The Influence of Ingmar Bergman on International Cinema

It is hard to estimate whose contribution to cinema worth more, it is impossible to differentiate how exactly a certain genre was born, it is impractical to argue what film deserves attention and what does not. Regardless, it can be said with no doubt that Ingmar Bergman played a major role in the world of cinematography. His career in film spans more than half a century and includes the most diverse films. Bergman does not belong to a particular genre or movement, his films differ from surrealistic and abstract to realistic and natural, a great amount of which are considered as masterpieces. “At the time, the foreign films that made an impact with the cognoscenti were mainly from France, Italy and Japan. Bergman, though, was a one-man film movement. His instant eminence created a cottage industry of Bergmania”. Not only Bergman’s style remains recognizable among his artworks, but the reflections of them can be easily found in other directors’ films. Themes he uncovers, philosophical ideologies he follows and distinctive features of the visual component he includes in his films have significantly inspired future directors.

Ingmar Bergman was always different and unique. The main ideas of Bergman’s plays and movies are closely related to religion, death, crisis of personality and the search of real relationships between people. His creative path in film industry started in the 40s, and it was the beginning of Ingmar finding “his” actors and themes. After contemplation of his development as a director, those early films seem to be naïve, ingenuous somewhat, resembling more of a poetic melodrama. In his “Prison” (1949) the author for the first time decides to make non-commercial adaptation on the script of his own composition, indulging in own vision of cinema as an art field. After Bergman becomes an international star in the 50s, he strongly decides to make fully independent cinema. While cinematographers are defining the visual component with pure and austere style, Ingmar Berman, as a director, is radically experimenting with genres, but as says one of his critics, John Donner: “Bergman’s films are not isolated pieces, they are also a part of a whole”.

As it is stated, Bergman has influenced authors of the future, but in fact his influence also hugely spread on the directors of his century. The film, which is considered not only one of the most important among Bergman’s works, but in the international cinematography at all – “Wild Strawberries” (1957), became a world sensation. Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky included “Wild Strawberries” (1957) in the lists of their favorite films. Woody Allen, Wim Wenders, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Michael Haneke highlighted that picture to be hugely impacted on the films of their own. In “Wild Strawberries” (1957) Bergman opened a completely new design for cinema spatio-temporal relations - the method of coalescence of the inner layer of time with the outer. In addition, in this film visual component includes an adaptation of dreams of the main character combined with the reality. This largely echoes with surrealism and with works of the great Spanish Director, Luis Buñuel, the combination of real life and dreams can be evidenced, for instance in his “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and “Belle de Jour” (1967).

Bergman often drew inspiration for films from his own life. Sometimes he gave characters some characteristics of people whom he personally knew, sometimes displayed his own dreams or events, sometimes he just “narrated” a film in an autobiographical manner. As it was said by Grigorieva: “It is noteworthy that after the success of Bergman's “Wild Strawberries” (1957) the world saw “8½” (Federico Fellini, 1963), “Amarkord” (Federico Fellini, 1973), “Mirror” (Andrei Tarkosvky, 1975) and other works based on autobiographical motifs and confessional intonation”. The action of many Allen’s films, for example, “Another Woman” (1988), “Stardust Memories” (1980), “Crimes and Misdemeanors” (1989) or “Deconstructing Harry” (1997) has a similar free structure: the narrative often goes in unexpected directions, includes memories, dreams, episodes from the past and represents a journey into the inner world, the study of the souls of the main characters (Grigorieva, 2017).

Dark and gloomy atmosphere is one of the main visual components in Bergman’s film. He started to implement his personal notion of color use since his early works and majorly developed it. Bergman in his films often turned to the dark style, and it can be said not only about the film design, but also about topics disclosed by the author. Characters of his films can be described that way: they are happy people from the outside who are buried in the inner misfortune. In his “Fanny and Alexander” (1982) in the epilogue sounds a phrase: “We will live in our little, little world. We will hold on to it, we will cultivate it and decorate it”, - and this expression says a lot about the style of Bergman's films as a whole.

Bergman shows a lyrical hero who faces the truth about life beyond his own existence, but he sees that “truth” only through the prism of his own experiences, his own world, which he “holds on to, cultivates and decorates”. Talking about another Bergman’s embodiment of the author’s color use, the plot of “Cries and Whispers” (1972) focuses on the painful relationships within blood relatives, one of whom is seriously ill. By the means of using red shades, that pain can be easily read just based on the visual component. That gloomy atmosphere, as well as the plot, is reflected in the film of Allen, namely “Interiors” (1978), which was made as an homage to Bergman. Another reference to Bergman is also can be seen in “The Dreamers” (2003), a Bernardo Bertolucci’s film. In one scene a viewer can notice a poster of “Persona” (1966), and that way Bertolucci pays an honor to the classic of author’s cinema, Ingmar Bergman.

Many European directors have repeatedly confessed their love for Bergman. Danish Director Lars von Trier said: “I studied film studies at the University, and during the whole semester almost all the lectures were devoted to Bergman. And it has taken a disproportionately large place in my cinematic memory. I looked at all of them, Bergman, even commercials about soap. Lars von Trier appears to have taken him as his role model in this regard. Violetta Savchits says that Lars von Trier is the heir to two major Scandinavian geniuses: the Dane Karl Theodor Dreyer and the Swede Ingmar Bergman and it is explainable. Bergman sometimes even referred to some as a “boring” author. When watching his films, a viewer can regard them to be quite diverse, but each one of them is undoubtedly focused on dialogues.

A significant theme of his films is certainly relationships between people and he repeatedly brings the viewer’s attention to long conversations of the characters and their thoughts. At the same time, Lars, the director, who is a personification of rebellion in the world of modern cinema, often refers to that technique of Bergman. His scenes are long, measured and psychologically tense, as the scenes Ingmar once depicted. Berman was a genuine master of conversations and namely he made a cult from depicting characters’ reflections. In his “Autumn Sonata” (1978) master fully shows his skill in putting a viewer in a position of the emphasizer.

Special attention should be paid to references in Bergman's films to religion, more accurately, to God and faith. He continuously questioning religion and a person’s solitude, he often turns to Christian symbolism, giving a viewer a mythical filling of a picture. Bergman became a director who wanted to be a philosopher in the field of cinema. “Religious imagery, subtly present in Bergman’s earlier work, assumes a new centrality in these films. Bergman’s films had always been full of masks, symbols of concealment and solitude. The ticking of clocks, a pervasive reminder of mortality, fills the space vacated by the absent orchestra”, - that phrase highlights what actually Bergman brought to the cinema with the way of depiction philosophical ideas. His “The Seventh Seal” (1957), a mythic allegory, made a huge impact on the cinema world, as he started to use specific symbols in his artworks, reflection on life and death, faith and lose of it, he was questioning everything as he always had done. “His philosophical Odysseys might have been epoxied to matters of Life and Death, of God and Man”, – is said in “Antonioni, Bergman, and the Soul” (2007).

A list of authors inspired by Bergman’s philosophy is endless. Nonetheless, it is worth to highlight Andrei Tarkovsky, on whom influence is undoubted, great and lasting. Even though Tarkovsky describes religion in a different way, his difficult path to God, as it is said in Séance Magazine, is imbued with images of Scripture of the great Ingmar Bergman’s cinema.

The work of Ingmar Bergman has been strongly associated with the close-up, he indeed can be called a master of conveying a psychological portrait of the character by the means of close-up, and it can be evidenced most notably perhaps in Persona (1966). It is said by Gronstad that a reflection of that Bergman’s technique can be found in the works of John Cassavetes, Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergio Leone, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Atom Egoyan. Talking about another characteristic reception of the master, his famous depiction of sky still considers his own feature, because most his films include a brand-name shot aimed upward. Bergman’s “God’s sky” can be found in the works of such great authors as Abbas Kiarostami, Werner Herzog and Alain Resnais. In “Bergman Wins International Fame with The Seventh Seal” it is overall highlighted that in the film world Bergman’s style and substance affected the new major directors who were born in the 1920’s and 1930’s and began their major works in the 1960’s. Francois Truffaut and others use some of Bergman’s techniques.

All things considered, there cannot be said enough about Ingmar Bergman as a filmmaker and about his influence on the international cinema. The variety of his works allows us to confidently declare the talent of the director, and therefore gives his disciples an opportunity to draw inspiration from his works. When looking at the world of art wider, the influence of master can be traced not just in the cinema field, but also in contemporary painting and even in the literature. Bergman shows a variety of emotions in his films in a very special way, in his own way. The way his contribution to the world of cinema has already changed and will continue to change the frame of people's thinking, speaks about the power of his works, which certainly are rich, multifaceted and brilliant. As stated in the title of one of the many documentaries about the Swedish director: “Bergman's Influence on world cinema is so huge that it is even difficult to talk about it”.

Sources

1. “Antonioni, Bergman, and the Soul”. Chronicle of Higher Education, Inc, vol. 53, no. 50, 17 Aug 2007. Academic OneFile. Web. Mar. 2019.
2. Gronstad, Asbjorn. “Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin and the Aesthetics of Ethical Intimacy”. Film Criticism, vol. 37, no. 2, 2012, pp. 22–37. Web. Mar. 2019.
3. Steene, Birgitta. “Archetypal Patterns in Four Ingmar Berman Plays”. Scandinavian Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 1965, pp. 58–76. JSTOR. Web. Mar. 2019.
4. McCann, Janet. “Bergman Wins International Fame with The Seventh Seal”. Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2019, p. 3. Research Starters. Web. Mar. 2019.
5. Corliss, Richard. “Why Ingmar Bergman Mattered”. Time Magazine. 30 Jul 2007. 2017. Web. Mar. 2019. http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1648084,00.html
6. Shields, Nathan. “Oh Lord, Why Did You Forsake Ingmar Bergman?”. Commentary Magazine. Aug 2018. Web. Mar. 2019. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/oh-lord-forsake-ingmar-bergman/
7. Savchits, Violetta. “What Did Dolin Say?”. 34Mag Magazine. 28 Apr 2017. Web. Mar. 2019. https://34mag.net/ru/post/chto-govoril-dolin
8. Gritten, David. “Ingmar Bergman: Shining Master of Darkness”. The Telegraph Magazine. 31 Jul 2007. Web. Mar. 2019. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/3666857/Ingmar-Bergman-shining-master-of-darkness.html
9. Grigorieva, Diana. “Cult Film: 60 Years of 'Wild Strawberries' of Ingmar Bergman”. Kinopoisk. 26 Dec 2017. Web. Mar. 2019. https://www.kinopoisk.ru/article/3098953/
10. Zorkaya, Nie. “Like in a Mirror. Bergman in the Texts of Andrei Tarkovsky”. Séance Magazine, no. 13. Web. Mar. 2019. https://seance.ru/n/13/glava2-bergman-vrossii/kak-vzerkale/