Faith and Fever: A Ingmar Bergman retrospective
Curator Note for the Ingmar Bergman retrospective at TPCC Bangalore (Jan & Feb 2025)
For being one of the most popular and influential filmmakers, it is instead surprisingly challenging to approach Bergman in writing. Where to begin with a filmmaker so dedicatedly curious about the questions of the human soul? He has no answers to talk about. An ideal and arduous way could be the soul itself but let us begin with drama. Let us borrow a little from Chekhov something that applies to Bergman as it does to all great artists - The task of an artist is not to solve problems but to state them correctly. Bergman had an illustrious career in both theatre and cinema concurrently. So, it won’t be long before we run into the postulate claiming a purely theatrical art of a filmmaker who was, on the contrary, cinematic. What necessitates retrospecting on Bergman’s filmography extensively is the detachment from the canonical sphere, academia and by extension such postulation. It is with this detachment that we shall rediscover Bergman’s cinema. But let us refrain from heading in that direction yet and begin with the productive overlap of his ventures. What is often immediate about Bergman is the very intuitive approach, economy and precise distanciation in composing drama. The closest to a foundational idea we can get in approaching Bergman’s films is that life is a stage. An ensemble of players and the right sociogram design is significant and sufficient, after all it is in staging that the problems are stated effectively; in a new light. Bergman knows very well that a psyche is agitated in the presence of another. The idea of form in Bergman is a result of such a method that tends to reveal the inner self in confrontation. His skill of developing this intimacy could alarm the spectator at any moment. But of course, we will be making a mistake in not mentioning his compassion even in devising such a scrutinising stage for his personage. Therefore Bergman’s work is on two levels - firstly, dramatic and then a patient and investigative gaze through the camera. The fragility of the human psyche needs duration to lay bare its functioning; when affable air turns frigid, the walls start enclosing, communication breaks down, god remains silent even for theists and the lovers abandon one another, then comes the moment when the barriers and masks start to dissolve. So it becomes obvious as to why the presentation is often of characters in vulnerable circumstances - backstage of a circus troupe, grieving women, regretful albeit wise men, magicians against scientists and absent parents being a few examples. The result is always fascinating and a well condensed work of dialogue where a range of feelings simply burst forth and there are no simple moral conclusions. The challenge for Bergman must have been how, in the midst of hurtful truths and pervasive misery, to keep the whole of humanity intact, and not narrow the spectrum of what is experienced.
Although Bergman took more time to adopt a cinematic thinking compared to his contemporaries - Welles, Tati and Rosselini to name a few, the seeds of his interests and a plaintive yet non-judgmental surface can still be sensed in his earlier works. Soon, he took to the nordic winds and land working with a contained location and a limited set of actors. The model of the space veered away from a traditional theatrical model where the geometrical principles can be applied with certainty; unlike Dreyer, Mizoguchi or Ford who work with a very concretely set up space. The camera movement mostly alternates between closely navigating the area of performance and only the immediate exterior arrangements. This particular form of space that results (which is also different from how traditional “chamber” is modelled in cinema as there is no explicit decoupage to orient the inhabitants or objects) seems to expand or shrink with changes in perspective as though under the influence of a very strong consciousness in the centre. The compound of the characters’ imaginations and the sub-conscious also adds to this. The same is true of close-ups in his films, that is, they are never applied to show a particular emotion on a face and instead to study the intricacies of thought. Is the face of a man confronting death only subject to express fear? These two relations (psyche-to-body and psyche-to-space) are naturally not possible to address in the medium of theatre which is devoid of an actor-camera dialectic. The amplified sense of time and anxiety, the sound work and Sven Nykvist's stark work with light are all very striking details worth analysing as contrasts to theatrical work. As he progressed, Bergman also became more self-reflexive, suggesting the staging in cinema through explicit interviews and introductions of the actors as a part of the fiction among other ways. The fissure between performance and reality started to show.
Bergman’s art arouses wonder above anything else, in that there are more questions on exit than when one enters. There is a humility to not be desperate to say something, convince or console anyone with answers (and anyway, truth seems to vanish once again when a man is in doubt). Until this humility holds, thought and knowledge suddenly become adventurous and the wandering itself carries meaning. Therein lies the key to Bergman’s sojourns. Maybe the spirit was never meant to reach a state of complete nourishment. Even the inarticulate shall probably remain as such forever. There are only doubts, then pursuits with faith and their feverish consequences.