“Damn it, I’ve got talent. I’m probably brilliant”: an outburst that made me feel hot and dizzy. In all my misery, a well-regulated self-confidence existed, a steel column right through the ramshackle ruins of my soul.—Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography
When Bergman’s theater was presenting Beppo the Clown, he became interested in the choreographer Else Fisher. A year later Bergman’s mother gave Else her sapphire ring. In March 1943 Bergman, at the age of twenty-five, and Else were married by his father in the Hedvig Eleonora church.
In looking back on his early life, Bergman told Marie Nyreröd in Bergman Island,
I started making films . . . in 1945 and for the first time I experienced an intensely erotic atmosphere. But that’s not quite true either. As I was so young and insecure, so scared and knew so little, I spent most of my time being extremely angry. . . . It wasn’t until after a few years, when I began to master my profession, that this incredible feeling of attraction and affinity appeared, within the magic circle created by the lights. I subsequently fell in love with the leading actress.[1]
* * *
Bergman should have been on top of the world. His fantasies about his future life were in fact coming true. His career was under way. He had his Esmeralda in the person of his wife Else as well as his stable of actresses and actors. But as he later told students at Southern Methodist University about those early days, all had not been well in his soul “because the tensions in me, the difficulties in me, the difficulties in my relations to other people, to reality, were so enormous, that I was almost mad.”[2] His relationship with God was also an extremely uneasy one.
* * *
I tend to think of Bergman’s life from this point until well into the future as a vast, inseparable braid made up of career, women, mentors, and the demons that tormented him, including his guilty conscience. The braid contains three colors: red for the moist soul out of which sprang his genius and his prodigious creativity; green for the love of the three women who had nourished him in his first months of life, as well as the mentors at the beginning of his career who were so important to his learning self-control; and black for his struggles with God—a God in the fierce image of his father.
As we progress, we will see how vital a role each new woman companion played in returning his life to spring-green. These wives cared for his children and offered him love and emotional support before the inexplicable frost set in and he sought greener pastures.
His wife Else was a choreographer and dancer whom he had met at work. She was kind, clever, and funny. She encouraged him in his creativity, acknowledging and appreciating his skills. Although he was very attracted to her, he was afraid to make a permanent commitment. A week before his wedding day, he ran away. Courage prevailed and he returned. Their daughter Lena was born on December 21, 1943. Bergman took his childhood with him into the marriage. His teddy bears were scattered around the apartment. They read Winnie the Pooh to each other. He rented a projector so they had their own movie theater at home.
* * *
In 1944 he was appointed director of the Helsingborg City Theater where, at twenty-five, he was Europe’s youngest theater chief. A group of actors followed him from Stockholm. Though they were very poor, they were happy to be working regularly. Sometimes the friendly townspeople fed them for nothing. When they arrived at the theater, they were greeted warmly by a host of fleas. Bergman’s description in an interview with Birgitta Steene is priceless.
The plumbing from the theater restaurant ran past the men’s dressing room and urine dripped onto the radiator by the wall. The old building was drafty, and a faint moaning of the lost souls of demons came from the lofty flies. The heating functioned badly and, when they ripped up the floor of the auditorium, they found hundreds of rats. . . . The living rats were robust, unafraid and enjoyed appearing. The theater engineer’s fat cat went into hiding when attacked. I do not mean to be nostalgic but for me this was paradise on earth.[3]
There was obviously not much time to spend with his wife and daughter. Else and their child fell ill with tuberculosis. Else entered a sanatorium and Lena was placed in a children’s hospital. Else was obviously doing her best to maintain a loving contact with her husband by writing every day for the six months she was gone, but he did not respond. For the anxious little boy within Bergman who needed the human touch, her letters did not suffice. He dutifully paid for her hospitalization that cost as much as he was making, but he turned elsewhere for body warmth. His relationship with his daughter Lena was minimal when she was small. However, she lived with him and his second wife for a time. Manifesting an interest in her father’s work, she appeared as one of the twins in Wild Strawberries and visited him on the set during the filming of Winter Light. The two years he was at Helsingborg he produced over a dozen plays and shot his first two films Crisis (1945–1946) and It Rains on Our Love (1946).
Before we move with Bergman to Gothenburg City Theater in 1946, let us see how his early films contribute to our understanding of the anxieties aroused by marriage. Crisis is the first film Bergman both wrote and directed.[4] He was excited that the experience he had dreamed of had finally arrived, yet he felt so incompetent to undertake it that he was almost undone.
Every evening I fell into bed and lay paralyzed with anxiety and shame, and, at dusk, I went to a milk bar and had a meal. Then I went to the cinema. . . . On Saturdays I got drunk, sought out bad company and got mixed up in brawls. . . . When we occasionally did succeed in taking a scene during a few seconds of sunlight, I was so confused and excited that . . . I behaved like a lunatic, screaming, swearing and raging.[5]
He felt that the whole crew and administration hated him. At the same time he was ecstatic. The sober, “unneurotic,” self-observing Bergman recognized the unfolding of his genius. “I stopped in the quiet street and stood quite still for several minutes, repeating silently to myself, ‘Damn it, I’ve got talent. I’m probably brilliant’: an outburst that made me feel hot and dizzy. In all my misery, a well-regulated self-confidence existed, a steel column right through the ramshackle ruins of my soul.”[6] At the age of twenty-seven, Bergman first experienced his sense of joy in his creation, but because the film was not well received, the Swedish Film Industry refused to produce his next film.
Joy in his accomplishment was not enough to help him get himself under control. The insecurity that haunted him was partly personal and partly realistic. He continued to be dictatorial, to drive the actors hard; he was ruthless. The tension in his body was building up. Was his joy going to be taken away from him? Would he never have the chance to make films about the vital issues waiting to burst forth from his soul?
Before we take a glimpse at Crisis, let us look at the crisis in Bergman’s life at the time. In his autobiography The Magic Lantern, Bergman tells us of those days in Helsingborg. “A mild promiscuity spread throughout the company. For a short period everyone had crablice and there were occasional outbreaks of jealousy.”[7]
While his wife was away in the sanatorium he met Ellen Lundstrom, a choreographer, who was “a strikingly beautiful woman who radiated erotic appeal, was talented, original and highly emotional.”[8] Their relationship soon resulted in a pregnancy. When his first wife, Else, came home from the sanitarium, he greeted her with the news that he wanted a divorce. Bergman and Ellen were married the following July 1945, a few weeks before their daughter Eva was born. Jan was born in September 1946, and the twins, Anna and Mats, in May 1947. That he spent little time with them is evident. He once said to his son that he had been a lousy father. His son retorted, “A father? You haven’t been a father at all!” However, the fact that Bergman was their father was obviously significant to them because they all followed him into the field. Eva and Jan became film directors, Anna an actress, and Mats a tenured actor at the Royal Dramatic Theater.
At the age of sixty-nine Bergman explained,
I do not recognize the person I was forty years ago. My distress is so profound and the suppression mechanism functions so effectively, I can evoke the picture only with difficulty. . . . If I felt attacked, I snapped like a frightened dog. I trusted no one, loved no one, missed no one. Obsessed with sexuality that forced me into constant infidelity, I was tormented by desire, fear, anguish and a guilty conscience. So I was alone and raging. My work at the theater provided some alleviation of a tension which only let go for brief moments in orgasm or drunkenness.[9]
Those few blunt words explain how it was that Bergman’s creativity saved his life. He was an obsessed, anxious, guilty, raging man. It is possible that a man with these kinds of irresolvable conflicts might well have disintegrated into madness. But held together by the remarkably powerful glue of the creative imperative within him, and his unshakable self-confidence—that column of steel penetrating his very soul that he had received from the love of the three women in his first year of life—he moved forward, slowly maturing both as a person and as an artist. Through the series of films that follow, we will be witness to this growth.
In Crisis, a teenager called Nelly has the opportunity to leave her simple village and join her real mother, who owns a beauty parlor in the city. Attracted by the broader world and independence, she goes. Only chance interrupts her seduction by her mother’s boyfriend, Jack. Jack goes out in the street and shoots himself. The film ends with the shot of a newspaper lying over Jack’s face, the newspaper announcing the name of the town’s theater, under which is a photograph of Ingmar Bergman.
Jörn Donner, Bergman’s colleague, wrote, “Jack is a marionette, a creature . . . who can love nobody but himself. [He] is a living dead man . . . Crisis shows that it is practical advantage and a narrow selfishness that ultimately directs man’s action. Crisis is an appealing debut work, behind which the forces of misfortune and disharmony brood.”[10] As Bergman looked at his own actions in relationship to his first wife and daughter and his behavior on the film and theater sets, he could honestly see that he was incapable of loving anyone, even himself. It was “his narrow selfishness that directed his actions.” In his eyes, he deserved to shoot himself.
As close as Bergman came to suicide at times, he always won the battle with death. When he presented the play Rabies shortly after his marriage to Ellen and the birth of their daughter Eva, he said in his introduction, “Hold on tight, ladies and gentlemen, for now we shall pull the floor out from under your feet and take you down into horror chambers and dung heaps to look at the eyeless monsters that hide there.”[11]
Bergman had to look elsewhere for a producer for his next film, It Rains on Our Love (1946). He was hired by a small film production company working under Lorens Marmstedt. Marmstedt may have seen the same potential in this brash young man as had Victor Sjöström and Carl Anders Dymling, but his approach was very different. In The Magic Lantern Bergman describes their first encounters. After viewing the rushes of It Rains on Our Love, the producer called him an incompetent amateur, saying that he was just acting out his private life in public. Later Bergman stated that it was Marmstedt who had taught him how to make films.
Of course Bergman was acting out his private life in public. The inner life is the primal source of all art. However, in It Rains on Our Love, written in conjunction with Herbert Grevenius, Bergman holds out more hope for the future of love. Perhaps he was hoping that his relationship with his new love, Ellen, would have a happier outcome. Could he possibly profit from his earlier cowardly betrayal of his first wife Else?
In the film, an impoverished, lonely couple meet, endure great hardships, and are saved by a kindly lawyer. As the film ends, they are together heading back to the city. The reviewer Bendt Champert wrote, “Ingmar Bergman wanted to communicate things important in It Rains on Our Love. We all need each other. You need someone to turn to in this vast and cold universe. Helpfulness, practical kindness is the only way out of a pointless drifting chaos.”[12]
In Bergman’s film A Ship Bound for India (1947), Sally says, “One cannot just be lonesome. One must have somebody to care for. One must have somebody to love.” At this point in his life, Bergman was searching for a solution to the desperate loneliness he lived with no matter how many close friends he was surrounded by. Fourteen years later when he created Winter Light with his pastor father in mind, he accepted that God was dead but that God was inside each of us as we join together in one community. The English translation of the Swedish name for the film is “The Communicants.”
Why did Bergman carry this agonizing loneliness until he had matured enough to make his fifth marriage? It must have been because of the loss of his three mother figures who could never be replaced. This kind of early trauma leaves a lifetime of separation anxiety. It may well be that in Bergman’s case, superimposed on this primal loss was the loss of his father who truly loved him when he was a child. But that love had always been interrupted by his father’s sudden, cruel outbursts, and it was seriously compounded by Bergman’s need to break free from his family’s attempts to control his life. When Bergman walked out the door leaving his parents behind, his old wound of separation anxiety was reopened. After his mother’s death, freed from her controlling nature, father and son were able to share a few years of more predictable love.
* * *
In 1946 Bergman, Ellen, and their first two children moved considerably southwest of Stockholm to Gothenburg, where he became director of the Municipal Theater. “Torsten [Hammaren] embraced me and I at once appointed him in my heart as the father-figure I had lacked since God had abandoned me. He took on the role and played it conscientiously.”[13] Bergman learned a great deal about theater directing from Hammaren, and in a year he was being invited as guest producer and director in theaters in various parts of Sweden. As he gained more confidence, he became extremely productive, often writing the plays himself that he produced for the theater and radio, as well as a number of films. He found filmmaking more difficult than directing plays. Filmmaking made him feel hurt and humiliated because here he was living closer to his own deep feelings. Despite the fact that in Music in Darkness (1947–1948) he was expressing his dread of loneliness, it was his first popular success and stimulated the Swedish Film Industry to reach out to him.
The fundamental foundation for the themes of his creative work now ranged from his struggle with the problem of how to maintain a permanent, loving relationship to beginning to deal with his struggle with God. This preoccupation with God and the Devil that existed inside him was to occupy Bergman in a series of films once he was given permission to produce them after the serious illness of 1955.
* * *
Looking again at the braid of Bergman’s life, we see that the red strand of his creativity is fuller: he is learning his trade. The black strand is still very black and harsh. Bergman describes his religious despair: “I have struggled all my life with a tormented and joyless relationship with God. Faith and lack of faith, punishment, grace and rejection, all were real to me, all were imperative. My prayers stank of anguish, entreaty, trust loathing and despair. God Spoke. God said nothing. Do not turn from me Thy face.”[14]
But the green of his personal relations is beginning to expand. The spring-green strand of his relationships with women would take years to mature, but there are darker filaments of new growth that will change the course of his life. These are thanks to the many fine people who saw Bergman’s potential despite his outrageous behavior and moved in to parent him. In 1942 Dymling and Stina Bergman of the Swedish Film Institute had given him his start. Victor Ströström cautioned him kindly and firmly to get himself under control. Marmstedt taught him how to make a film, and Hammaren embraced him and became the father figure he had lost when God abandoned him.
Bergman’s own father had loved him, but his outbursts had terrified the child into submission. Not only did this impede the development of his autonomy, it warped his kindly nature into being as terrifying in his aggression as was his father. These new parental figures were firm, but their counsel was given with love. They did not have within them the same deeply embedded hate that kept pushing its way into his father’s actions. Nurtured by the parental love of these older men, Bergman’s character gradually changed. No longer was his life governed primarily by “practical advantage and narrow selfishness.” When he was twenty-four he befriended the younger Vilgot Sjöman, who later said that Bergman had bolstered his self-confidence. They became lifelong friends. Sjöman became a famous film director who wrote and filmed L136: Diary with Ingmar Bergman during the creation of Winter Light.
* * *
During the four years Bergman was in Gothenborg, he directed almost ten plays, and created eight films, seven radio plays, and one opera. The happenings in his personal life wove their way into the substance of several of the films. Projecting into his audience his pains of love and loss helped to ease his own pain and his confusion about not being able to maintain a permanent relationship. And keeping busy in doing something he loved helped to ease his perpetual loneliness.
Bergman fell passionately in love with Ellen Lundstrom when they met at Christmas in 1944. He was later to write, “Port of Call (1947/48) opened in October 1948 and was a relative success. . . . Ellen . . . and I went to the summer cottage in Dalecarlia where I had spent my childhood. . . . It was late autumn and we were in great spirits. We burned fires in the tiled stoves in the two main rooms as well as the kitchen stove. Ellen occupied the living room, working on her choreography, while I reigned in the bedroom, where I wrote.”[15] It is possible that creating Port of Call contributed to Bergman’s ability to remain in a marriage of contentment for at least four years, a marriage that might have lasted longer if difficult realities had not intervened. He set Port of Call in the working port of Gothenburg on the North Sea where they lived. It is filmed in stark black-and-white scenes of the harbor, the loading and unloading of the freighters, the men at work.[16] Bergman’s magic was definitely at work. Berit and Gosta come across as real people who feel lonely and imprisoned by their lives, and yet they still hope to find some meaning in their love for each other. But they are edgy. She sends him away before he can hurt her further. When she confides in him that she has been in a reformatory and that she has had other men, he walks away. Gosta’s struggle with his conscience for deserting her when she needs him is straight out of Bergman’s life. Gosta gets drunk and breaks up the furniture, his soul ripping apart as he screams “Goddamned conscience!” His struggle pays off. He seeks her out. They plan to escape by boat so she doesn’t have to return to the reformatory. But they change their minds. Gosta decides that, facing life together, they can turn back and take on the world.
It is apparent from Port of Call that Bergman was in the process of becoming a different man. He is developing a conscience; he is facing life instead of running away. His character Gosta has a “No!” voice. After Gosta hurts the woman he loves and abandons her, he returns. That Bergman was able to create Port of Call indicates that the essential ingredient in a permanent love relationship was slowly growing in him.
Bergman and Ellen were happy together for at least four years. Then a series of overwhelming realities occurred. As he describes it in The Magic Lantern,
The twins [Anna and Mats] were born. Ellen’s stepfather killed himself, leaving large debts. My mother-in-law and her small son moved in with us. They settled in my study next to Ellen’s and my bedroom. . . . Lena, my elder daughter lived with us because Else was still ailing. The family was completed by a kindly but gloomy person who was to help in the household. We were ten people in all. Ellen had so much to do she could only occasionally devote time to her profession. Marital complications became more and more infected by all this. Our sex life, which had been our deliverance, ceased because of the proximity of my mother-in-law and her little son through the thin wall. . . . My domestic finances were stretched. Added to our other troubles were bitter quarrels about money. Both Ellen and I were careless and extravagant. . . . Home seethed with crying children, damp washing, weeping women and raging scenes of jealousy. All escape routes were closed and betrayal became obligatory.[17]
Bergman ran away to the south of France, leaving devastation behind him. Ellen’s eczema got worse and the children were sick. Bergman and Ellen started corresponding with the hope that their marriage might be salvaged. “[Ellen] was actually a good and strong friend. In different, less dire circumstances, we would certainly have enjoyed living together, but we knew nothing about ourselves and thought life was supposed to be as it was. . . . We were fighting chained together and were drowning.”[18]
* * *
Although Bergman had four contented years of marriage with Ellen, that doesn’t mean their life was peaceful. Given what we know of his need to be in control and to deal with problems in a volcanic way, there were arguments. As the small apartment swelled with occupants, the home became a prison. It was at this time that Bergman wrote and directed Prison, or The Devil’s Wanton (1948–1949).[19] His sixth film, it was the first that he had a free hand in everything. Considered the gem of his early work both in the severe black-and-white photography, which foretells The Seventh Seal, and the powerful convoluted story of the hell that exists on earth for helpless children at the hands of ruthless adults, it deserves to take its place beside Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. The use of a mysterious dream sequence that unlocks the young woman’s frozen mind foretells Wild Strawberries. And the many close-ups of the face of Doris Svedlund foretell Persona. This versatile actress expresses a multitude of emotions as she goes from seductive prostitute to fragile child to happy, loving playmate in this story of tragic loss, rebellion, and the acceptance of the peace of death.
In Prison, Birgitta-Carolina walks down a long, narrow, wet street enclosed by high buildings. She is pregnant. Her fiancé and pimp and his sister persuade her to give up the baby, which they kill. She is temporarily rescued by Tomas. They have a happy night together sharing childhood memories. In the safety of his arms, she dares to tell him a dream. She is moving through a forest of people who are frozen in place. Trying to reach a motherly woman who is sewing, she knocks on an invisible screen. The woman ignores her. At Tomas’s urging, Birgitta-Carolina remembers that, in the dream, she sees her pimp twisting her baby in two and throwing it in a bathtub.
By facing this horrifying dream, she wakes from her frozen state of dissociation and dares to confront her pimp. Screaming and sobbing, she begs, “I don’t want to do this anymore. Please don’t make me!” She finds her way to the basement, where she slits her wrists. As she fades away, she has Tomas and his tenderness on her lips. A narrow shaft of light streams through a small window into her black prison cell.
As noted earlier, Bergman remarked, “I don’t want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck in aesthetically. . . . I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.”[20]
* * *
As Bergman’s marriage to Ellen was coming apart, he produced a raw, brutal film titled Thirst (1949). Ruth and her professor husband Bertil are like two pit bulls confined in the small enclosure of a train compartment. As the film is being introduced, we are warned of what is to come by a menacing whirlpool in a sparkling black river that threatens to pull under and drown anyone who ventures near. Bertil wakes from a dream in which he has killed Ruth by hitting her on the head with a bottle. Relieved to discover that it was only a dream, he describes it to Ruth. Holding her tight, he says he doesn’t want to be alone and independent. “At least we have each other.”[21]
Thirst indicates that life alone is unbearable. Ruth has had an injury and is unable to return to the ballet. She has had an abortion leaving her sterile. To be in a relationship without children is equally unbearable. This theme of hell together is better than hell alone recurs over and over again in Bergman’s films.
As soon as Thirst was “in the can,” Bergman was on his way to Paris with a new woman friend, Gun Hagberg Grut. At the age of thirty, Bergman, like Ruth and Bertil in the film, could not tolerate being alone. But his ability to experience guilt was maturing. Forty years later he remembered with deep regret coming home to tell Ellen that he was leaving. He could still see vividly the delight on her face at his unexpected arrival and how he turned and walked out without even taking off his coat.
Marie Nyreröd, Bergman Island, TV movie (2003); Smiles of a Summer Night (Svensk Filmindustri, 1955; U.S. release, Rank Film Distributors of America, 1957).
G. William Jones, ed., Talking with Ingmar Bergman (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1983), 59.
Birgitta Steene, audio commentary, The Virgin Spring (Svensk Filmindustri, 1960; U.S. release, Janus Films, 1960), The Criterion Collection (DVD).
Early Bergman (Svensk Filmindustri; U.S. release, Janus Films), The Criterion Collection (DVD).
Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography, trans. Joan Tate (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 69.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 147.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 145.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 145.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 146.
J. Donner, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 19–21.
P. Duncan and B. Wanselius, eds., The Ingmar Bergman Archives (Köln: Taschen, 2008), 102.
Duncan and Wanselius, The Ingmar Bergman Archives, 31.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 150.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 204.
Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (New York: Arcade, 1990), 144.
Early Bergman, Janus Films.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 153–54.
Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 155.
Prison (Terrafilm, 1949; U.S. release, Embassy Pictures, 1962).
Jerry Vermilye, Ingmar Bergman: His Life and Films (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002), 13.
Early Bergman.