Bergman: ett år, ett liv

Jane Magnusson (2018)

The year in question is 1957, which began with the release of The Seventh Seal and ended with the release of Wild Strawberries.  Ingmar Bergman had barely conceived the story of Professor Borg at the time The Seventh Seal premiered.  In the intervening months, Bergman also wrote and shot So Close to Life and directed two stage productions, including a five-hour version of Peer Gynt, as well as a play for television.  He also had two radio plays broadcast.  Even by his super-productive standards, it was an extraordinary 365 days although – according to this feature-length documentary, written, directed and narrated by Jane Magnusson – just another year in terms of Bergman’s complicated love life and stomach ulcers.   (He was in relationships with, as well as his current wife Gun Grut, three other women, Bibi Andersson among them.  He lived on coffee, yogurt and Marie biscuits and wouldn’t go near a vegetable.)  Bergman: A Year in a Life, showing at the London Film Festival, contains a wealth of interesting archive material and talking heads interviews.  It’s a goldmine for Bergman aficionados like me.  It’s also muddled, discursive and a bit pompous.

The words in the English translation of the title[1] seem the wrong way round – ‘A Life in a Year’ would make more sense.  The film’s coverage extends well beyond 1957, before and after.  Magnusson uses the twelve months as a convenient narrative framework but also as if to suggest that they encapsulate Bergman, both the creative genius and the man.  At the same time, she asserts repeatedly that 1957 was a turning point in his artistic development, achievement and international celebrity.   The celebrity claim is reasonable but Magnusson’s view seems simplistic in relation to the quality of Bergman’s work and undervalues films like Summer with Monika (1953) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955).  She maintains it was only from 1957 onwards that his films ‘were all about him’.  Yet she also includes clips from early 1950s pictures in which the male-female relationships, she suggests, reflect Bergman’s own relationships at the time.

This isn’t the only example of Magnusson making a pronouncement that she then disregards.  Near the start of the film, she declares that Bergman’s mystique is partly a consequence of the contradictory statements he made in books he wrote about his life and work.  The truth about Bergman, says Magnusson, is found only in his films.  Within a few minutes, you find yourself wondering why, in that case, A Year in a Life is making extensive use of extracts from television interviews with Bergman (including Dick Cavett’s chat show)  – in which he was presumably no more likely than in his writings to tell ‘the truth’.  These extracts don’t appear to be used to demonstrate Bergman’s slipperiness.  They’re interesting to watch provided you ignore what the narration has said previously.

Magnusson makes judgments about particular Bergman films and characters in tones that imply matters of fact rather than of opinion.  (It follows that she sees no need to substantiate her claims.)  Fanny and Alexander is unquestionably Bergman’s most famous film.  Fair enough to call it his most internationally popular film, even if that’s largely because Fanny and Alexander, though marvellous, is in various ways atypical.  Bishop Vergérus in the same film is Bergman’s best-known cleric.  If so, again it’s only because more people have seen Fanny and Alexander.  The pre-eminent Bergman priest, to my mind, is Pastor Tomas Ericsson in Winter Light.  That’s a personal view no more or less subjective than Jane Magnusson’s choice of Vergérus.

The narrative is chronologically all over the place, which needn’t be a problem but is when, for example, one of Magnusson’s contributors[2], discussing Bergman’s authority and autocratic behaviour as a theatre director, remarks that ‘a lack of moral courage’ among his collaborators gave the great man ‘monumental power … the amount of arse-licking was stupendous’.  The person who says this isn’t old enough to have worked with Bergman as far back as 1957 (when, supposedly, everything changed). So when are we talking about?  A Year in a Life often seems more interested in soundbites than in biographical insight.

Magnusson’s attitude towards her subject keeps changing too.  It’s true that much of Bergman’s conduct both as a director and in his private life encourages a you’ve-got-to-be-a-real-bastard-to-be-a-great-artist treatment on the part of a biographer.  But the tone of A Year in a Life veers from one extreme to the other.  The second half of the film turns into a hatchet job until an eleventh-hour change of tack.  Then the music on the soundtrack suddenly turns reverent.  By the closing stages, there are hyperbolic statements such as the Chinese auteur Yimou Zhang’s statement that Bergman’s films have ‘affected every member of the human race’.

In spite of these many objections, I did enjoy Jane Magnusson’s film and she’s done a fine job of collecting archive material, especially footage from the shoots of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, and people with worthwhile, sometimes funny and touching things to say.  Liv Ullmann is particularly expressive:  her memory is hazy about which beautiful actresses Bergman slept with in what order; she can say, through tears (and she speaks as one of those beautiful actresses), that he ‘was the most ordinary, everyday man you could ever live with’.  Perhaps the most surprising witness is Barbra Streisand.  I couldn’t at first fathom why she was in the film, unless as a super-celebrity Bergman fan chosen to illustrate the breadth of his appeal.  Then Streisand reminds us she was married to Elliott Gould when Bergman cast him in The Touch.  She talks gushingly about her experience of visiting the film set.  It’s amusing to hear a megastar coming on like a wannabe.

15 October 2018

[1]  The Swedish translates literally as ‘Bergman:  one year, one life’.

[2]  I can’t recall which one …