BREAKING THE SEVENTH SEAL ON A CAREER

Ingmar Bergman through a glass less darkly with Criterion

From the late 1950s through the early 1980s, the name Ingmar Bergman was virtually synonymous with art-house cinema. But by the time the Swedish filmmaker died in 2007, he seemed to have gone out of fashion. A mere week after his death, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote an Op-ed piece in The New York Times titled Scenes From an Overrated Career.

“The same qualities that made Mr. Bergman’s films go down more easily” than those of more demanding masters like Carl Theodor Dreyer and Robert Bresson, Rosenbaum wrote, “also make them feel less important today, because they have fewer secrets to impart.”

A filmmaker’s perceived importance waxes and wanes; so do ideas about what art ought to do. The Criterion Collection’s impressive and almost exhaustive Blu-ray set, Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema, released Tuesday, makes a fresh case for his continuing importance. Do the films in it impart many secrets? Having explored this new box-set, I found that Bergman’s art today seems more interested in laying bare intimacies than in proffering enigmas. It certainly offers dozens of hours of engagement, illumination and even entertainment.

For decades, few living directors could lay greater claim to a seat in the art-house pantheon than Bergman. His reputation had been building internationally since the foreign release of Summer With Monika in 1953 — later recut and marketed to American viewers as Monika, the Story of a Bad Girl — a racier-thanHollywood film that earned him some notoriety. His drawing-room sex comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) was a hit at Cannes. (Release dates reflect the year of a film’s foreign theatrical debut.)

But his Seventh

Seal from 1957, an allegory in which a medieval knight seeks to cheat Death in a game of chess, catapulted him to worldwide fame: Over 60 years later, it is hard to quantify just what a game-changer it was. It is almost certainly the only Swedish art film to be parodied by Sesame Street.

Today’s conventional wisdom regards Bergman as a dour Scandinavian brooder who specializes in the romantic/erotic lives of neurotic characters and the absence of God. That reputation does have some basis in reality. But the variety found in this 30-disc set, which presents 39 feature-length films and two documentary shorts by Bergman, along with an in-depth array of supplemental materials, is awe-inspiring. Almost all of the films are newly or recently restored, beautifully showcasing the camerawork work of, among others, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist, the two cinematographers who helped make Bergman’s work consistently visually distinctive.

Although the collection looks intimidating, Bergman’s work is best approached from a relaxed posture, not a defensive one. Rosenbaum compared Bergman’s “fluent storytelling” and “deftness in handling actresses” to the “skills of a Hollywood professional like George Cukor,” and in Bergman’s earliest films one feels the touch of an unusually engaged classicist. His ability to frame each of his shots for maximum dramatic value seems innate. Even when the movie opens with as dire an event as a young woman’s attempted suicide, as Port of Call (1948) does, the viewer is drawn in.

Packaged as a two-volume book (one holds the discs, the other comprises 248 pages of essays and notes), the set is not presented chronologically, but rather like a film festival, programmed with “centrepieces” and thematically linked “double features.” Its “Opening Night” includes Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Bergman’s professional salvation after a string of box-office failures. As Bergman biographer Peter Cowie notes in a video interview on the disc, this comedy left audiences feeling upbeat, and it did so without compromising the filmmaker’s principles.

Even when his subject matter was at its darkest during this early period, Bergman the magician, who was also a renowned stage and television director, could pull an audience-pleasing gesture out of his hat and make it feel honest. Death has his triumph in The Seventh Seal — which Bergman was able to make only because of the commercial success of Smiles — but life gets the last word in the form of a young couple played by Bibi Andersson and Nils Poppe. Similarly, the memory-journey of professor Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries (1957) is full of anxiety and regret, and a nostalgia more bitter than sweet, but the old man finds resolution in the end.

Beginning in the 1960s, the anxiety of Bergman’s films heightened, and his style shifted substantially. The touches of irrationality, which formerly inhabited his dream sequences, began to bleed into the “actual” worlds of his films. Pictures like The Silence (1963) and Hour of the Wolf (1968) are whole, mesmerizing nightmares in cinematic form. Characters who broke the fourth wall had long been a feature of Bergman’s films, but in the manner of theatrical asides; after Bergman’s 1966 breakthrough Persona, his most avant-garde-influenced picture, the practice was more starkly cinematic. In The Touch (1971), Bibi Andersson and a startlingly nasty Elliott Gould stand in front of a black wall and speak straight into the camera.

By the 1970s, Bergman increasingly preferred hand-held camera work over the carefully grounded constructions of his earlier films. (An elevator scene late in Waiting Women, from 1952, contains no fewer than a dozen camera setups in that cramped space.) And by his final films, Bergman was synthesizing metafictional awareness with oldfashioned cinematic magic. His rapturous 1975 filming of Mozart’s The Magic Flute and his sumptuous 1982 family melodrama, Fanny and Alexander, are among his greatest, most tonally varied and completely satisfying experiences. (Fanny and Scenes From a Marriage, from 1973, are offered here as two cuts, one a longer made-for-tv version, the other a shorter theatrical one.)

Having so many Bergman pictures in one place allows one to savour the work of the lesser-known members of Bergman’s repertory company. The great reputations of actors like Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, Erland Josephson and Ingrid Thulin rest largely on their work with Bergman, but one also marvels at the often very funny Eva Dahlbeck, who appears in five pictures in this set; Jarl Kulle, the haughty Don Juan of Devil’s Eye, who is also in All These Women and Fanny and Alexander; and other lesser-known performers like Hasse Ekman, Ake Gronberg and Gunnel Lindblom, all of whom contribute wonderful work.

To the credit of Criterion’s editorial staff, the package does not lionize every film in the collection. The essay by David Cairns and Fiona Watkins on the curdled farce All These Women (1964), for example, deals bluntly with that film’s artistic failure. But “failure” here doesn’t equal waste: All These Women is a key work nonetheless because it is Bergman’s first colour film, and a most striking one.

Bergman films may not be as in vogue as they once were, but in the centennial year of his birth, recent developments suggest that his place in history is secure. But for the box set, a Criterion spokeswoman told me: “Preorders have exceeded expectations. We can’t make them fast enough.”

PACKAGE DOES NOT LIONIZE EVERY FILM INTHE COLLECTION.