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ingmar bergmanSCANDINAVIAN LEGENDS

The world’s greatest director. That was how INGMAR BERGMAN was labeled for decades. Initial­ly,­­he­was­associated­with­the­infamous­Swedish­sin,­later­on­with­highbrow­culture.­But­what­is­true­about­the­man­behind­the­masterpieces,­the­man­with­the­many­marriages?­Well, according to author Alexander Ahndoril, the director preferred to direct his life the way he wanted it to appear – even if it took a bit of creative license with the facts to do so.

ThE lIfE of INGMAR BERGMAN–dIREcToR’s cuT

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Far left: Family bliss? This was the picture that Ingmar Bergman wanted to be the official one – here he is together with wife Käbi Laretei and their son Daniel in 1960. Left: How cool a director can one be? Bergman in 1951, wear­ing his characteristic beret. Below: In 1967, with one of his many women – Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, with whom he had his daughter Linn, now a famous writer.

secret. It was only when the daughter reached 22 years of age that he suddenly sat her down and told her he was her father.

“I was rushing around like a bloody whirling dervish,” said Bergman to me on the phone when we were talking about this period.

The same year he married Laretei and had a daughter with von Rosen, he invited a major weekly magazine to do an at-home feature on him. “They have found their idyllic strawberry patch! Ingmar Bergman talks for the first time about his private life,” ran the headline. In the photos, the couple smiled contentedly and secretively at each other. A large number of similar articles in different women’s papers would subsequently confirm the couple’s conventional happiness.

erhaps Bergman’s reality consisted, precisely as did his films, in merely a long series of “now:” small, true moments that determine the course for the onlooker.

Shortly after having received his first Oscar – for The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) – he was criticized in a Swedish film magazine by four writers. The writer who was hardest on Bergman was a French critic called Ernest Riffe: “In film after film, he provides examples of his profound misanthropy and lack of contact with his surroundings.” Riffe was actually Bergman himself. By personally directing the worst attack and exaggerat-ing the criticism, he succeeded in making the other writers just as comic as Riffe.

Bergman received his second Oscar for Through a Glass Dark-ly (Såsom i en spegel) and decided that his next film would be about an ordinary Swedish pastor on a completely ordinary Sunday. He wrote the script for Winter Light (Nattvardsgäster-na) but had problems in finding a workable ending to the story – he had captured the plot but did not know what the outcome would be.

Bergman told the story many times of how he finally received the ending as a gift from his father, who was pastor for the royal parish. He described it to the actors during the filming of Win-ter Light and much later in his books Images (Bilder) and The Magic Lantern.

In Bergman’s version, it is a foggy early spring morning, and his mother is in hospital recovering from her first heart attack. Together with his father, Bergman goes on a visit to a small coun-try church north of the university town of Uppsala. A sparse congregation takes their places in the pews. The pastor arrives late, has a cold and a high temperature, and explains that he will be holding a shortened service. When the priest disappears into

was sitting as usual in front of the computer in my study. It was a gray day in mid-March 2006. The tele-phone rang; I answered and heard an old man say: “This is Ingmar Bergman.”

My heart began to beat more rapidly. The pale light struggled through the dirty windows. For me,

he was not merely the world’s greatest director – voted this by Antonioni, Altman, August, Coppola, Scorsese, Taviani, Wajda, Wenders, Kusturica, Coen, Costa-Gavras, Lynch, Campion and Leigh – Bergman was also a character in a novel.

In fact, the central character in my latest novel The Director (Regi ssören) is Bergman. But on this day in March, my book had not yet gone to press. The publishers had sent my manuscript to the famous director’s home on Fårö, that barren limestone island off the east coast of Sweden.

Bergman was now an old man of 87 with a thin face and liver spots on his hands. He was completely blind in one eye and used a magnifying glass to read. When he had put aside the last page of the manuscript, he dressed warmly, left the house and trudged around in the deep snow of his island.

He was very moved by the novel and needed to think about his father, he told me on the telephone. We talked for two hours, during which time he praised me and made criticisms but said he did not want me to change a single word.

Six months later, Bergman made his final TV appearance just to explain how demeaned he felt by my novel, to say that it was filthy to describe his wife Käbi Laretei naked.

I was bewildered and distressed by this news. But I believe that this final act was a keyhole into the room in which the real Bergman was to be found. For behind the closed door, there was a director who was using great power and a great deal of his genius to direct reality.

And to attempt to understand this about-face, I think we have to study Bergman’s relationship with the truth about himself. In an early draft of what was to become his great autobiographi-cal book, The Magic Lantern (Laterna magica), Bergman wrote:

was, you see, thinking of trying to keep to the truth. It is difficult for an old liar and inveterate martyr to the imagi-nation who has never hesitated to give reality that form he believes that the moment requires.”

When this autobiography was published many years later, it began with the sentence: “When I was born in July 1918, mother had Spanish influenza; I was in bad shape and received emergen-cy baptism in hospital.” Bearing in mind his intention to keep to the truth, it is remarkable that the very first sentence in this book actually is not true: Bergman’s mother did not have the Spanish flu when she gave birth to him; he was not in poor shape; and he was not given emergency baptism in hospital.

But a dramatic birth is without doubt a suitable entrance for the world’s greatest director to make. Bergman would direct 170 theater pieces and 76 films, but to understand the genius behind the great filmmaker, one has to understand that he directed far more than this – he directed reality.

Bergman seems to have guided everything with an equally sure hand: his masterpieces, his life and the regular scandals. In the 1950s, international interest in him was not associated with highbrow culture, but with Swedish sin. This was the quick-est way to find fame in the world outside Sweden, and Bergman intended at an early stage to emulate the notoriety gained by film director Arne Mattson with One Summer of Happiness (Hon dansade en sommar).

For the printed program at the premiere of Summer with Mon-ika (Sommaren med Monika), Bergman conducted an interview with himself in which he claimed that nude bathing should become a compulsory element in all Swedish films. The scandal was already a fact.

In Sweden, Bergman’s film was censored, while the distribu-tor in Los Angeles inserted its own clips of nude bathing on Long Island and changed the title to Monica: The Story of a Bad Girl. The distributor was fined and sent to jail for showing pornogra-phy, and the judge, Byron J. Walter, maintained that: “Monica appeals to potential sex murderers.”

All of this talk merely generated greater interest in the film. Woody Allen has said that he had no idea what the director was called: “When I left the cinema, I simply relived the moment when Harriet Andersson took her clothes off, and even if it was the first time I had been subjected to this director who I would come to regard as the best filmmaker of them all, I did not know that then.”

ne of the most creative periods in Bergman’s life coincided with his time together with the Estonian concert pianist Käbi Laretei. In an early letter to her, he declared his love: “To be able to experience one

single great feeling, consisting of many, many sensations. To be absolutely whole. I have never experienced anything like that; I have not been ready or prepared for that gift.” In 1959, Bergman married Laretei in order to live a well-organized and bourgeois life. Or that is what this period looked like in Bergman’s direc-tion. But what happens if you ignore his influence; what hap-pens if instead you go to other sources, to his mother’s diaries and letters, his father’s autobiography, his sister’s memories and photographs, the director and good friend Vilgot Sjöman’s tape recordings, and Laretei’s autobiographies. Then you see that Bergman was having a relationship with a married woman, Ingrid von Rosen, when he wrote to Laretei about his great feel-ing of being whole. And the same year Bergman married Laretei, he had a daughter together with von Rosen. But this was kept o

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Bergman on the ferry between Gotland and his beloved Fårö.

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Above: Harriet Andersson was one of Bergman’s protégées. Here they are in Skåne, southern Sweden, in 1954.

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For Bergman, critics were a kind of policemen, and there was nothing that frightened him as much as the police. It was with great joy that he recalled the occasion when he had a number of Stockholm policeman as extras running about to the point of exhaustion in take after take, all completely unnecessarily.

In The Magic Lantern, he placed great weight on his liberation from his authoritarian father: “There was an angry exchange of words between my father and me. I warned him not to hit me. He did so and I hit back; he staggered and ended up sitting on the floor.”

In his telephone call to me, Bergman stressed how close he had come to accidentally killing his father on that occasion; that his father had fallen headlong, with his temple only a few centi-meters from a heavy radiator.

According to his mother’s diary, Bergman then stayed away from home for three months, while the liberation was considerably lon-ger if one reads The Magic Lantern: “It was with a great feeling of relief that I left the vicarage. I stayed away several years.”

ild Strawberries (Smultronstället) was the first film to receive its premiere after Bergman met Laretei. One particular scene from it usually stays in the memory longer than the others. This

is when the aging professor Isak Borg reclines in the dry grass of a forest glade, thinking of the love of his youth, Sara. Suddenly she appears in a striped, rustling dress. Young and pretty, with her fair hair pinned up, she looks at Borg with a kind of amused dis-appointment and then holds a mirror up to his face. He does not want to look, but she forces him: “Have you looked in the mirror, Isak? You are a troubled old man who will die soon.”

There are mirrors in all of Bergman’s films, and very often the mirror acts as a window into reality, a cruel and revealing

opening. Even in his first film, Crisis (Kris), a woman stares at her mirror image in amazement: “You cannot see it on the surface, but beneath this face ... oh, God.” Almost word for word, the reac-tion is repeated in one of his last films, After the Rehearsal (Efter repetitionen), when the aging actress stands before a mirror and bursts out: “Oh, my face. God, oh my God.”

All those years later, Bergman read the novel about himself that I wrote and appreciated it spontaneously as a work of fic-tion. But then weeks and months passed, and he continued to think about what he had read, and perhaps began to wonder

about the truth about himself, because in the novel The Direc-tor it says that his father never took over and completed the church service in the little church north of Uppsala. I quite sim-ply wrote the story the way it was from other accounts, that his father remained seated in his pew like everyone else, listening to the abbreviated service.

Bergman was convinced that biographical works can never liberate themselves from his direction, but I feel he was increas-ingly troubled by the fact that a great deal in the novel could be read as the truth about him, that precisely because it is fictitious it might act like the mirror in Wild Strawberries.

I think that Bergman’s about-face, his sudden rage at me, was about the unacceptability of someone else being able to direct a piece of his life. He made a big scene, which was heard world-wide, and in this way took over the direction once again. And I have nothing but praise for his skill in this regard.

But then, that is really what one would expect from the world’s greatest director.

ALEXANDER AHNDORIL is an author and playwright based in stockholm. he received both praise and criticism for his novel ,The Director, which was recently published in the uk . ahndoril@bredband.net

the sacristy, Bergman’s elderly father gets up from his pew and hobbles after him. There is a brief but agitated exchange. After a while, Bergman’s father returns, clad in white vestments. He holds a proper service and Bergman acquires the ending of his film in the form of a rule from an old pastor: no matter what hap-pens, you should always hold your service.

If we study Bergman’s story and compare it with Sjöman’s documentary material on the making of the film and the dia-ry kept by Bergman’s mother, then a different truth emerges. There is only one visit to church during this period. One day in high summer (not a foggy day in early spring), Bergman visit-ed a church north of Uppsala together with his father and his mother (who had not had a heart attack). The priest was ill and

conducted a shortened service without Bergman’s father inter-vening. All of this is very clear from his mother’s diary. Berg-man’s father never read the script of Winter Light, but according to Sjöman’s documentary book, Bergman told his actors that: “The old man has read the script three times. Can you imagine that? And he has understood the ending just right.”

When Bergman and Laretei’s son was three years old, work began on the film Persona. Bergman fell in love with actress Liv Ullmann; in August the next year, they had a daughter togeth-er, Linn. Now there were three women with his children at the same time, while Bergman’s story about the well-organized fam-ily prevailed. The marriage to Laretei continued for four more years, but two years before their divorce, Laretei was awoken in the middle of the night in her hotel room in New York by the telephone. It was a journalist who wanted to interview her about the story that she and Bergman were to divorce. When she got back to Sweden, there was a note on the kitchen table from Berg-man that said: “Do not believe anything they say until we have had time to talk.”

ergman’s very private truth, his direction of reality, was closely associated with his hatred of the author-ities. His father’s strictness and artful punishments alone should have been sufficient to explain this feel-

ing, but he was also over the years deprecated by film critics and theater critics alike, so much so that he finally stopped reading his reviews. And in the 1970s, he was subjected to harassment by the tax authorities, arrested by the police during a rehearsal, and finally felt so persecuted that he chose to live a life of exile in Germany.

The critics caused him to despair. On a number of occasions, he tried to forestall them by using his nom de plume, Riffe, a par-ody of malevolence, and frequently used a trick borrowed from the Swedish writer and dramatist August Strindberg of inter-viewing himself in an affectedly superior and sarcastic tone. He also tried to frighten them, as when he attacked a famous critic, calling him a clown and a toady. Or when, during a rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theater, he discovered a theater critic in the auditorium and went for him, for which he was found guilty of common assault and had to pay a fine. lef

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I think that Bergman’s rage at me was about the unaccept-ability of someone else being able to direct a piece of his life.

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Ingmar Bergman is born on July 14 in Uppsala, Sweden

Bergman at Helsingborg City Theater in the middle of the 1940s

Becomes Sweden’s youngest ever theater manager. Leaves Else Fisher and their daughter for Ellen Lund­ström when she becomes pregnant

Meets journalist Gun Hagberg during the filming of To Joy (Till glädje) and runs off with her to Paris, leaving his wife and their four children

Has his debut directing the feature film Crisis and marries Ellen Lundström

Marries Gun Hagberg and they have a son, Ingmar

Begins a relationship with Harriet Andersson during the filming of Summer with Monika

Films Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnat­tens leende) and begins a relation­ship with Bibi Andersson

Cinema pre­mieres of The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) and Wild Strawber-ries. Begins a relationship with Käbi Laretei

Marries Käbi Laretei. Ingrid von Rosen gives birth to a daughter, Maria, but Bergman’s paternity is kept secret

The Virgin Spring re ceives an Oscar for best foreign film

Through a Glass Darkly receives an Oscar for best foreign film. Bergman’s son Daniel is born

Begins a rela­tionship with Liv Ullmann during the filming of Persona and has a daughter, Linn, with her

Marries Ingrid von Rosen

Cinema premiere of Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander)

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Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap) is shown on Swedish television

The auto­biography Laterna Magica is published

Alexander Ahndoril’s novel The Director (Regissören) is published in Sweden

Bergman dies and is buried on Fårö beside his wife Ingrid

1943 1944

Makes his definitive breakthrough as a young director and marries Else Fisher

Marries Else Fisher in 1943. Their daughter Lena is born in December the same year

Wife #2 (1945–1950), Ellen Lund­ström. They have 4 chil dren together

Bibi Andersson, one of many actress es he was romantically involved with

Bergman and his last wife, Ingrid. Together they have one daughter

Bergman’s own book (left)

The author’s book in Eng­

lish (right)

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