Author: Hao Han, Master of Drama, Film and Television School, Communication University of China
As a world-renowned master of modernist cinema and a philosophical director, Ingmar Bergman, together with Italian director Fellini and former Soviet director Tarkovsky, has called the "Holy Trinity" of the film industry, representing the insurmountable peak of European art cinema since the 1960s. Known for his profound thematic expression and obscure authorship, Bergman's films use video media to illustrate highly abstract, philosophical and serious issues, including the question of life and death, religious beliefs, and the search for subject position.
Ingmar Bergman
The Philosophy of Death
Bergman's films are deeply influenced by western modern philosophy represented by existentialism, such as Heidegger once pointed out in "Existence and Time": "Death as an ever-present possibility hangs in the situation of the existent, marking the existence of man to death." But it is precisely based on this state of existence that the artist realizes the value of life, stimulates the creative motivation of the subject and the motivation for the realization of value, and thus breeds the practical activities of the will. Bergman's philosophy of death is actually a kind of hypothetical death, and the portrayal of death in the film is actually just an illusion of his objectification of death.
In The Seventh Seal, "death" appears in the form of the god of death. In the film, Death is a black-robed man with a sickle and hourglass, who becomes an arbiter and torturer, and as a third party, he coldly observes people's performances in the face of disaster. In the Black Death, which inflicted great trauma on Europe, death became part of everyday life, and God abandoned people at critical moments. People's faith was shaken, and hell was no longer terrible, because the human world was hell.
Stills from The Seventh Seal
Bergman's Grim Reaper is another aspect of God, where God plays the function of judgment and death. In Bergman's eyes, God is just an idol that has been molded to fight against the fear of death, so in the film, death replaces God and determines everything in the world. He can play chess with a knight and truly exists.
Bergman explores life and death through images, emphasizing that people should face death squarely. The film is full of questions about God, confirming Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead", and negation and criticism become the basic spiritual characteristics of his films. The relationship between death and God, the relationship between survival and death, has become the theme of many of his films.
Gestures of faith
Born into a traditionally conservative Protestant Lutheran family and a strict clergy father, Bergman Jr. developed an "indissoluble bond" with religion in his childhood. In his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, he said, "I was indoctrinated from an early age with the idea of sin, repentance, punishment, forgiveness, humility, and so on. This led many of his later works to deal with the sensitive issue that has long haunted the world—the relationship between God and man, that is, attitudes toward faith.
Stills from "Shouts and Whispers"
What really puzzled Bergman was not which religion he believed in, but his attitude toward religion. Pursuit, introspection, and doubt are Bergman's attitudes toward religion. In Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern, he once said, "For me, religious questions have always puzzled me. I never stopped paying attention to those issues, he was happening all the time. ”
In "Shouting and Whispering", the protagonist Agnès occasionally cries out of his heart and lungs because he endured the torment of illness, and the physical torture led to his physiological extreme fear of death. Instead of giving Agnès spiritual comfort, his two sisters deepened Agnès' illness, causing him to suffer both physical and psychological torture. The two sisters actually symbolize death, and their indifference and bystander to Agnès' pain are precisely Bergman's attitude towards religion.
For Bergman, the essence of religion is to examine the inner problems of man, to question the soul while also experiencing the soul. It can be seen that Bergman doubts God, but also needs God, so it is worth noting that Bergman did not completely reject the belief in God, and he believed that for God, we should first break the narrow and limited image of God before accepting it.
Stills from "Masquerade"
As Bergman says in The Magic Lantern, "My whole life has been wrestling with the pain and unhappiness of a relationship with God" "God does not exist because no one can prove his existence, and if he does exist, then he must be a bad god, narrow-minded, full of unforgivable prejudices... The world, as Strindberg put it, was a pit of dung. ”
Isolated subjects
Bergman's films have a strong philosophical meaning and are deeply influenced by existentialism, especially the ideas of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard. Existentialism regards the irrational consciousness of isolated individuals as the most real existence, centered on people, respects people's personality and freedom, and magnifies human subjectivity.
In "Masquerade", we can feel Bergman's pursuit of loneliness more clearly, the whole film does not have excessive color rendering and text modification, dilutes the treatment in the plot, and expresses the protagonist's indifference and isolation from the surrounding world by focusing on modifying the character's emotions and inner world. In addition, this loneliness about human nature can be found almost everywhere in Bergman's films, such as the almost isolated seclusion of a couple in "Humiliation", the inability of the three sisters to communicate in "Shouts and Whispers"... And Bergman often puts the protagonists in his films in an island, such as "Still in the Mirror" to use the environment in which the characters are located to express the inner state of the characters, like an island full of loneliness and isolation, coldness and pain.
In 2006, director Ang Lee visited Ingmar Bergman on the Swedish island of Faroe
All in all, Bergman's films show a dreamlike charm, with abstract and obscure images exploring the motifs of never reconciling the body and the soul: survival and destruction, faith and doubt, freedom and isolation... These eternal propositions that have plagued humanity have also plagued Bergman throughout his life, transcending race, class and geography in his video writing, influencing generations of filmmakers. (Hao Han)
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