Ingmar Bergman's Post-Christian God: Silent, Absent, and Female

INGMAR BERGMAN'S POST-CHRISTIAN GOD: SILENT, ABSENT, AND FEMALE RICHARD A. BLAKE, S.J. Boston College years ago Ingmar Bergman was a key figure in discussions of the relationshipThirty between theology and contemporary art, and deservedly so. During a period lasting little more than seven years his exploration of religious themes in his films was truly extraordinary. "The Seventh Seal" (1957) was based on his radio play "Wood Painting" (1955). This film . was followed by "Wild Strawberries" (1957), "The Magician" (1958), "The Virgin Spring" (1960) and finally the God Trilogy, "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961) "Winter Light" (1963) and "The Silence" (1963).l Because of his unusual background, the film maker himself, no less than his films of this period, invited theological speculation. Well known as the son of a Lutheran pastor who was once chaplain to the Royal Court in Stockholm, Ingmar Bergman wrote of his visits with his father to rural churches in Sweden, where he was captivated by paintings and carvings that decorated the winter-darkened chapels. In an essay he composed during the filming of "The Virgin Spring," he confessed: "To me religious questions are continually alive. I never cease to concern myself with them. It goes on every hour of every day" (Four Screenplays xxi). For academics who tried to explore religious questions within the increasingly secular atmosphere of intellectual discourse, Bergman became a nuclear-age Everyman, a modern-day artist working in a 20th century medium and searching for God and meaning in a world that seemed to push God further into the margins of irrelevance with each passing season. He provided the affirmation that religion was still pertinent to the contemporary philosophic dialogue. In addition, Bergman films struck American audiences especially as something qualitatively different. The Italian neo-realist movement, beginning in the closing days of World War II, had already cultivated the American taste for foreign-language movies in small art theaters, but the . Bergman phenomenon added the printed text to the images. Bergman scripts-unlike those of, say, Federico Fellini, a former cartoonist and illustrator, and thus a more purely visual artist-were highly quotable works of literature. When the scripts started to appear in English in 1960, they became highly useful tools in undergraduate classes in theology and philosophy. Unlike the (seemingly) straightforward narrative of popular American films, the Bergman works were filled with indirection, allusion and visual symbolism, which made them seem more complex and more suitable for discussion than the works of other film artists, European or American. The films and their scripts thus provided fertile ground for "theological" analysis in the scholarly journals. Finally, the stark black- and-white photography of Gunnar Fischer and, beginning with "The Virgin Spring," Sven Nyquist, provided a sharp contrast to the garish Technicolor generally associated with Hollywood. Bergman provided respectable film "art" for people who generally despise "the movies." After 1963 Ingmar Bergman's theological period ended, and although many of his strongest films were yet to come, in many ways the unique . Bergman phenomenon ended with it. For the next twenty years the artist turned his attention to human relationships, fantasy, dreams and the subconscious. The extraordinarily rich body of work of this later period included several consensus masterpieces like "Persona" (1966), "Shame" (1968), "The Passion of Anna" (1969), "Cries and Whispers" (1973), "Scenes From a Marriage" (1973) and "Fanny and Alexander" (1982). For many of his devoted fans of the early 1960's, however, this period represented something of a disappointment. For them the name Bergman will always be associated with those brooding religious quests of the previous decade, as though the film maker and his creation, Antonius Block, the tormented knight of "The Seventh Seal," were one and the same entity, and the later films represent an abandonment of his search for his intellectual equivalent of the Holy Grail.2 Sadly, the Bergman discussion declined rapidly, and the film maker became regarded as a quaint monument to an era when religious questions were taken seriously in film. It may be time for a second look at this once dominant figure. Since the director, now nearing his 80th year, has shown little inclination to make another film in the last fifteen years, his corpus may now be considered complete. It is now possible for critics to look at his work in its entirety and identify strands of continuity within the extraordinary variety of his work. Such can be even after the ' continuity perceived apparently abrupt shift that took place in his interests at the close of his sequence of religious films. More precisely, the Christian and Lutheran themes that dominated his thought for nearly a decade reassert themselves in a transformed fashion 28 .

Load more