Spanning three decades, the collaboration between director Ingmar Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist ranks as one of the greatest teamings in cinematic history. The two men's names are irrevocably linked in the minds of the world's film scholars, who credit the Swedish duo with expanding (or, more accurately, exploding) the parameters of the medium. The magnitude of their achievements cannot be understated; the pair's work together helped to redefine motion pictures as an art form, opening up limitless vistas of visual creativity, intellectual insight and raw emotional impact.

Bergman began his artistic career in Swedish theatre circles, and made his debut as a motion picture director with the 1945 feature Crisis. Nykvist, a native of Stockholm who had studied at the city's Municipal School for Photographers, first worked with Bergman in 1953 on Sawdust and Tinsel (a.k.a. The Naked Night), sharing cinematographic duties with Goran Strindberg and Hilding Bladh (who had trained both Nykvist and Strindberg). Nykvist's partnership with the great director began in earnest on the classic 1959 film The Virgin Spring, and subsequently produced such masterworks as Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), The Silence (1963), Persona (1966), The Hour of the Wolf (1968), The Passion of Anna (1970), Cries and Whispers (1972), The Magic Flute (1973), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Face to Face (1976), Autumn Sonata (1978), The Serpent's Egg (1978) and Fanny and Alexander (1983). The cinematographer earned Academy Awards for both Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander.

A consummate film artist, Bergman held high standards for his cameramen. As he noted in the seminal text Bergman on Bergman, "For me, two things about a cameraman are fundamental. The first is that he shall be technically absolutely perfect, and at the same time first-class on lighting. The second [is] that he must be first-class at operating his own camera. I don't want any camera operators on my films. The cameraman and I come to an agreement about what is to be included in the image. We also go through everything to do with lighting and atmosphere in advance. And then the cameraman does everything in the way we've agreed on."

Bergman went on to note that his collaboration with Nykvist rose from the ashes of his long partnership with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, who shot many of the director's acclaimed early films, including Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1956) and Wild Strawberries (1957). Bergman's comments on this break are telling, revealing that talent alone cannot always ensure a durable bond: "Little by little, Gunnar Fischer's ideas and mine parted company, and this meant that the solidarity, the feeling of personal contact and interplay between us, which was so necessary to me, became slack–largely, perhaps, because I became more and more domineering, more and more tyrannical, and more and more aware that I was humiliating him. Sven Nykvist is a much tougher personality. I've never had any reason to be nasty to him."

Further analyzing his relationship with Nykvist, Bergman noted that the two eventually reached an almost telepathic state of synchronicity. "We've developed a private language, so to speak. We hardly need to say a word. Before the filming begins we go through the film very carefully, to see how we imagine the lighting, check the lighting conditions, and then solve all lighting problems together.

"The light in the images is something I hardly think can ever be attributed to just one of us," the director added. "Perhaps I can put it like this: the impulse comes from me, and the enormously careful, subtle and technically clever execution is all Sven Nykvist's work."

Nykvist, for his part, has consistently credited Bergman with opening his eyes to the full emotional range of lighting. As he told American Cinematographer in 1972, "I owe a great debt to Ingmar, for he gave me my passion for light. Without him I would have remained just another technical cameraman with no great awareness of the infinite possibilities of lighting. Today, I hate purely technical camerawork. I have a great sense that every picture I work on is different and demands a different approach. And I believe that the audience, supposedly indifferent to lighting subtleties, and responsive only to acting and story, will appreciate our work. People must do more than see a motion picture. They must have a feeling for it, and my experience has told me that they appreciate and are held spellbound by a certain mood that is created for them by the proper utilization of light. That is the key to it all. That is what photography is all about."

Throughout their careers, both Bergman and Nykvist have consistently championed the virtues of simplicity. In Bergman on Bergman, the director told his interviewers that he admired his cameraman's ability to see past the logistical aspects of film production and pinpoint the narrative core of a story. "More often than not, it's the people who know nothing or very little who use the most elaborate apparatus," he said. "It's their ignorance that complicates the whole procedure. Take a cameraman like Sven Nykvist, a technically clever cameraman, one of the cleverest in the world. All he needs to work is three lamps and a little greaseproof paper. One part of knowing what to do is simply the ability to eliminate a mass of irrelevant technical complications, to be able to peel away a mass of superficial apparatus."

Indeed, after being named as the recipient of the ASC's International Award in 1996, Nykvist recalled the stripped-down pleasures of his early work with Bergman, who in those days was making films for $100,000 with crews of 8 to 10 people and a handful of actors. "That was a very nice way to work," the cameraman related. "Everyone did everything. Everyone helped everyone else. It was like a family."

In his 1972 interview with AC, Nykvist confirmed that the intervening years of experience hadn't changed his fundamental principles on the set. "I see a great many films and I have come to the conclusion that a large number of pictures today are overlit. Technical perfection in terms of camera and lenses seems to have been matched by a desire to fill the screen with lots of perfectly placed and calculated light. I just don't go along with this, and I have Ingmar Bergman to thank for letting me experiment with a kind of cinematography which, by utilizing true light where possible, seems to me to do greater justice to the medium.

"Of course, Bergman is unique," Nykvist conceded. "I have had the privilege of working with him since 1953 and, through him, have learned to better understand the ultimate possibilities of cinematography. Because he had worked in the theatre, he was intensely interested in light and its uses and how it can be applied to creating a given atmosphere. Bergman has been making pictures for many years, and he knows everything about the camera as a technical instrument He has a mind and an imagination that takes in not only the limits of poetic imagery, but–equally–the scientific aspects of filmmaking. He has done away with 'nice' photography and has shown us how to find truth in camera movement and in lighting."