautiful. The warmth of Fanny and Alexander, the strange sensuous comedy of Smiles of a Summer Night, the rueful tenderness of Wild Strawberries, in which an old man reviews his life and finds it wanting and is forgiven anyway — these are not the films of a man who despises humanity. They are the films of a man who loves humanity with the particular ache of someone who knows exactly what humanity is capable of and loves it anyway.

What he offers — what the cinema of the human face at its most unflinching always offers — is the experience of being fully seen. Not flattered, not entertained, not distracted, but seen. Recognised. This is a rarer experience than it should be, in cinema as in life, and it is why people who find their way to Bergman tend to stay found. He does not make it easy. But he makes it real. And in an era of cinema that is increasingly skilled at spectacle and increasingly uninterested in the interior life, the interiority of Bergman’s work feels not like a historical curiosity but like a rebuke and an invitation.

The woman on stage who stops speaking and cannot explain why. The pastor who performs faith he no longer has. The couple negotiating the end of their shared life with insufficient equipment. The nurse who tells everything and is consumed by the telling. These are not Swedish stories or mid-century stories or arthouse stories. They are stories about the permanent conditions of being human — the loneliness, the longing, the gap between what we feel and what we can say — and Bergman found ways to put those conditions on screen that have never been surpassed.

Go back to Persona. Watch it in the dark. Let the face on the screen get close enough to unsettle you. That unsettling is not discomfort for its own sake. It is the feeling of being told the truth, and it is one of the things cinema, at its best, exists to do.

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Sources and further reading

Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern (1987) — his autobiography, essential and unreliable in equal measure, which is to say, essential.

Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (1990) — his reflections on his own work, film by film, candid and sometimes startling.

Peter Cowie, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography (1982) — the most rigorous critical biography in English.

Liv Ullmann, Changing (1977) — a memoir that illuminates the Bergman collaboration from the inside with remarkable honesty.

Sven Nykvist, Light — interviews and writings on his cinematographic philosophy and his work with Bergman.

For first-time viewers, the suggested order: Wild Strawberries (1957), then Persona (1966), then Scenes from a Marriage (1973), then Fanny and Alexander (1982). Return to Winter Light (1963) when you are ready for the most unforgiving room Bergman ever built.