A gifted poet with a film camera

Dr. D.B. Nihalsingha pays tribute to two giants of the art of cinema Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, who died within hours of each other this week

Ingmar Bergman a true artist of the cinema is dead at 89. He died on July 30 in Sweden, the country of his birth and of his prolific cinematic and dramatic work in a 40 year career which encompassed some 50 films and many ground-breaking theatrical works.

Despite much trumpeting, there are only few major artists of the cinema. Those who are true cinematic artists should have “been free from the limitations of genre, made movies in ample numbers with worldwide recognition and defied the passage of time.” No one fits the title of a true cinema artist as Ingmar Bergman. In his passion for cinema as art, he had only a few compatriots: Akira Kurasawa, Sathyajith Ray and Fedrico Fellini.

Dealing with subjects which were once considered outside the realm of the film, his films took the viewers into the two themes which were his focus: “the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God.”

He had once described his passion as the search for “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect." In that search he brought themes of metaphysics, religion, death, existentialism to the screen.

Often his films were difficult, moody, gloomy, depressing and even dull. However, to his faithful admirers and film critics, he was the epitome of film as art, a gifted poet with a film camera the likes of which were seldom seen. The difficult films he made perhaps had much to do with his life and childhood and the problems he faced in his own country, Sweden.

His father, a strict Lutheran priest, would beat him and place him in solitary confinement as punishment. Perhaps because of this “all his life he had to fight against his demons: illnesses, breakdowns, threats of madness and suicide.”

Some of his acclaimed films “"Cries and Whispers", "The Seventh Seal", "Fanny and Alexander", “Wild Strawberries” deal with his favourite themes. He is reported to have said that his films have been conceived "in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, in my guts”.

But his life was seldom gloomy as his films. It was, on the contrary, quite exciting: he came to love and live with gifted, beautiful women, often his leading ladies. Married five times, he was also the epitome of his films: moody, unsettling, gloomy and unpredictable. His humiliation came when he was falsely accused of tax fraud. He left Sweden and lived in Germany where he continued his cinematic work. He was redeemed when it was found that the accusation was itself a fraud.

His major contributions are widely known in film, but are not confined to that medium. He was professionally a theater director as a director of Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater. To that he added work in television and opera and literature: novels and autobiographies.