Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007
July 30, 2007

Federico Fellini died in 1993, Akira Kurosawa succumbed to a stroke in 1998 and with the passing of Ingmar Bergman earlier today at the age of 89, the last of the triumvirate of international cinema giants is gone. I was never a huge Bergman follower—hell, I’ve definitely seen more Kurosawa and Fellini movies than I have Bergmans. All told, I’ve probably seen about half of his 50ish films (not to mention a theatrical production of Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade that he directed), but I can say that at least half of

those did make quite an impression on me. Persona, Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Cries and Whispers and The Silence stand out in particular. Oh yeah, and Wild Strawberries. Definitely Wild Strawberries, one particular screening of which I remember fondly.

I lived in Sweden for a year or so back in the mid-Nineties—I was working as an on-air dee-jay on an English language Swedish rock radio, Bandit 105.5, The Rock Home of Stockholm—and I can’t deny that while I lived there, I always senses Bergman’s presence in air. Does that sound crazy? How to describe it….? It was like the feel or the texture of the Sweden that I had come to experience through watching Bergman’s films, had seeped into the atmosphere. I mean, it was Sweden. And to a ex-pat working off the books for cash in Stockholm, Bergman’s Sweden was the only Sweden I knew. That feeling was never more prevalent than the time I went to a repertory movie house in center city, Swedish lady friend on one arm and a bag of wild strawberries cradled in the other, to catch a glitchy 16mm revival of Bergman’s great (what else?) Wild Strawberries. The tale of an aging professor who travels across the country to receive an honorary degrees from his former university. Along the way he has a series of run-ins with images, dreams, remembrances and people from his past. It’s potent stuff and, for me, all the more so as I was in the land of the filmmaker and was reluctantly acknowledging that I had reached a crossroads of sorts of my own.  Why else would a born and raised New Yorker be dee-jaying in Sweden, where it gets damned cold and dark in the winters and you can’t even find a decent bagel to adorn with the country’s cheap-and delicious-as-you’ll-ever-find lox ? I made plans to return to the States that week, content with my decision and not unaware that it had been prompted by Bergman, his film Wild Strawberries, the fact that I was watching it in the country of its origin and in its native tongue, and that I was knibbling away at sweet samples of the film's titular repast. 


And besides, I could freeze as many pounds of lox as I could carry and bring it home to New York, where they really know how to make bagels!  

Posted by Laurence Lerman on July 30, 2007 | Comments (1)