INTRODUCTION

WHEN INGMAR BERGMAN ANNOUNCED IN 1983 THAT Fanny and Alexander would be his final film, many people greeted the news of his intended retirement with skepticism. After all, he was at the height of his cinematic powers with this rich, multilayered work. Although Bergman had written and directed films for almost forty years, Fanny and Alexander seemed to break new ground both in its exploration of his own psyche and personal experience and in the creation of images of great archetypal power. Even though Bergman cited the physical demands of filmmaking as his reason for stopping, many of his admirers believed (and of course hoped) that he would not be able to stay away.

In the dozen years since Fanny and Alexander, however, it has become evident that Bergman’s “retirement” was only from one particular segment of his artistic life. And, unlike those artists who seek challenges in new fields after having made their mark in the one they are best known for, Bergman was merely continuing two lifelong interests, the theater and writing. Both had been central to his identity as an artist from the beginning of his career. In addition, having brought his filmmaking skills to television in 1957, he actively continues to work in that medium as writer and director. If Bergman the film director was the persona best known to his international public, Bergman the writer (primarily of his own film and television scripts) and Bergman the stage director were never slighted in favor of his more “famous” self.

It is, in fact, Bergman’s ability to sustain careers in theater, film, and television, all at the highest levels of artistic excellence and achievement, that makes him a unique figure as a creative and interpretive artist. While there have been (and continue to be) many great directors whose careers have encompassed both theater and the camera media, in every other case it is possible to state with near certainty that their major impact has been in one area or the other. From the start of his artistic life in the 1940s to his retirement from the cinema in the 1980s, not only did Bergman alternate between stage and screen (both large and small) but he was generally acknowledged to be a consummate master in each realm. Although he has directed few opera productions, even there he has made his presence felt, with versions of The Rake’s Progress for the Royal Swedish Opera, The Merry Widow for the Malmö Municipal Theater, and The Magic Flute for film, all of which are considered landmarks. In recent years he has made an important mark as a writer. Both fiction (The Best Intentions and Sunday’s Children) and nonfiction (The Magic Lantern and Images) further solidify his identity as a twentieth-century artistic Renaissance man.

Although the origin and nature of genius are impossible to pinpoint, in Bergman’s case there are certain cultural precedents and institutions that can help us better understand why he refused to restrict himself to one particular genre or medium. As a twentieth-century Swedish writer and director, he would, perhaps inevitably, have been influenced by August Strindberg, who died only six years before Bergman was born. One of the founders of theatrical modernism, Strindberg was not only novelist and playwright, but also painter, photographer, and alchemist. Among Bergman’s earliest artistic endeavors were stagings of Strindberg plays, first in his childhood marionette theater and later in a youth theater he directed before embarking on his professional career. Bergman has returned to Strindberg again and again throughout his theatrical life, directing Miss Julie, The Ghost Sonata, and A Dream Play in several different versions, in some cases for radio and television as well as theater.

It is easiest to see Strindberg’s influence on Bergman in their depictions of the painful relationships between men and women, especially within the institution of marriage. Such Strindberg masterworks as The Father and Dance of Death can be said to anticipate Bergman’s exploration of similar themes in the film The Passion of Anna and in the six-episode television version of Scenes from a Marriage that was later condensed into a film for theatrical release. Yet it is not just in subject matter but also in the nature of Strind-berg’s career, characterized by restless experimentation both within and between the forms of expression he explored, that Bergman could have found a multidisciplinary model toward which to aspire.

The fact that one of those disciplines was film should not be surprising given the era in which Bergman grew to maturity. Cinema was not just a phenomenon growing in international popularity during the 1920s and 1930s; it was one emphatically embraced in Sweden. In the twenties Svensk Filmindustri, later the production company for many of Bergman’s films, became the main source of films in Scandinavia. Major silent film directors, including Georg af Klecker (whom Bergman writes about in his play The Last Scream), Mauritz Stiller, and Viktor Sjöström (who played the old man in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries), were making international reputations with their films. According to film historian Robert Sklar, in Film: An International History of the Medium, “No countries with populations so small, British film historian Forsyth Hardy wrote in the early 1950s, had made so great a contribution to world cinema as Sweden and Denmark (and this was before Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman became famous as a leading director of international art cinema).”

This contribution would have included not only the films of the directors named above, but also those of Alf Sjöberg, who had a great influence on Bergman’s artistic life. Sjöberg’s career as a filmmaker embraced both silent and sound eras. When his film of Strindberg’s Miss Julie won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1950, it was the first Swedish film to be so honored. Sjöberg served as more than a model and inspiration for Bergman. In 1944 he directed Torment, Bergman’s first screenplay to be realized on celluloid, the success of which facilitated Bergman’s film directorial debut the following year. Sjöberg, whose film career was soon to be eclipsed by his younger colleague’s, directed another of Bergman’s scripts, Last Couple Out, in 1956.

Sjöberg’s place in Swedish cinema and Sjöberg’s importance for Bergman, however, extend far beyond their two collaborations. Despite his success as a filmmaker, Sjöberg’s major achievement was as a theater director. For almost half a century his productions at the Royal Dramatic Theater (the Dramaten) in Stockholm were singled out for their interpretive power and theatrical imagination. When asked why he had directed almost no plays by Shakespeare at the Dramaten during the years when he and Sjöberg were in residence there, Bergman replied that there was no reason to do so, since Sjöberg’s productions were so good. In an act of, homage to his fellow director, after Sjöberg’s death Bergman filmed for television Sjöberg’s final stage production, Mo-lière’s The School for Wives, completing the circle begun with Torment.

If Sjöberg thus served as a precedent for a director who could combine important careers in theater and film, he also symbolized continuity in his stage career. As an actor, Sjöberg appeared at the Dramaten in over fifty productions from 1923 to 1931, and from 1930 to 1980 he directed 138 productions. The Dramaten, where as a boy Bergman first experienced a live theatrical performance—-directed by Sjöberg —has been Bergman’s theatrical home since 1961. He continues to direct one or two productions a year there, combining reinterpretations of the classics with stagings of contemporary plays from the international repertory.

The Dramaten not only allows Bergman to work with many of Sweden’s most distinguished actors, but also provides him the opportunity to continue associations that extend back to his early career. Erland Josephson, who played the title role in Bergman’s 1994 production of George Tabori’s The Goldberg Variations, has known the director since 1939. He appeared in many of Bergman’s films, including The Magician, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander, and was once Bergman’s, and Sjöberg’s, boss, when he ran the Dramaten, a position Bergman also held at one time. Bibi Andersson, whose recent stage collaborations with Bergman include Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Goldberg Variations, and.