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.
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.
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