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Ingmar Bergman departs our world, but will, nevertheless, haunt our consciousness until death like many of his cinematic metaphors ...

Our story, 10 Directors Who Told Our Times, that launched the very day that Ingmar Bergman died, confined its picks to directors working in English through the Hollywood studio-supported distribution system. Bergman's death was a sharp reminder that we had not covered the great directors from overseas who were so much a part of our boomer consciousness-raising.

Though foreign directors had been coming to work in Hollywood since early in the silent era, foreign films themselves only began significantly showing up on American screens starting with the importation of Vittoria De Sica's Bicycle Thief in 1948. But the heyday of our boomer fascination with the filmic view from overseas blossomed with our questioning of the American status quo that was part and parcel of our assault on the establishment during the 1960s.

Strong philosophical discontents with the white patriarchal political landscape seeded by a Modernist curriculum that opened our minds with the likes of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Doestoevsky, Tillich, Buber, Sartre, Camus and others found us a ready audience for serious filmmakers who confronted us with alternate, existential views of life. Whereas films made in America still tended to hide their themes deep within escapist "entertainment," foreign films through concept, juxtaposition and imagery made us think and think hard. We loved it (then).

 

Foreign directors became our heroes: Kurosawa, Fellini, Truffaut, Godard, Buñuel, Ray and -- the last surviving of these icons until now -- Antonioni and Bergman.

From his chess game with death in The Seventh Seal (1957) and his look back on a disappointed life in Wild Strawberries (1957), to his anatomy of dying with a terminal illness in Cries and Whispers (1972), Bergman starkly, profoundly, confronted us with the metaphysics of death and dying. He presented us with the uncompromising view that we are responsible for ourselves and for the world in which we live. We can't blame our conditions on God, or institutions, or social constructs. Likewise, if we want better ends, we can't rely on these to provide them for us without our strong interventions. If we want better results, we must become conscious of and act upon better choices. Here was a cinematic philosophy undergirding our '60s efforts to reform the world.

As our '60s preoccupation with eradicating all social evils less than triumphantly waned in the '70s and was replaced by an increasingly inward focus on personal fulfillment, Bergman was there with his expositions of relationships as the core of finding meaning and the problems they cause in achieving it. In such films as Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Autumn Sonata (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) the conundrums of finding communion in love, and the metaphysical haunting of ghosts we must slay to achieve such breakthroughs offered us ambiguous relief through stoned or lonely nights.

With a Thalberg Award at the Oscars for producing consistently high quality work (1971) and three Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film (The Virgin Spring – 1961, Through a Glass Darkly – 1962, and Fanny and Alexander – 1982) among innumerable other awards at the Oscars, Golden Globes, Cannes, etc… Bergman is unquestionably one of the "greatest of the greats."

Sadly, or maybe inevitably, his concerns with dark and light, good and evil, and his metaphors for our theological approaches to answering these life questions became too heavy for all but film buffs to ponder as we entered the necessary demands of pursuing careers and raising families. But like his cold, pale chess partner, or suddenly arising "virgin spring," his indelible cinematic metaphors haunt us still in the back of our minds, crying, whispering: "make something meaningful of your lives."

Thank you, Mr. Bergman, for moving us to do so…

 

Entertainment Editor Jeff Stein (Jeffry John Stein) is the author of Life, Myth, and the American Family Unreeling.