A Silent Dance Upon Bleak Shadows Catalog

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INTRODUCTION

Ingmar Bergman

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FEATURED FILMS

Winter Light

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The Seventh Seal Hour of the Wolf The Silence

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FESTIVAL INFO

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Event schedule Area attractions

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ABOUT BERGMAN

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a silent dance upon bleak shadows/ingmar bergman

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Ingmar Bergman born in Sweden in 1918 and is known

Even though movies like Persona, The Hour of The

as one of the most significant directors in history,

Wolf, and The Silence were released in the mid-to-late

and one of the directors who have inspired many til

60's, the idea is still relevant in modern day cinema –

today. His movies were studied by many critics, and

the silence of a God in a world of chaos expressed the

are still found fascinating; specifically the first ones in

tyrannical yet realistic human condition; where chaos

Bergman's archive. His work, though at a glance can

mostly always wins. In these movies Bergman shows

be viewed as cynical and dark, has in fact many hidden

the fragility of humans that could drive them from

meanings and reflect Bergman's thoughts and opinions

stability to insanity.

at a certain period. Bergman's focus was the human's condition, which when looked at closely reflects his own condition. Subjects such as the extreme contrast of life and death, loss and birth, sanity and insanity, paradise and martyrdom are expressed through the language barriers that many people choose to replace with silence. The conflict between physicality and spirituality and the deathly silence.

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Ingmar Bergman directing

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uncomfortable feelings are opened up, shared and laid bare. And this often occurs, quite literally, face-to-face.

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was canonical to ‘art-house’ movie culture, academic cinema studies and film clubs all over the world. Today, a

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Bergman has written and directed around fifty feature films, and for over twenty years from the late-’50s his work

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young film enthusiast or student is most likely only to have seen The Seventh Seal or perhaps Wild Strawberries (both 1957), or in some countries, Persona. However, they are just as likely to have seen no Bergman at all. The

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The camera moves in uncomfortably, almost seeking to go inside — until a giant abstracted face fills the frame,

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“Bergman’s guilt-ridden desire to crack open the narcissistic shell and face reality strikes a distinct chord in our newly troubled times. Perhaps he is only just beginning to speak to us.”

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relentless close-up of the face is a useful formal and thematic key to Bergman’s work. In these frequent, almost

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a silent dance upon bleak shadows/ingmar bergman

Ingmar Bergman’s mature cinema provokes the viewer into an intimate engagement in which a range of

stopping the zoom dead. The viewer is confronted with a close yet also alienating proximity to such a large expanse of human exterior, while we watch our enormous diegetic companion ask of itself ‘what’ it is, as it

viewer seem to feel the intermixing and breaking down of diegetic and meta-diegetic space, and intensities of

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looking. This is sparked and enforced by Bergman’s tight use of a 1.33:1 frame which often excludes any clear

movement where the giant face gazes straight out of the screen, visually exploring a world beyond that in which

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glimpses of the world beyond a face which finds no up, down, left or right in which to direct its gaze. This final

it traditionally exists, connects the space of the diegetic subject to my space. And here I sit, troubled yet also

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thrilled by this uncomfortably intimate experience.

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self-conscious crisis meets the viewer’s implicated looking upon and participation in that image. Both face and

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faces a very personal void. A dual gaze of inquiry takes place here, whereby the onscreen subject’s gaze of

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Jörn Donner: Quite often, you’ve been considerably more experimental in films than in the theatre.

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Ingmar Bergman: Films demand their form, and staged plays theirs. I’ve never simply decided that now I shall experiment, but everything has just been given the form I’ve thought it ought to have.

I’m not at all interested in whether I’m experimenting or not.

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Ingmar Bergman: (laughter) It’s like this: it was necessary to write it in that way, or Persona, or the one I’ve just written, Faithless. They’ve found their form simply because it was necessary to write them in that way–to do them in that way.

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Jörn Donner: But is it some kind of intuition? Who the hell would be crazy enough to write a script such as Cries and Whispers?

Jörn Donner: You didn’t think about the drama...

Ingmar Bergman: No, in general I wasn’t thinking about anything.

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Jörn Donner: That’s not what I meant. But to go back in time, to Sawdust and Tinsel or Prison. Didn’t you think them out either?

Jörn Donner: I suppose you don’t want to say you’re an intuitive writer.

Ingmar Bergman: But wasn’t it you who said that when you begin writing, you don’t know how it will turn out?

Jörn Donner: That’s right, of course, yes.

Ingmar Bergman: It’s just intuition, and it’s the same when I start writing, I have a kind of basic scene, a beginning. I usually say that in Cries and Whispers I went on for very long, and had a scene with four women in white in a red room.

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Ingmar Bergman: No, I didn’t. Well, not Sawdust and Tinsel, but Prison–I suppose that was the first time I wrote my own script. I was quite crazy with delight and had to get everything that I had been walking around and thinking about into it. Without my really making any effort, it became... peculiar.

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Jörn Donner: And that was all, generally speaking.

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Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it was only that. And then I started thinking about why they were there and what they said to each other, that kind of thing. It was mysterious. It kept coming back again and again, and I couldn’t get that scene to come out right.

Jörn Donner: A kind of dream image.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, you know what it’s like. Then you begin winding in a long thread that appears from somewhere or other, and the thread can suddenly snap. That’s the end of that, but then all of a sudden, it’s a whole ball.

Jörn Donner: Have threads often snapped for you?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, lots of times.

Jörn Donner: But not the kind of threads you’ve spent weeks working on, or in manuscript form.

Ingmar Bergman: No, not once I’ve started writing. By then I’ve already done my working books.

In them, I’ve written endless things, masses of stuff, but once I’ve started on the script, then I know what I’m doing.

Jörn Donner: What are your working books about?

Ingmar Bergman: Absolutely everything.

Jörn Donner: So the script grows out of the working book?

Ingmar Bergman: Exactly. Well, it’s unfinished, completely. Keeping working books is fun.

Jörn Donner: Have you always done that?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, always. At first, I didn’t really have the time. But when I did have the time, yes. Often when I was younger and had to earn money for all my wives and children, then I had to begin on the script, so to speak, bang, directly, I mean. But now I can lie on the sofa and play about with my thoughts and have fun with them, looking at images, doing research and so on. All that’s great fun. My working books are also quite illegible to anyone else but me. But then the actual writing begins out

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There was something very exciting about images

influenced in his collection of films is his childhood

that could generate such feelings of raw, complex

and the way he was raised. Growing up Bergman was

subjectivity. Yet reading some of the critical

surrounded by religious parents and environment.

work from the 1960s and ’70s there also seemed

His films expressed different emotions such as

something worrying about this cinema’s power,

loneliness, the search of meaning in life and being

especially as enunciated and shaped through the

burdened with faith. These emotions later generated

figure of a demonic author-subject.

his reputation as a great filmmaker; a filmmaker of melancholy. Being raised with a conservative strict father, as he mentioned in many interviews have shaped him. Even with his father’s constant preaching, this drove ingmar as he said to explore a different side of church – the artistic side of church.

At the time of release, Bergman’s most important work was often received as a ‘personal cinema’ of virtually unparalleled strength.

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Ingmar Bergman’s greatest influence that’s clearly

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“ You’re going to ask how it is I understand women so well. Women used to interest me as subjects because they were so rediculously treated and shown in movies. I simply showed them as they are­—or at least closer to what they are than the silly representations of them in the movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Any reasonably realistic treatment looked great by comparison with what was being done. In the past few years, however, I have begun to realize that women are essentially the same as men, that they both have the same problems.

I don’t think of there being women’s problems or women’s stories any more than I do of there being men’s problems or men’s stories. They are all human problems. It’s people who interest me.”

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June 1964, Interviewed by Cynthia Grenier

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ON HIS INFLUENCES

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In an interview with Cynthia Grenier Bergman talked about his influences as he mentioned that he had to learn all about film on his own. One of his greatest influences in theater was a man in Göteborg where he spent four years learning from him. As for movies, he wasn’t influenced by anyone.

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“Before the War, I was a schoolboy. Then, during the War, we got to see no foreign films at all. By the time the War was over, I was working hard to support a wife and three children. But fortunately, I am by nature an autodidact, one who can teach himself­—though it’s an uncomfortable thing to be at times.”

Then Bergman mentioned how the uncomfort of being self-taught is because autodidacts tend to cling to the technical side and forget about the concept. His belief is that the most important thing in a movie isn’t the technicality as much as it is having a story to share.

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Ingmar Bergman directing Winter Light, 1962

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HIS 10 FAVORIT E FILMS The Circus (Charles Chaplin, USA 1928) Port of Shadows (Quai des brumes, Marcel Carné, France 1938) The Conductor (Dyrygent, Andrzej Wajda, Poland 1979) Raven's End (Kvarteret Korpen, Bo Widerberg, Sweden 1963) The Passion of Joan of Arc (La passion de Jeanne d'Arc, Carl Th. Dreyer, France 1927) The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen, Victor Sjöström, Sweden 1921) Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, Japan 1951) The Road (La Strada, Federico Fellini, Italy 1954) Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, USA 1950) Two German Sisters (Die bleierne Zeit, Margarethe von Trotta, BRD 1981) Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, Soviet Union 1969)

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a silent dance upon bleak shadows/ingmar bergman

ON HIS FILMOGR APHY In 1939, Bergman accepted the job of production assistant at the Royal Theatre (the Stockholm Opera), leaving school the following year to focus on stage work. By early 1943, he had begun work at the script department of Svensk Filmindustri, with his original screenplay for Hets (Torment) filmed by leading director Alf Sjöberg the following year. While remaining active in the theater, Bergman also continued his work in the film industry, and in the summer of 1945 he began directing his debut feature, Kris (Crisis), an adaptation of a drama by Leck Fischer. His next four films 1946’s Det Regnar på Vår Kärlek (It Rains on Our Love), 1947’s Skepp till Indialand (A Ship Bound for India), and 1948’s Musik i Mörker (Night Is My Future), and Hamnstad (Port of Call) were all adaptations as well, although Bergman continued crafting original screenplays. In a sense, Bergman’s career

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began in earnest with 1949’s Fängelse (The Devil’s Wanton), his first true auteur work. In addition to directing his own original script, the feature also marked the introduction of a number of Bergman hallmarks including his patented emotional complexity, a fascination with the dynamics of marriage, and a willingness to experiment with the motion-picture form and structure. Törst (Three Strange Loves), based on a screenplay by Herbert Grevenius, followed in 1949, but within months Bergman was filming Till Glädje (To Joy), another original effort again exploring a disintegrating marriage. In 1950, Bergman began shooting Sommarlek (Summer Interlude), his breakthrough effort. Told extensively through flashback, the film hones in on a number of the themes which would continue to recur throughout his oeuvre, including the loss of artistic identity, the demise of love, and the slow decay of life, all explored with a newfound confidence and grace. The political thriller Sånt Händer Inte Här (This Can’t Happen Here) soon followed. of the relationships of man to God and death, a theme which remained at the center of his work for many years to come.

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Upon returning to work in 1952, he filmed the relatively lightweight Kvinnors Väntan (Secrets of Women) before turning to 1953’s Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika). With 1953’s Gycklarnas Afton (Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night), Bergman made his next significant leap. His first period piece, the film was his bleakest work to date, drawing from the breadth of his major influences (particularly 1930s French films and silent German cinema) to create a newly mature and distinctive visual sensibility. The sense of freedom so dominant throughout Gycklarnas Afton remained for 1954’s farcical En Lektion i Kärlek (A Lesson in Love). After 1955’s Kvinnodröm, Bergman created his next masterpiece, the intricate romantic comedy Sommarnattens Leende (Smiles of a Summer Night). Having hit his stride, Bergman began work on one of his most famed efforts, 1957’s Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal). The film which brought him international renown, it marked a turning point away from the romantic explorations of his earlier work toward an examination of the relationships of man to God and death, a theme which remained at the center of his work for many years to come. Bergman’s obsession with death continued in 1957’s brilliant Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries), starring Victor Sjöström as an aging professor reminiscing about the disappointments which tainted his life. After the somewhat slight Nära Livet (Brink of Life), Bergman helmed 1958’s gothic comedy Ansiktet (The Magician), a stunning return to form. The medieval setting of The Seventh Seal reappeared in 1960’s Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring), a controversial essay on rape which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was followed later that same year by Djävulens Öga (The Devil’s Eye). The outstanding Såsom i en Spegel (Through a Glass Darkly) was the next step in Bergman’s evolution, marking the beginning of his “chamber” style of photography essentially, a penchant for extreme close-ups designed to highlight the nuances of his actors’ faces to underscore a scene’s psychological intensity.

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a silent dance upon bleak shadows/ingmar bergman

Between 1944 and 2002 Bergman directed more than 40 films and wrote multiple screenplays for others. He was also a playwright.

In the wake of 1964’s För Att Inte Tala om Alla Dessa Kvinnor (All These Women), Bergman planned to mount a theatrical production of The Magic Flute, but instead fell prey to a viral infection which kept him out of action during the early months of 1965. He returned to the screen in late 1966 with Persona, an intense meditation on identity that remains his crowning masterpiece. In 1970, Bergman directed his first English-language film, The Touch. The masterful Viskningar och Rop (Cries and Whispers) followed in 1972, with the acclaimed television miniseries Scenes from a Marriage premiering in 1973. The small screen remained Bergman’s medium of choice for the next several years, with The Magic Flute in 1975 and Ansikte mot Ansikte (Face to Face) in 1976. That same year, he was arrested for alleged tax evasion, later leaving Sweden as a voluntary exile. Relocating to Munich,

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he began work on 1977’s The Serpent’s Egg, his first feature film in half a decade. After completing 1978’s Autumn Sonata, Bergman entered the 1980s with Aus dem Leben der Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes).

Two years later, he released the Oscar-winning Fanny och Alexander (Fanny & Alexander). He then turned strictly to television, premiering Efter Repetitionen (After the Rehearsal) in 1984, followed a year later by The Blessed Ones. He also maintained his busy theatrical schedule and in 1987 published an autobiography, Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern). In 1992, his script Den Goda Viljan (The Best Intentions) was filmed for television by Bille August; three years later, he announced his withdrawal from the stage, but by 1996 he was shooting the television drama Larmar och Gör Sig Till (In the Presence of a Clown). After years of inactivity following that project, Bergman in late 2002 broke his vow of cinematic retirement on one final occasion: a two-hour made-for-television sequel to the director’s 1973 masterpiece Scenes from a Marriage, which makes it Bergman’s last movie.

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NOT ED FILMS 1949 Thirst/Törst 1951 Summer Interlude/Sommarlek 1952 Secrets of Women/Kvinnors väntan 1953 Summer with Monika/Sommaren med Monika 1957 The Seventh Seal/Det sjunde inseglet Wild Strawberries/Smultronstället 1958 The Magician/Ansiktet 1960 The Virgin Spring/Jungfrukällan 1961 Through a Glass Darkly/Såsom i en spegel 1963 Winter Light/Nattvardsgästerna The Silence/Tystnaden 1966 Persona 1968 Hour of the Wolf/Vargtimmen 1972 Cries and Whispers/Viskningar och rop 1973 Scenes from a Marriage/Scener ur ett äktenskap 1982 Fanny and Alexander/Fanny och Alexander

Above are selected films from Bergman’s collection Film festival featured films italicized

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Winter light starts with a scene of a group of people in Church, and they’re not there because they want to, they are because they’re obliged to. the literal translation of the title which in Swedish

Not that the lead character of the Pastor Tomas Ericsson

means Holly Communion. The plot line for Winter

is in anyway based on Bergman’s father but some of the

Light is simple, the concepts and the ideas at play

events of the film are taken from events which his father

within the film are contrastingly huge, but the plot and

took part in. The story follows Tomas for a single day,

its execution remain remarkably singular. Winter Light

starting with a ten minute sequence as he gives holly

takes most of its strength from this rarest of rare virtues.

communion to the few members of his congregation

The film consolidates most of Bergman’s reoccurring

who’ve turned up. It is a fascinating prologue to the

themes into one film, the nature of existence, God’s

film because far from being boring we see the reactions

silence, and the meaning of love. In a time when

of those trying to sing or pray, they cough, look at their

Sweden, like the UK was abandoning religion,

watches, yawn — for them church isn’t something to

embarrassing modernity and becoming increasingly

attend because they want to, they attend because they

secular, Bergman remain adamantly attached to his

feel obliged to the numbers of those who feel obliged

favored theme of faith and God. The next natural step

are reducing rapidly. The community Tomas serves is

was to make a film about priesthood, what it means to

religiously damaged and uninterested in matters of

lead your flock, and what happens when the priest’s

faith. Afterwards Tomas is visited by Jonas (played by

beliefs and dedication to the church, begins to flounder

Max Von Sydow) and his wife, Jonas is afraid that the

as the numbers of those who attend mass dwindle and

Chinese will use nuclear weapons and destroy the world.

divide. Bergman was the son of a preacher, from this life defining factor, he took much of his inspiration.

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a silent dance upon bleak shadows/ingmar bergman

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27 Scenes from Winter Light

His irrational fear has a basis in the truth and because of this Jonas doesn’t know how to continue and he looks to Tomas for comfort. Tomas unfortunately is of little use to Jonas, since the death of his Tomas’ wife he can not reconcile himself with a God that does nothing, that sits back and watches the horrors unfold around them, who allows his wife to be taken from him at this time, from him of all people, a faithful servant of the lord. Jesse Kalin comments on the similarities between Jonas and Tomas in the book: The Films of Ingmar Bergman:

“ W hether it is God, lover, or parent, or even the world itself. Beyond the self there is no longer anything reliable, and meaning in life, our sense of value and purpose, even our delight in being alive, are lost to grief, anger, disappointment, loneliness, hurt. Before, meaning was simply there; now, what we had seems forever irretrievable, we are thrown into despair, and our spirit dies.”

Both men are inwardly centred, the fear of God, is replaced by indifference. Indifference towards God, indifference to the world - leads to self. Jonas isn’t worried about the world, he’s worried about himself, because without a stable world to fall back on he has only himself to rely on, self-resilience is insufficient for Jonas - it is not enough for him to survive believing only in himself. Tomas by comparison is not indifferent to those around him, but is indifferent to God, to whom all his notions of the world have been built up around.

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A scene from W inter Light

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81 min

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WRITER:

Ingmar Bergman

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PRODUCER:

Ingmar Bergman

CAST:

Ingrid Thulin Gunnar Björnstrand Gunnel Lindblom Max von Sydow

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—Time Out, Review

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“Never a comfortable film, it’s finely acted by a familiar Bergman ensemble, and the awesomely cold vistas form a perfect counterpoint to the spiritual freeze.”

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a silent dance upon bleak shadows/ingmar bergman

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the Seventh Seal is the first film of Bergman’s “middle period” as a filmmaker, a period characterized by reflection upon faith, doubt, and unbelief.

The Seventh Seal has haunted film aficionados, baffled and bored college students, inspired innumerable parodists, and challenged both believers and unbelievers for nearly half a century. Long considered one of the greatest films of all time, Bergman’s medieval drama of the soul can be difficult to watch but is impossible to forget. The film opens and closes with the passage from Revelation from which it takes its title: “When he broke open the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour” (Rev 8:1). “Silence in heaven” or rather the silence of heaven, the silence of God in the world — is Bergman’s ambitious theme, along with mortality and death, existential dread, and apocalyptic fears. The Seventh Seal is the first film of Bergman’s “middle period” as a filmmaker, a period characterized by reflection upon faith, doubt, and unbelief. In these

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films, the director can be seen working through the tension between the childhood faith of his strict Lutheran upbringing and his adult skepticism. During this period, having lost his faith in God, Bergman remained haunted by the horror of existence without God and faith, of life in the shadow of a death that is simply annihilation.

In The Seventh Seal more than any other film, Bergman confronts these issues with the directness of a medieval allegory. In fact, it is a medieval allegory, set in fourteenth-century Sweden, with one character embodying tortured doubt, another simple faith, still another defiant unbelief. Yet it is a medieval allegory for modern sensibilities and anxieties, after the loss of medieval faith.

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a silent dance upon bleak shadows/ingmar bergman

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31 Stills from The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal tells the story of a knight named Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) and his squire Jöns (Gunnar Bjönstrand), who have just returned from ten fruitless years in the Crusades to a Sweden in the throes of the black plague. There the knight is confronted by the specter of Death; and, in an image parodied from Woody Allen’s Love and Death to Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey to the lame Schwarzenegger action-comedy The Last Action Hero, the knight challenges Death to a game of chess. Though the film’s theme, the silence of God and the horror of death if there is no afterlife, is an essentially religious one, The Seventh Seal doesn’t really deal with religion or God as such, but with the place of God and religion in the human heart and human society.

“Its view of a seemingly godless landscape in the grip of plague is still bold and frightening.”

—John Monaghan, Detroit Free Press Review

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WRITER:

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PRODUCER:

Ingmar Bergman

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Gunnar Bjรถrnstrand Max von Sydow Bengt Ekerot

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The night had brought little relief from the heat, and at dawn a hot gust of wind blows across the colorless sea. The knight, Antonius Block, lies prostrate on some spruce branches spread over the fine sand. His eyes are

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wide-open and bloodshot from lack of sleep.

Nearby his squire Jons is snoring loudly. He has fallen asleep where he

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collapsed, at the edge of the forest among the wind-gnarled fir trees. His open mouth gapes towards the dawn, and unearthly sounds come from his throat.

At the sudden gust of wind, the horses stir, stretching their parched muzzles towards the sea. They are as thin and worn as their masters.

against the grime.

The knight returns to the beach and falls on his knees. With his eyes closed and brow furrowed, he says his morning prayers. His hands are clenched together and his lips form the words silently. His face is sad and bitter. He opens his eyes and stares directly into the morning sun which wallows up from the misty sea like some bloated, dying fish. The sky is gray and immobile, a dome of lead. A cloud hangs mute and dark over the western horizon. High up, barely visible, a seagull floats on motionless wings. Its cry is weird and restless. The knight’s large gray horse lifts its head and whinnies. Antonius Block turns around.

Behind him stands a man in black. His face is very pale and he keeps his hands hidden in the wide folds of his cloak.

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The knight has risen and waded into the shallow water, where he rinses his sunburned face and blistered lips. Jons rolls over to face the forest and the darkness. He moans in his sleep and vigorously scratches the stubbled hair on his head. A scar stretches diagonally across his scalp, as white as lightning

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Death

Are you prepared?

Knight

My body is frightened, but I am not.

Death

Well, there is no shame in that.

The knight has risen to his feet. He shivers. Death opens his cloak to place it around the knight’s shoulders.

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Knight

That I know.

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I have been walking by your side for a long time.

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I am Death.

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Bergman’s message in Hour of the Wolf is that we will all become the von Sydow character sooner or later.

And perhaps that’s the scariest thing of all.

Hour of the Wolf begins and ends with Ullmann talking into the camera, and the set-up is simple. After a title card soberly announces a story about the strange disappearance of an artist, Johan Borg, while he and his wife, Alma, sojourned on a barren, windswept island, Alma appears to give her side of the story, and she’s clearly giving an interview, as if to a TV reporter — it’s not one of Bergman’s interior monologues. Alma is clear-headed, a little sad, and pregnant. In spite of her husband just going “poof,” she announces that she’s going to stick around awhile before returning to the mainland. In her demeanor there’s a quiet acceptance of Johan’s fate. She’s not out there searching for him; she knows he’s really gone. There’s something shaky, however, under Alma’s quiet resolve to just hang around, and it’s clear she’s exhibiting a kind of shock. She looks and acts like a woman who’s needed to leave a man

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in order to save her sanity — it’s for her own safety, really and in the core of her being she’s all right with that, but, still, she thinks; what the hell happened? Could I have done something? Perhaps she’s not quite ready to accept the idea that Johan didn’t so much disappear into thin air, or get eaten by vampire ghosts, as just disappear into himself.

Hour of the Wolf has been described as Bergman’s only horror film and that’s not far from the mark, with creepy characters and imagery pervading the entire second half of the movie. At the same time, it’s a movie all too familiar out of the Bergman canon. His existential dread is palpable, as the fear of death and the great beyond and more are ultimately responsible for von Sydow’s condition. Bergman is a bit obvious about this: We will all become the von Sydow character sooner or later. And perhaps that’s the scariest thing of all.

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WRITER:

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PRODUCER:

Ingmar Bergman

CAST:

Max von Sydow Liv Ullmann Ingrid Thulin

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the silence is about the myriad ways in which communication can fail, the ways that speech and language can drive people apart rather than bringing them closer to mutual understanding. .

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has multiple meanings, resonances that cascade through

and earthy (Gunnel Lindblom), and the other sickly,

this puzzling, richly symbolic allegory. Bergman

intellectual, and introspective (Ingrid Thulin). They

considered calling the film God’s Silence, and the

are traveling to a strange and unfamiliar country with

absence of divinity and spirituality is certainly one of

Lindblom’s son Johan (Jörgen Lindström), while the

the title’s implications. This is particularly true since

convalescent sister grows steadily sicker, obviously

the film is the capstone of the so-called “faith trilogy,”

easing towards death.

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At the center of the film are two sisters, one sensual

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The title of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece The Silence

which cumulatively represents a process of moving further and further away from God, arriving here at a place where the deity simply doesn’t exist and is

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indeed never even invoked. In many ways, however, it

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is fortunate that Bergman settled on a more ambiguous

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title, because the film is about much more than the absence of faith: it is about the myriad ways in which

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communication can fail, the ways that speech and

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Scenes from The Silence

“Like so many of Bergman’s films, this work wanders between the pretentious and the profound.”

—Critic Review

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Ingmar Bergman directing Jรถrgen Lindstrรถm in The Silence, 1963

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K-16

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Our interview began with a wry smile from our subject, and a disarming greeting in which he reversed roles by asking the first question.

Ingmar Bergman: Well, are you depressed yet?

Playboy: Should we be?

Ingmar Bergman: Perhaps you haven’t been here long enough. But the depression will come. I don’t know why anybody lives in Stockholm, so far away from everything. When you fly up here from the south, it’s very odd.

First there are houses and towns and villages; but farther on there are just woods and forests and more woods and a lake, perhaps, and then still more woods with, just once in a while, a long way off, a house. And then, suddenly, Stockholm. It’s perverse to have a city way up here. And so here we sit, feeling lonely. We’re such a huge country; yet we are so few, so thinly scattered across it. The people here spend their lives isolated on their farms, and isolated from one another in their homes. It’s terribly difficult for them, even when they come to the cities and live close to other people; it’s no help, really. They don’t know how to get in touch, to communicate. They stay shut off. And our winters don’t help.

Playboy: How do you mean?

Ingmar Bergman: Well, we have light in the winter only from maybe eight-thirty in the morning till two-thirty in the afternoon. Up north, just a few hours from here, they have darkness all day long. No daylight at all. I hate the winter. I hate Stockholm in the winter. When I wake up during the winter ­— I always get up at six, ever since I was a child ­I look at the wall opposite my window. November, December, there is no light at all. Then, in January, comes a tiny thread of light. Every morning I watch that line of light getting a little bigger. This is what sustains me through the black and terrible winter: seeing that line of light growing as we get closer to spring.

Playboy: If that’s how you feel, why not leave Stockholm during the winter and work in the warmer climates of such film capitals as Rome or Hollywood?

Ingmar Bergman: New cities arouse too many sensations in me. They give me too many impressions to experience at the same time; they all crowd in on me. Being in a new city overwhelms me, unsettles me.

Playboy: There’ve been reports that you feel what you’ve called “the great fear” whenever you leave Sweden. Is that why you’ve never made a film outside the country?

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Playboy: You’re said to be no less indisposed to come into contact with outsiders even on your own sets in Stockholm, from which all visitors are barred. Why? Ingmar Bergman: Do you know what moviemaking is? Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you’re lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don’t come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you’re going to get your good ten minutes this time. Everything and everyone on a movie set must be attuned to finding those minutes of real creativity. You’ve got to keep the actors and yourself in a kind of enchanted circle. An outside presence, even a completely friendly one, is basically alien to the intimate process going on in front of him. Any time there’s an outsider on the set, we run the risk that part of the actors’ absorption, or the technicians’, or mine, is going to be impinged upon. It takes very little to destroy the delicate mood of total immersion in our work. We can’t risk losing those vital minutes of real creation. The few times I’ve made exceptions I’ve always regretted it.

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Ingmar Bergman: Not really; all that has very little to do with making movies. After all, actors and studios are basically the same all over the world. What worries me about making a film in another country is the loss of artistic control I might run into. When I make a film, I must control it from the beginning until it opens in the movie houses. I grew up in Sweden, I have my roots here, and I’m never frustrated professionally here, at least not by producers. I’ve been working with virtually the same people for nearly twenty years; they’ve watched me grow up. The technical demands of moviemaking are enslaving; but here, everything runs smoothly in human terms: the cameraman, the operator, the head electrician. We all know and understand one another; I hardly need tell them what to do. This is ideal and it makes the creative task always a difficult one easier. The idea of making a film for an American company is very tempting, for obvious reasons. But it’s not one’s first Hollywood film that’s so difficult, it’s the second. Work in another country, with more modern equipment but with my same crew, with the same relationship to my producers, with the same control over the film as I have here? I don’t think that’s very likely.

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Playboy: You’ve been criticized not only for barring and even ejecting intruders from your sets, but for outbursts of rage in which, reportedly, you’ve ripped phones off walls and thrown chairs through glass control booths. Is there any truth to these accounts?

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Ingmar Bergman: Yes, there is, or rather, was. When I was younger, much younger, like so many young men I was unsure of myself. But I was very ambitious. And when you’re unsure, when you’re insecure and need to assert yourself, or think you do, you become aggressive in trying to get your own way. Well, that’s what happened to me. In a provincial theatre where I was a new director. I couldn’t behave that way now and hope to keep the respect of my actors and my technicians. When I know the importance of every minute in a working day, when I realize the supreme necessity of establishing a mood of calm and security on the set, do you think I could, or would have any right to, indulge myself that way? A director on a movie set is a little like the captain of a ship; he must be respected in order to be obeyed. I haven’t behaved that way at work since I was maybe twenty-five or twenty-six.

Playboy: Yet these stories of temper tantrums continue to circulate in print.

Ingmar Bergman: Of course they do. Such stunts as ripping out telephones and hurling chairs around make the sort of copy that journalists love to give their editors and their readers. It’s more colourful to read about a violent temper than about someone instilling confidence in his actors by talking quietly to them. It’s to be expected that people will go on writing, and reading; this sort of nonsense about a man year after year. Do you begin to understand why I don’t like to talk to the press? You know, people also say I don’t like to see journalists, that I refuse to talk to them anymore. For once they are right. When I am nice to reporters, when I give them my time and I talk to them sincerely, they go off and print a lot of old gossip, or their editors throw it in, because they think those old stories are more entertaining than the truth. Take that cover story done on me a few years ago by one of those American magazines of yours.

Playboy: Time magazine?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, that’s it. My wife read it to me when it came out here. The man they described sounds like someone I’d like to meet, perhaps a little difficult, not such a nice person, yet still an interesting fellow. But I didn’t find myself in it. He was nobody I know.

Playboy: It’s been reported that you’ve had no less difficulty recognizing some of your own films when you read what the critics have to say about their merit and meaning. Is this true?

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Ingmar Bergman: Possibly, but I hope not because I think that making a film comprehensible to the audience is the most important duty of any moviemaker. It’s also the most difficult. Private films are relatively easy to make; but I don’t feel a director should make easy films. He should try to lead his audience a little further in each succeeding film. It’s good for the public to work a little. But the director should never forget who it is he’s making his film for. In any case, it’s not as important that a person who sees one of my films understands it here, in the head, as it is that he understands it here, in the heart. This is what matters.

Playboy: Whatever the nature of their understanding, a great many international critics concur in ranking you foremost among the world’s film makers. How do you feel about this approbation?

Ingmar Bergman: Success abroad has made my work much easier in Sweden. I don’t have to fight so much on matters really external to actual creative work. Thanks to success, I’ve earned the right to be left to my work. But, of course, success is so transitory; it’s such a flimsy thing to be á la mode. Take Paris; a few years ago I was their favourite director. Then came Antonioni. Who’s the new one? Who knows? But you know, when these young men of the nouvelle vague first started making films, I was envious of them, envious of their having seen all the films at the cinémathéque; film library, of their knowing all the techniques of moviemaking. Not anymore. On the technical side, I have become very sound. I have acquired confidence in myself. Now I can see other directors’ work and no longer feel jealous or afraid. I know I don’t have to.

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Playboy: Well, your films have been unfavorably reviewed for, among other reasons, the private meanings and obscurity of many of their episodes and much of their symbolism. Do you think these accusations may have some validity?

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Ingmar Bergman: I’ve given up reading what’s written either about me or about my films. It’s pointless to get annoyed. Most film critics know very little about how a film is made, have very little general film knowledge or culture. But we are beginning to get a new generation of film critics who are sincere and knowledgeable about the cinema. Like some of the young French critics, them I read. I don’t always agree with what they have to say about my films, but at least they’re sincere. Sincerity I like, even when it’s unfavorable to me.

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Playboy: Have their films influenced or instructed you in the development of your own moviemaking style and skills?

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Ingmar Bergman: I’ve had to learn everything about movies by myself. For the theatre I studied with a wonderful old man in Göteborg, where I spent four years. He was a hard, difficult man, but he knew the theatre, and I learned from him. For the movies, however, there was no one. Before the War I was a schoolboy, then during the War we got to see no foreign films at all, and by the time it was over I was working hard to support a wife and three children. But fortunately I am by nature an autodidact, one who can teach himself — though it’s an uncomfortable thing to be at times. Self-taught people sometimes cling too much to the technical side, the sure side, and place technical perfection too high. I think what is important, most important, is having something to say.

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Ingmar Bergman: Yes, I do. I have seen just a few examples of their work — only The Connection, Shadows and Pull My Daisy; I should like very much to see more. But from what I’ve seen, I like the American New Wave much more than the French. They are so much more enthusiastic, idealistic, in a way; cruder, technically less perfect and less knowing than the French film makers, but I think they have something to say, and that is good.

That is important. I like them.

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Playboy: Do you feel that America’s New Wave directors have something to say?

Ingmar Bergman: Very much. I think something very good will be coming from them soon. I don’t know why, but I feel it. Did you see Childhood of Ivan? There are extraordinary things in it. Some of it’s very bad, of course, but there is real talent and power.

Playboy: How do you feel about the Italian directors?

Ingmar Bergman: Fellini is wonderful. He is everything I’m not. I should like to be him. He is so baroque. His work is so generous, so warm, so easy, so unneurotic. I liked La Dolce Vita very much, particularly the scene with the father. That was good. And the end, with the giant fish. Visconti - I liked his first film, La Terra Trema; his best, I think. I liked Antonioni’s La Notte a great deal, too.

Playboy: Would you classify these among the best films you’ve ever seen?

Ingmar Bergman: No, right now I think I have three favourite contemporary films: The Lady with the Dog, Rashomon and Umberto D. Oh, yes, and a fourth: Mr. Hulot’s Holiday. I love that one.

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Playboy: Have you enjoyed the Russian films you’ve seen?

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Playboy: Let’s return to the subject of your own work, if we may. Where did you get the idea for your latest and most controversial film, The Silence?

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Ingmar Bergman: From a very big, fat old man. That’s right. Four years ago, when I was visiting a friend in a hospital here, I noticed from his window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park. As I watched, four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of him being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind, although I didn’t really know exactly why. It all grew from that seed, like most of my films have grown from some small incident, a feeling I’ve had about something, an anecdote someone’s told me, perhaps from a gesture or an expression on an actor’s face. It sets off a very special sort of tension in me, immediately recognizable as such to me.

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On the deepest level, of course, the ideas for my films come out of the pressures of the spirit; and these pressures vary. But most of my films begin with a specific image or feeling around which my imagination begins slowly to build an elaborate detail. I file each one away in my mind. Often I even write them down in note form. This way I have a whole series of handy files in my head. Of course, several years may go by before I get around to transforming these sensations into anything as concrete as a scenario. But when a project begins to take shape, then I dig into one of my mental files for a scene, into another for a character. Sometimes the character I pull out doesn’t get on at all with the other ones in my script, so I have to send him back to his file and look elsewhere. My films grow like a snowball, very gradually from a single flake of snow. In the end, I often can’t see the original flake that started it all.

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Playboy: In the case of The Silence, the “original flake” - that paralyzed old man - is certainly hard to discern in the explicit scenes of intercourse and masturbation that aroused such heated reactions, pro and con. What made you decide to depict sex so graphically on the screen?

Ingmar Bergman: For many years I was timid and conventional in the expression of sex in my films.

But the manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don’t want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them. There is much in common between a beautiful summer morning and the sexual act; but I feel I’ve found the cinematic means of expressing only the first, and not the other, as yet. What interests me more, however, is the interior anatomy of love. This strikes me as far more meaningful than the depiction of sexual gratification.

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Playboy: Do you agree with those who say that the American version of The Silence has been emasculated by the excision of almost two minutes of film from the erotic scenes?

Ingmar Bergman: I’d rather not comment on that.

Playboy: All right. But is it possible that this encounter with American censorship regulations will induce you to exercise a certain degree of self-censorship in future films?

Ingmar Bergman: No. Never.

Playboy: How did you persuade actresses Thulin and Lindblom to perform the actual acts depicted in the picture’s controversial scenes?

Ingmar Bergman: The exact same way I have gotten them, with all my other actors, to perform in any scene in any of my other films. We simply discuss quietly and easily what they must do. Some people claim I hypnotize my actors that I use magic to bring the performances out of them that I get. What nonsense! All I do is try to give them the one thing everyone wants, the one thing an actor must have: confidence in himself. That’s all any actor wants, you know. To feel sure enough of himself that he’ll be able to give everything he’s capable of when the director asks for it. So I surround my actors with an aura of confidence and trust. I talk with them, often not about the scene we’re working on at all, but just to make them feel secure and at ease. If that’s magic, then I am a sorcerer. Then, too, working with the same people, technicians and actors in our own private world for so many years together has facilitated my task of creating the necessary mood of trust.

Playboy: How do you reconcile this statement with the following declaration, which you made five or six years ago in discussing your film-making methods: “I’d prostitute my talents if it would further my cause, steal if there was no other way out, kill my friends or anyone else if it would help my art”?

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Playboy: We’re more interested in learning what you make of it.

Ingmar Bergman: Well, it was a difficult film, one of the hardest I’ve made so far. The audience has to work. It’s a progression from Through a Glass Darkly, and it in turn is carried forward to The Silence. The three stand together. My basic concern in making them was to dramatize the allimportance of communication, of the capacity for feeling. They are not concerned, as many critics have theorized, with God or His absence, but with the saving force of love. Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely dead. They don’t know how to love or to feel any emotions.

They are lost because they can’t reach anyone outside of themselves.

The man in Winter Light, the pastor, is nothing. He’s nearly dead, you understand. He’s almost completely cut off from everyone. The central character is the woman. She doesn’t believe in God, but she has strength; it’s the women who are strong. She can love. She can save with her love.

Her problem is that she doesn’t know how to express this love. She’s ugly, clumsy. She smothers him, and he hates her for it and for her ugliness. But she finally learns how to love. Only at the end, when they’re in the empty church for the three o’clock service that has become perfectly meaningless for him, her prayer in a sense is answered: he responds to her love by going on with the service in that empty country church. It’s his own first step toward feeling, toward learning how to love. We’re saved not by God, but by love. That’s the most we can hope for.

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Ingmar Bergman: Let’s say I was pretty defensive when I said that. When one is unsure of himself, when he’s worried about his position, worried about being a creative artist, he feels the need, as I said before, to express himself very strongly, very assertively, in order to withstand any potential criticism. But once you’ve finally become successful, you feel freed from the imperatives of success.

You stop worrying about striving, and can devote yourself to your work. Life becomes so much easier. You like yourself better. I find that I’m beginning to enjoy much that I never did before, to learn that there is much I haven’t seen. I feel a little older, not much, but a little and I like it. You know, I used to think that compromise in life, as in art, was unthinkable, that the worst thing a man could do was make compromises. But of course I did make compromises. We all do. We have to. We couldn’t live otherwise. But for a long time I wouldn’t admit to myself, although, of course, at the same time I knew it - that I, too, was a man who compromised. I thought I could be above it all. I have learned that I can’t. I have learned that what matters, really, is being alive. You’re alive; you can’t stand dead or half-dead people, can you? To me, what counts is being able to feel. That’s what Winter Light; the film of mine that people seem to understand least is trying to say. Now that you’ve been in Stockholm in midwinter for a few days, I think you can begin to understand, a little, what this film is about. What do you make of it?

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Playboy: How is this theme carried out in the other two films of the trilogy?

Ingmar Bergman: Each film, you see, has its moment of contact, of human communication: the line “Father spoke to me,” at the end of Through a Glass Darkly; the pastor conducting the service in the empty church for Marta at the end of Winter Light; the little boy reading Ester’s letter on the train at the end of The Silence. A tiny moment in each film but the crucial one. What matters most of all in life is being able to make that contact with another human. Otherwise you are dead, like so many people today are dead. But if you can take that first step toward communication, toward understanding, toward love, then no matter how difficult the future may be and have no illusions, even with all the love in the world, living can be hellishly difficult, then you are saved. This is all that really matters, isn’t it?

Playboy: Many reviewers felt that this same message — ­ that of salvation from solitude through love was also the theme of your best-known and most commercially successful film, Wild Strawberries, in which the old physician, as one critic wrote, “after a life of emotional detachment, learns the lesson of compassion, and is redeemed by this change of heart.”

Are they right?

Ingmar Bergman: But he doesn’t change. He can’t. That’s just it. I don’t believe that people can change, not really, not fundamentally. Do you? They may have a moment of illumination, they may see themselves, have awareness of what they are, but that is the most they can hope for. In Winter Light, the woman, the strong one -she can see.

She has her moment of awareness, but it won’t change their lives. They will have a terrible life. I wouldn’t make a film about what happens to them next for anything in the world. They’ll have to get along without me.

Playboy: Speaking of the character of Marta in Winter Light, you’ve been widely praised for your sympathetic depiction of, and insight into, the feminine protagonists in your films. How is it...

Ingmar Bergman: You’re going to ask how it is I understand women so well. Women used to interest me as subjects because they were so ridiculously treated and shown in movies. I simply showed them as they actually are, or at least closer to what they are than the silly representations of them in the movies of the Thirties and Forties. Any reasonably realistic treatment looked great by comparison with what was being done. In the past few years, however, I have begun to realize that women are essentially the same as men, that they both have the same problems. I don’t think of there being women’s problems or women’s stories any more than I do of there being men’s problems or men’s stories. They are all human problems. It’s people who interest me now.

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Playboy: Will your next film be in any way a continuation of the theme elaborated in your recent trilogy?

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Ingmar Bergman: No, my new film, and my last for a while, is a comedy, an erotic comedy, a ghost story, and my first film in color.

Ingmar Bergman: All the Women. They may like it in America; the theme song is Yes, We Have No Bananas. It amuses me, anyway. I’ve already told one Swedish writer that I’m hoping it will start the Bergman Ballyhoo Era. It’s not long since I finished the final cutting. You know, I don’t at all mind editing or cutting my films. I don’t have any of this love-hate feeling that some directors have toward cutting their own work. David Lean told me once that he can’t bear the task of cutting, that it literally makes him sick. I don’t feel that way at all. I’m completely unneurotic in that respect.

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Ingmar Bergman: Two years, probably. I want to immerse myself in my work as director at the Royal Dramatic Theatre here. Theatre fascinates me for several reasons: for one thing, it’s so much less demanding on you than making films. You’re less at the mercy of equipment and the demand for so many minutes of footage every day. You aren’t nearly so alone. It’s between you and the actors, and later on, the audience. It’s wonderful -the sudden meeting of the actor’s expression and the audience’s response. It’s all so direct and alive. A film, once completed, is inalterable; in the theatre you can get a different response from every performance. There’s constant change, always the chance to improve. I don’t think I could live without it.

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FÅRÖ

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Ingmar Bergman always had a huge international audience, but the accessibility to his surroundings were mainly exclusive to people who lived around him, hence, the Swedish audience and if lucky, maybe the European. Since 2009 there has been a celebration taking place in Fårö Island to celebrate Bergman’s legendary accomplishments, but there hasn’t been enough publicity; especially when it comes to North American audience. A Silent Dance upon Bleak Shadows film festival is encouraging and bringing people from San Francisco; one of the largest cities in

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the United States, and art cities in the world to celebrate Bergman’s life and accomplishments. All movies during the festival will be screening with English subtitles and all handouts will also be featured in English. The beauty of this festival not only lies in getting to know Bergman, but also experience the unique environment that inspired his award-winning movies.

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Sudersandsbion (Sudersand Cinema)

FÅRÖSUND

Sudersandsbion (Sudersand Cinema) Sudersand cinema is where the festival is taking place in Fårö . This cinema was a barn that was turned later into a cinema in Bergman’s age. In this cinema Bergman and Sven Nykvist, Sweden’s greatest directors did some work during the 60s. Today, the

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other interesting locations in Fårö that relate to Bergman.

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screened there, and will be screening starting July 14, 2017. The cinema is close to

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FILMS SCHEDULE All films will be screening in Sudersand cinema in Fårö island.

FRIDAY (14 July, 2017) 12:00 PM

Festival opens.

Getting there early is a plus for bike and car parking available.

There will be a shuttle available for guests around the area.

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Lunch will be served, Swedish live music, with a collection of Ingmar Bergman’s favorite Bach soundtracks.

3:00 PM Screening at Sudersand cinema to start off the festival.

5:00 PM

Commentary on Winter light, what inspired Bergman, and how this film influenced the rest of his filmography.

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all movies will be screening at Sudersand cinema between July 14 & 15.2017 6:30 PM Screening at Sudersand cinema.

8:30 PM

Light dinner and variety of beverages served.

10:30 PM

Festival closes for the day.

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Festival opens.

Parking and shuttles will be available all day.

Food, drinks and music available.

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3:00 PM Screening at Sudersand cinema.

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6:30 PM Screening at Sudersand cinema.

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Dinner, live music, and open mic around the audience of notable film accomplishments by Bergman.

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ABOUT FÅRÖ ISLAND Fårö island is also the place where Bergman lived and worked for long periods of his life, he lived in Fårö for around 40 years.

Ingmar Bergman, the genius film maker from Sweden, lived at the tiny island Fårö on the northern edge of Gotland.

Fårö is a small island located in the southeastern coast of Sweden and north of Gotland island. What makes Fårö unique is its isolation from everywhere else, and how its population kept it this way. Fårö has a population of fewer than 600 and is mostly a summer resort. It has no banks, medical services or police., and can be reached by airplane or ferries. Bergman first came to Fårö on a stormy April day in 1960. He had reluctantly agreed to Svensk

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Filmindustri’s suggestion to look at Fårö as a possible location for Through a Glass Darkly. Bergman had already pencilled in the Orkney Island outside Scotland’s north coast as the perfect setting for the film. To put an end to the discussions he visited Fårö in order to have a reason to definitely decide on the Orkneys. The meeting with barren island on Gotland’s northern point was overwhelming. “If one wished to be solemn, it could be said that I had found my landscape, my real home; if one wished to be funny, one could talk about love at first sight,” he wrote in his autobiography Laterna Magica. As well as Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman would make three feature films, a TV series, two documentary films and a short film on Fårö.

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is also the place where Bergman lived and worked for long periods of his life, he lived in Fårö for around 40 years, and he died in July 2007 at the age of 89 and was buried at the cemetary of the Fårö Church.

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“ Noted even in February 1967 that I’m working on an idea of Fårö as the Kingdom of the Dead. Someone comes wandering in across the island longing for something that’s Several along the road. Light, frightening, –far away.

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Fårö island is an isolated island but this also has it’s own beauty. Movies were a big part of Bergman’s life, and left a great impact on the island itself. From places some of his movies were filmed at to the beauty of relaxing on the summer beach, Fårö island is filled with attractive must-see spots. Here are some:

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Fårö Church

Digerhuvud Rauks

Ingmar’s last wish was to be buried on Fårö together

The stone stacks at Digerhuvud are amazing as it feels

with his wife Ingrid. Bergman also chose the site of his

like you walk around inside the stone at times rather

own grave; beautifully situated with a view out over

than around it like being in a giant bowl. The road

Svens and Hammars. It is located close to the cinema

there runs along the sea a good while and you have

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parking places there and there as the area is quite stretched out. Despite being a nature reserve you are allowed to collect fossils.

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PLACES T O V ISIT

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Lighthouse in Fårö island

Ingmar Bergman Sites

Located conveniently near Sudersand cinema and the

Bergman moved to Fårö in the 1960’s as here he found

magnificent beaches of Fårö. It’s also surrounded by the

settings for several of his films in the very special seaside

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Fårögården Bed & Breakfast or Hostel

. island’s shops and restaurants, and Sylvis Döttrar’s well

light and with old fashioned farms and spooky stone

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stacks to add flavor to the unfolding dramas. He moved to the part of the island called Dämba in the south-east, but every time you tried asking a local for directions,

Helgumannen Helgumannen is probably the most famous of all the famous Gotland fishing villages and it is stunning in

they would send you in the opposite direction, that is how much Bergman fitted the Fårö people’s mentality.

its simplicity, thrown out on the deserted beach with ancient huts and boats. A place for real contemplation.

Just sit down and breathe.

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USED SOURCES

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My Life in Film by Ingmar Bergman.

“Screenmancer Exclusive: Ingmar Bergman Official Tribute by Jon Asp.” “Kommande.” Ingmar Bergman Face to Face.

“Bergmanorama: Ingmar Bergman: Bergman on Bergman: Demons and Childhood Secrets: An Interview (Jörn Donner).”

“The Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb).” Seventh Seal, The Script at IMSDb. “Playboy Interview: Ingmar Bergman (Cynthia Grenier).” 1964.

“Ingmar Bergman - About This Person - Movies & TV - NYTimes.com.”

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“The Enchanted Island That Bergman Called Home.” - NYTimes.com. 07 Oct. 2007.