This description of Ingmar Bergman's The Silence (1962) can be said to summarize the often clichéd conception of what is "typically Bergmanian": a Lutheran, not to say Puritan, streak ("body and mind totally irreconcilable"); isolation and lack of communication between people ("people who can't talk to each other"); and general gloominess ("the sun setting at 2 p.m."). However, Young considers these ingredients to be not only "typically Bergmanian" but apparently also "typically Swedish." Who if not a Swede, he asks rhetorically, would make a movie like The Silence?

Young sets out from an implied assumption, namely that the correlation between Bergman's world and the world we call reality–in this case the Swedish reality–is in some way "positive," direct, and unproblematic. Wild Strawberries, for example, is seen as depicting Sweden's "favourite misery":

In every country, to be sure, there are people who have abdicated from life, "the world forgetting and by the world forgot." But in no other country to my knowledge are there so many people who have turned their backs on society while remaining in it. This ancient ruin, Mrs. Borg, deserted by her son and ignored by her grandsons, this undoting father who has made loans to his son at exorbitant rates of interest, and the son, declaring to his wife, "My need is to be dead. Absolutely, totally dead," are all familiar Swedish phenomena [my italics]. So, at the end, Isak Borg is sentenced to loneliness....To no Swede would isolation be a capital punishment. Ensamhet: loneliness. Their favourite misery. They cherish it; they hug it to themselves, they write odes to it...[170].

It cannot be expressed more clearly than this: Wild Strawberries (1957) is a kind of spiritual documentary about Sweden and the Swedes' perverted yearning for loneliness.

The fact that a naïve, one-dimensional comparison like this between the "Bergmanian" and the "Swedish," between fiction and reality, flourishes in more popular contexts is perhaps not so surprising. The cinema is thought of as a mirror with a near-mystical ability to reflect reality "as is," or as a window to the world, a transparent, art-less window where–as in Magritte's famous painting–there is no ontological boundary between the reproduction and the represented. The cinema is regarded as a substitute for reality, instead of as a parallel, an addition.

This approach to cinema is probably due to its "built-in" realism. For one thing, it reproduces objects photographically, and, even more than a realistic novel or painting, it conveys the impression–the illusion–of "capturing" the world and reality; and, for another, it is a medium of moving pictures, which further enhances this illusion. But this is, of course, no excuse for treating cinema as if its very nature or essence lies in this illusion, in this purely photographic resemblance to reality.

The representation and the represented are different phenomena. As we know, a copy is not the same as the original, a map not the same as the territory. A picture–even a moving picture–is never reducible to its original; on the contrary, it is always something beyond, something more than the tangible object that it depicts. Film is a language, not a "reality"; it is distinction, not resemblance. As with all other arts, film gives reality a meaning it does not intrinsically have. This distinction between cinema as language and as representation must consequently serve as the starting point if we want to compare Bergman's films and Swedish reality.

One critic who understands this distinction is Jörn Donner, in his book on Ingmar Bergman.² Donner bases his analysis on the transformation of Swedish society during the past forty years, a period when Christian norms and solidarity have increasingly yielded to more secular norms. But since these new norms did not succeed in filling the void and replacing the old norms, a spiritual unrest emerged in Swedish society. One symptom of this unrest, according to Donner, is Bergman's films, which are all–even the most idyllic ones–characterized by a sense of crisis (see page 11). The Christian element in Bergman's films becomes not a direct expression of "Swedish" religiousness but a paradoxical sign of the lack of religiousness. It expresses less a presence than an absence: the void that "has remained" after material welfare has been taken care of. Or, as Bergman himself is supposed to have said, "When all the problems seem to be solved, then the difficulties come."³

The Lutheran Christianity in Bergman's films thus becomes a paradoxical expression of the fact that Sweden is one of the most secularized countries in the world, something that most Swedes don't give a thought to. In the eyes of foreign interpreters, Bergman's films seem at their most Swedish precisely when they are at their most un-Swedish!

Swedish Nature–and Girls

Constantly trying to prove a connection between Bergman's movies on the one hand and a supposed Swedish reality on the other hand is not only extremely problematic but also quite limiting. The danger is that people will use the films as a kind of Rorschach test in order to express an opinion about something else, about something "Swedish" outside of the films.

In searching for the specifically Swedish in Bergman's films, it is thus relevant to place them in their own sphere: Swedish culture and its traditions. This is especially relevant given the fact that there are probably few film directors so thoroughly rooted in their own country's artistic traditions as Bergman is (which he is the first to admit).

Bergman has especially strong ties with Swedish silent film. As Leif Furhammar has pointed out, his roots in the past are stronger than his own influence on the younger generation of Swedish directors.⁴

Perhaps the most characteristic feature of Swedish silent films–which made them world-famous–was that they brought nature into the dramatic action. (Remember that at that time it was still relatively unusual to film outdoors and even more unusual to take artistic advantage of the setting.)

Victor Sjöström's Terje Vigen (1917) and The Outlaw and His Wife (1918; also known as You and I), for example, are famous for their magnificent images of nature and for the way they created an interaction between man and nature. Equally renowned is Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure (1919),⁵ based on a story by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Selma Lagerlöf, especially the scene in which the women trek across the ice in a snowstorm, carrying the dead heroine.

A similar feeling for the moods and interaction between man and nature is perhaps especially evident in Bergman's early films, in which the Swedish summer plays a prominent part. The titles themselves reveal this: Illicit Interlude (1950), Summer with Monika (1952; U.S. title Monika), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).

In these early films the summer landscape tends to be either a realistic background to the action or, as foreground, the object of lyrical descriptions of nature. In either case, nature has great intrinsic value and exists largely for its own sake. Or in critic Marianne Höök's graphic words:

...summer is the main character, the inviting semi-dusk of the summer night, the glittering water, the shadow of a boat across the bottom, a fishing rod in a rowboat, the peacocks dragging their vanity between the trees in the white nocturnal light....⁶

Just as during the silent-movie period, this Bergmanian feeling for nature was interpreted–especially abroad–as very Swedish, even exotic.

In this context, keep in mind that Bergman's early movies were released around the same time as the worldwide triumph of Arne Mattsson's One Summer of Happiness (1951), which was furnished with similar stage decor: the bright Swedish summer night and, of course, Swedish girls, i.e. Swedish "sin." The fact is that Bergman's "stage decor" attracted particular attention from the critics.

There is something about Swedish girls like Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson, something that goes straight to the heart of all men; they have some kind of mystical chemical attraction which withstands every analytical effort.⁷

This British (and most likely male) reviewer was obviously so enchanted that he almost declared himself bankrupt as a critic!

Also indicative of this attitude were the titles chosen in the United States for Bergman's movies, even those that had nothing to do with summer and "sin." The film known in Britain as Waiting Women (1952) became the mysteriously enticing Secrets of Women; the innocent Summer Games (1950), the original Swedish title, became Summer Interlude in the U.K., only to evolve into the sinful Illicit Interlude in America. Even the fairly complex film known in Britain as Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) became The Naked Night in the United States.

The Dream of Summer

The sensuous beauty of Swedish summer nature and of the summer girls in Bergman's movies of the fifties has great intrinsic value. But just as in the Swedish silent films, these images of nature are charged with meanings that go beyond their documentary status. An example of this is in Monika, which is about two young people spending the summer in the archipelago outside Stockholm. The plot follows the changes in nature. With its glittering water, its space and light, the archipelago in summer becomes a dream of happiness and freedom. When the couple returns to the city and reality, not only the summer but also their love is over.

A similar contrast is found in Illicit Interlude, but here Bergman's imagery takes on greater weight through the roles of time and memory. The story is told using a flashback technique and is about a young woman, Marie, and her development from a young girl into a maturing artist. The memory sequences, which describe summers Marie spent with a student, Henrik, are dominated by space and light, as in Monika. The scenes from the present are consistently gloomy and confined: dark city streets, an autumn storm tearing through naked branches, rain beating down. In other words, the passage of time and the changes that accompany it are depicted through changes in nature: Youth stands against aging, innocence against experience, play against seriousness; summer becomes the foremost sign of a past, of a time relentlessly gone. It becomes the very image of a paradise lost.

Characteristically, Illicit Interlude includes, for the first time, something that became a recurrent symbol of a summer paradise in Bergman's films. When Marie first meets Henrik, she takes him to her secret wild-strawberry patch. There they crawl around on all fours like children in a presexual Eden.

Bergman returns to the wild strawberries in the famous sequence of The Seventh Seal (1956) in which Mia offers wild strawberries with milk to the Knight: "I shall carry this memory between my hands as if it were a bowl filled to the brim with fresh milk," he solemnly says. For one precious moment he has escaped the struggle with his silent god and has found a paradise on earth.

The next year strawberries found their way into the very title of a Bergman film: Wild Strawberries. As in Illicit Interlude, the inner world of the main character is shown through the mechanism of flashbacks, and again wild strawberries are associated with memories and dreams and with a lost paradise where everything is drenched in white summer light. In the words of the main character, Isak Borg: "The clear reality of the day faded into the even clearer images of memory, which rose before my eye with the strength of a real event."

In the film's last dream sequence, the old professor sees himself sitting in the wild strawberry patch with his first love, Sara. "No more wild strawberries," she says sadly, and above them the clouds gather. When there are no more wild strawberries left, the clear light of summer, too, disappears. But then she leads him through a dark forest, and suddenly in front of him is an inlet with water smooth as glass. On a sunlit peninsula on the other side, his parents, dressed in white, sit and wave at him. And so the movie ends, with a close-up of the blissful face of the professor: He has finally found peace, found his way back to his wild-strawberry patch and his paradise.

Thus summer and nature are central visual concepts to Bergman. It could be argued that they are part of the pattern of crisis situations in his films. "Happiness" or "freedom"–or whatever we want to call it–is fleeting; it is only a respite, a moment's grace, always threatened and doomed to disappear. But, says Donner:

Foreign critics have interpreted this in a more than necessarily complicated manner. They have sought the symbolic meaning of the summer theme and forgotten its actual one. They have not known what summer in Scandinavia implies....[It is] mirrored in the lives of the people, in the dream of freedom, which is almost always a summer dream.

And he adds: "...the artist who chooses this subject is not original, finds no new symbols" (73).

Certainly it is true that the Bergman summer, to a degree, coincides with the summer of Swedish reality; certainly as such it is a cliché: short, intense, and always threatened by autumn.

But what is interesting, after all, is the charged meaning of this "Swedishness" in the film's fictive universe. This can, of course, apply to all art, but especially to that of such a pronounced auteur as Bergman, whose work constitutes a universe in which the parts are more closely related to its own fictive wholeness than to anything outside of it. Or, as Dusan Makavejev has put it: "Bergman's work is actually inimitable; for in spite of the fact that he repeatedly uses the same visual clichés, these Bergmanian clichés cannot be found in other films."⁸

Capturing the Invisible

The fact that the summer in Bergman's films is charged in accordance with a specifically Bergmanian mythology is shown by the way Bergman uses the summer light, that light which Marianne Höök refers to when she speaks of Bergman's pronounced feeling for "colouristic effects in black and white." She mentions Smiles of a Summer Night as an example: It "has in its extreme whiteness all the nuances of a colour film and a joy in storytelling which is seldom found in movies but often in painting" (75).

We rarely notice how Bergman turns inside out those positive meanings which, in both reality and fiction, usually are associated with this "extreme whiteness."

Take, for example, the famous nightmare sequence at the beginning of Wild Strawberries, with its overexposed images and strong contrasts of light and shade. This overexposure admittedly leads the mind to a now rather threadbare expressionistic tradition with origins in the German cinema of the twenties. But in contrast to this tradition, which involved films made completely in the studio, Bergman's nightmare sequences are obviously filmed outdoors. The sharp contrasts between light and shade suggest a scorching, brightly lit street in the midday sun. The light–that positive summer light–has been transformed into its opposite.

Another example from the same film is the scene in which the professor witnesses a rendezvous between his wife and a man. The scene takes place in a big, dark forest, but, characteristically, in a brightly sunlit glade. The whole situation becomes an ironic idyll: summer as a dream has been transformed into summer as a nightmare.

Something similar also happens in The Virgin Spring (1959), in which a young maiden is raped on a naked sunlit hill. There are no dark, ominous clouds, but only a blinding, devastating light, which stands in sharp contrast to the journey on horseback depicted earlier, in which the light was soft and gentle, like the young birch trees and flowery meadows alongside the young maiden's path.

Through a Glass Darkly (1960) and Winter Light (1961/62) take place in extremely isolated environments–a barren island and a desolate country church–which become concrete images of an inner landscape: of the lack of communication, of the silence between God and man, between man and man. (This spiritualization of nature is also characteristic of Swedish poetry and landscape painting.) This visual asceticism, this lack of nature and milieu, is, to use Birgitta Steene's words, part of Bergman's "Gothic quality. "⁹

An example of the lack of "normal" depiction of environment is the way in which Bergman chooses to begin many of his films. Thus Fanny and Alexander (1982) begins with a series of images of different objects–a statue, a window, a tree–accompanied by the clear, ringing sound of a clock.

These are far from being ordinary establishing shots. Rather, they are charged with a totally opposite meaning: They form an entrance or door to a completely different world.

As so often with Bergman, they are about events not visible to the eye, but, quite paradoxically, they must be shaped and experienced through the eye. It is a matter of capturing the invisible with the most visible of media.

Literary Tradition

Apart from the silent-movie tradition, Bergman is very close to Swedish literature and theatre. In Donner's words: "No director has ever come to films with such a great reliance on literature" (153).

In The Seventh Seal, Bergman has chosen to shape his depiction of modern religious problems according to the schematic pattern of medieval morality. Here are purely allegorical features, such as the chess game with Death, and the characters–the Knight, Death, Mia, and Jof–have all the features of Christian moral archetypes.

Even when the plot takes place in the present, Bergman's films–especially the earlier ones–tend to have a touch of allegorical polish. In his 1944 film Torment, written by Bergman and directed by Alf Sjöberg, the Devil is found in the shape of the sadistic Latin teacher, the knight is a student, and the young maiden is the student's girlfriend.

The result is a peculiar mixture of the abstract and the concrete, the metaphysical and the realistic. This oscillation is perhaps part of Bergman's stylistic uniqueness, which he has gradually refined. One example is Fanny and Alexander, in which the most fantastic events are told in a seemingly straightforward, simple, and "realistic" way.

Here are found all kinds of Ovidian metamorphoses and mysteriously Swedenborgian correspondences across time and space; people and places meet and merge as in a dream and change shape. This is done, however, without the camera commenting and without making use of overexposure or other clichéd transitions to indicate the difference between dream and reality: Style and content have become one.

This is one of the film's themes: that dreams and the inexplicable and magical are in the midst of us, in the midst of everyday life and reality. Or, as Aron, son of Isak the Jew, says: "We are surrounded by realities, one outside of the other." But just as in Bergman's visual style, the cracks are invisible.

Bergman shares this mixture of realism and visual delusion with some of the most prominent figures of Swedish literary realism, including Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793-1866), August Strindberg (1849-1912), and Hjalmar Bergman (1883-1931), who all possessed a feeling for the sensual and the grotesque, the realistic and the dreamlike.¹⁰

Bergman's films exhibit other similarities with these authors. Especially in his earlier films, there are confrontations–reminiscent of Hjalmar Bergman–between a corrupt and cynical parental generation and an unspoiled and optimistic youth. Ingmar Bergman's movies in general have much of the earlier Bergman's pessimistic view of man as a puppet, manipulated and controlled by outside forces. Even in a cheerful film like Smiles of a Summer Night the characters, as Donner points out, move like marionettes in the game of love (128). And is there not also in this film a touch of Hjalmar Söderberg, the Swedish turn-of-the-century novelist who wrote that the only sure things in life are carnal pleasures and the incurable solitude of the soul?

According to Bergman himself, the closest parallels between his films and his literary antecedents are with the works of August Strindberg. There is the same unromantic nakedness in their descriptions of relations between the sexes, and perhaps some of Strindberg's views on women can be found in the films as well.

To be sure, Bergman's women, like the nature depicted in his films, are not merely "themselves" and should therefore not be judged in psychological-realistic terms. In The Silence, for example, the two female main characters are components in a uniquely Bergmanian mythology and as such represent opposing concepts: intellect vs. feeling, soul vs. body, "masculine" vs. "feminine." But as feminist-inspired critics have pointed out, it is striking how often even these female concepts are either vigorous sexual beings or–if they are of the more "intellectual" type–neurotic and frigid.¹¹

Bergman's films also contain direct, creative borrowings from Strindberg's plays. The most obvious one is perhaps Isak Borg's dream in Wild Strawberries. He finds himself back in school and is declared incompetent by the examiner, who also accuses him of "some minor offenses": "insensitivity, selfishness, and ruthlessness." This is obviously inspired by A Dream Play. In the Strindberg drama, the Officer, who, like Isak Borg, is being awarded an honorary doctorate, is tested on his multiplication tables and fails. (We cannot help being reminded of the lawyer in A Dream Play, who is asked by the daughter of the god Indra what the worst thing about life on earth is. He replies: "Repetition. Doing things again. Going back." This is exactly what Isak Borg has to do–go back, remember, and look inside himself.)

Even the structure of Wild Strawberries is similar to that of A Dream Play, because Bergman, like Strindberg, uses the free associations and floating boundaries of the dream technique. In Fanny and Alexander, Bergman has the grandmother read aloud from the Author's Note to A Dream Play: "Anything can happen, everything is possible and plausible. Time and space do not exist. Against an insignificant background, the imagination spins and weaves new designs." These words become an aesthetic credo, not only for Fanny and Alexander, but for all Bergman's cinematic works: the film as dream play, the dream as film play.

Typically European

Strindberg, however, lies outside the boundaries of Swedish culture. And, like Strindberg, Bergman very much belongs to a European literary tradition; just think of the artistic conflict in, for example, The Naked Night (Sawdust and Tinsel), The Magician (1958), and Persona (1965), which also pervades twentieth-century literature. The metaphysical problems in Bergman's films, which though couched in Lutheran terms do not express anything specifically Swedish, by their very nature are universal. To exaggerate a bit, they express not so much belief, as doubt, perhaps an eternally human and existential state of crisis, a revolt against an absolute authority who might be God, fellow human beings, or marriage. "Hell is other people...."

In this context, do not forget that Bergman's films, especially those of the forties, are obviously coloured by the literary and philosophical movement then current in Europe (which in Sweden found expression in the "faithlessness" of the time). In the centre stood, not social, but abstract beings–Sisyphos, K, suffering Humanity.¹² The Bergmanian conceptualization of people and situations displays similarities not only with a specifically Swedish cultural heritage but also with a specifically European tradition.

And perhaps, as Marianne Höök points out, this lack of anchorage in a Here and Now at least partly explains Bergman's international success (55). Thus, it is interesting that the film which brought about Bergman's international breakthrough by winning a prize at the Cannes Festival in 1956 was Smiles of a Summer Night, though this seemingly very "Swedish" film is actually one of Bergman's most "foreign" ones. It is inspired by eighteenth-century French comedy and is also reminiscent of Jean Renoir's film Rules of the Game (1939). And Bergman himself has mentioned the French director's father as a source of inspiration: "I hope that, in its best moments, it will evoke images of Renoir's and Degas' paintings."¹³

There are thus good reasons to assume that when the film received the Cannes prize, the French were at least as delighted with its familiar attributes as with all the new–exotic Swedish–attributes they didn't recognize. It might be said that Bergman, as yet another Swede in the footsteps of Strindberg, was declared "French." That would fit in with what Horace Walpole once said: "If something foreign arrives in Paris, they say that it has always been there...."¹⁴

It is very difficult to pinpoint anything unequivocally "Swedish" in Bergman's works. Yet it is not surprising that his films, which almost singlehandedly created the reputation of Swedish cinema abroad, are also characterized as "typically Swedish," through some kind of logical non sequitur or guilt by association. It is significant that this sort of characterization has not been made in Sweden, but abroad, where most of the literature about Bergman is published.

The question is whether the Swedes themselves haven't accepted the foreign conception of Bergman as "typically Swedish" and done so uncritically, out of pure gratitude for the fact that the world has turned its face toward their nation's culture, thereby completely swallowing the legend.

The question is not so much how "Swedish" Bergman's movies are, but to what degree they have coloured our perception of what is Swedish. To put it bluntly, it is not so much whether Bergman is "Swedish," but whether the Swedes, in the eyes of themselves and others, are or have become "Bergmanian."

In that case, Bergman's art has not imitated Swedish reality, as is often claimed, but, instead, reality has imitated art.

Maaret Koskinen is a professor of film history and criticism at the University of Stockholm. She is the author of a study of Bergman's film aesthetics and is currently researching a book on the relationship between his film and theater work. In the spring of 1994 she was a visiting professor at Cornell University. [1995]