Thomson on Bergman

What do they know of 1957, those who recall the start of Eisenhower's second term, Harold Macmillan succeeding Anthony Eden, as Britain tested a hydrogen bomb above Christmas Island and Russia tossed Sputnik into space? For 1957 was also the moment of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries – or, as I hear their titles still, Det Sjunde Inseglet and Smultronstället, films by Ingmar Bergman.

The Swedish language was blooming in our mouths with its gentle, pious, slightly smug closed vowels and its swallowing syllabics. We mimed the word smultronstället from the dark as Victor Sjostrom and Bibi Andersson uttered it in Wild Strawberries. We had to hope that that innocent fruit was untouched by fall-out. A year or so later, when the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm brought Bergman's production of Ur-Faust to London, in Swedish, there were some of us who crowded the gallery, trying to soak up the rainfall sounds of the language.

Bergman was not only the most famous Swede of our time, the unquestionably great movie and stage director, but also so exemplary an artistic figure that he might have been a character from a Thomas Mann novel, in which the child of a Lutheran pastor raised in uncommon strictness becomes the lover of many radiant actresses, and gives art-house cinema a new relevance. You cannot weigh the authority of Bergman then, unless you were in the generation that joined the National Film Theatre to catch up on his earlier works in the 1959 season, "Films from Sweden".

And now he is back, beneath Waterloo Bridge, for two full months – which is scarcely time enough to cover all his work. Not that Bergman is fashionable still. Wild Strawberries and Persona were in Sight & Sound's 1972 poll of the top ten films, but no Bergman picture made it in 2002, although he came eighth in the directors' vote. Why should that be? Well, Bergman was over-done for a time: his case was pushed too hard. We became too familiar with his austere tone. We decided he was humourless and monotonous. We took him for granted, and times became apparently safer than they had been in 1957.

In addition, he retired from film directing, and consistently declined invitations to be celebrated at film festivals. Indeed, he went back to that Thomas Mann-like character, living on an island off the Swedish shore, acting on the antique notion that no artist needs celebrity. So he has written books, he has directed occasionally in the theatre, and he has written scripts for others. But he has not let our fickleness alter him.

Maybe he knows enough to let history follow its slow course.

After all, to be Swedish is to keep a long-term view of taste in movies. Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala in 1918. That year, Victor Sjöström made a film called The Outlaw and His Wife, a great film in a superb body of work. The same Sjostrom was a poetic film-maker who made his more famous contemporary, DW Griffith, seem both heavy-handed and slick.

The tradition of film-making in Sweden that existed before Bergman's birth matched a sense of land, sea, light and the seasons with a profound view of humanity's modest place and passionate striving in that context.

Sjöström was so famous in his day that he was, along with director Mauritz Stiller and actress Greta Garbo, one of the Swedes who went to Hollywood. Decades later, at nearly80, he was called back by Bergman to play the professor who recalls his past in Wild Strawberries.

That professor has to make a journey to receive a great honour at a university. He is alone in the world, but for his memories, his bad dreams and the faint chance that hope can be rekindled by young people he meets along the way and by the renewal of wild strawberries. In Swedish cinema, there is a steady trust in nature. In the end, it amounts to a religion, and it is the one thing that can stand up to the intellectual pessimism of Ingmar Bergman. That latter quality had been spelt out with icy clarity in The Seventh Seal, a medieval morality play in which a knight tries to beat the figure of Death at chess. That film looked like the middle ages, but responded to the despair of the Cold War. Equally, Wild Strawberries was a small "and yet ..." that defied the melancholy – and the vast international box-office success – of The Seventh Seal.

So it was marvellous in the late fifties to discover that the 40-year-old Bergman had already been through several periods. He had begun in film around the end of the war and had his first great success writing Frenzy, a film directed by Alf Sjoberg (another forgotten Swedish master) and starring the very sexy Mai Zetterling (later a resident of Britain). As he began directing, Bergman was much affected by the contemporary Italian neo-realism, and by the examples of Marcel Carne, in France, and Carol Reed, in England. The early films were, notably, It Rains on Our Love, Port of Call, Prison, and Thirst.

But then Bergman softened a little, most obviously because his attention turned to women and to actresses. And so, in the early Fifties, there is a string of mordant love stories – Summer Interlude, Waiting Women, Summer with Monika, A Lesson in Love, and Smiles of a Summer Night – that starred and introduced such women as Maj-Britt Nilsson, Harriet Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, and Ulla Jacobsson. It became clear that Bergman's Sweden was a nearly infinite source of great acting, and there were fine men, too – Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, and later, Erland Josephson. But the women were supreme and radiant, and many of them became lovers of their great director.

Is this truly a Swedish resource, like timber and herring, or is it that Bergman had an extraordinary power for uncovering the actress in all women? Ask those named already as well as Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, Gunnel Lindblom and so on.

There is not space here to name every Bergman film or actress, but it is clear in hindsight that the great success of The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries gave the man confidence. He has been a classic neurotic, subject to several breakdowns, divorces and even a famous lapse in income tax payments, something for which his Sweden effectively forgave him, in part because he had earned so much foreign currency.

In the Sixties, he launched himself on a series of deliberately large subjects (though the films were often very modestly made), the great works, parables for an age of anxiety: The Face (with von Sydow as a magician/fraud), The Virgin Spring (a story of rape and revenge), Through a Glass Darkly (a distressing study of mental illness), Winter Light, The Silence, Persona (with a prolonged monologue by Bibi Andersson, in which Liv Ullmann listens to her – one of the screen's finest studies of acting and identity), The Shame, The Rite, Cries and Whispers (a brilliant Three Sisters done in bloody colours), Scenes from a Marriage (made for television), and Autumn Sonata (in which Bergman at last made a film with Ingrid Bergman – no relation).

And then, a final clearing in the emotional air in films that dwelt in memory and Bergman's great love of theatre: The Life of the Marionettes, the gorgeous Fanny and Alexander, and After the Rehearsal (with yet another new actress, Lena Olin).

Even now, Bergman remains an assured dramatist who is still pursuing the idea of his relationship with the world and his own material. Faithless, made in 2000, was laudably directed by Liv Ullmann. Bergman was not present on her set. But his script is plainly something to be considered in the company of his best work – and in Lena Endre, Faithless delivered one more astonishing performance.

In 1959, there were queues waiting to get into the Bergman season. I hope that today's young generation will sniff out the greatness ready to unfold over the next two months. Suppose there were no Bergman film in the latest top ten. So what? Where would you rate this ten: Wild Strawberries, Persona, Shame, Fanny and Alexander, Summer with Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night, Cries and Whispers, Sawdust and Tinsel, Waiting Women, Faithless?

And as if Bergman feels a touch irritated now at our lack of faith, he has a new film under way – Saraband, with a lovely young newcomer, Julia Dufvenius. He says it will be his last picture, after which he reckons to live on the island of Faro, letting the world slip by.

The Ingmar Bergman season: NFT, London SE1 (020-7928 3232), to 28 Feb;

Bergmanesque » where would they be without him

Ingmar Bergman is synonymous with art cinema at its most uncompromisingly serious. His work may have gone in and out of fashion, but it has consistently stirred the passions of other film-makers.

Woody Allen has spent his career riffing on Bergman the way that some jazz musicians devote lifetimes to reworking Thelonious Monk. He sometimes takes Bergman in painful earnest, as in the sombre Interiors (1978), sometimes mocks his own Bergmania, larking about with The Seventh Seal (1957) in Love and Death (1975). Allen's most fanciful tribute is Shadows and Fog (1992), which takes the circus setting of Sawdust and Tinsel (1953), mixes it with German Expressionist paranoia, and adds John Malkovich in full clown get-up.

In the race to be the next master of Scandinavian misterioso, Lars von Trier remains the front runner, scoring for Denmark over Sweden. Von Trier shares his master's commitment to gruelling psychodrama. Breaking the Waves (1996), a tale of sexual and metaphysical agony, plays Bergman off against Denmark's own grim doyen, Carl Theodor Dreyer. He also used the lugubrious tones of Bergman star Max von Sydow for the somniferous intro to his nightmare saga Europa (1991).

The French New Wave directors loved Bergman, and they loved his actresses, who established the screen fantasy of cool, cerebral eroticism. Perhaps it was by way of hommage to the Bergman femmes that Godard made an icon of his Danish-born muse, Anna Karina. The most overt French tribute to Nordic glamour is the scene in Francois Truffaut's Les 400 Coups (1959) in which the young hero steals a publicity still of a languid Harriet Andersson in Summer With Monika (1953).

Robert Altman may seem the quintessence of no-bullshit American spirit, but even he had a strange Bergmanesque blip in his career. Three Women (1977) is Persona (1966) with a third angle, featuring Sissy Spacek at her most unearthly and a perplexing psyche-merging payoff. Two years later, Altman cast one-time Bergman gamine Bibi Andersson in his claustrophobic snow-bound sci-fi puzzler Quintet.

Andrei Tarkovsky always admired Bergman, but in his last film, The Sacrifice (1986), the Russian metaphysician almost turned into him. The elements are all there: portents of apocalypse, a strange silent child, a symbolic tree, a Swedish island setting, and two Bergman mainstays, actor Erland Josephson and cinematographer Sven Nykvist. Not surprisingly, the Swedish Film Institute weighed in with funding.

And Bergman's most unlikely, and possibly most enduring, influence? In 1959, he made mediaeval rape-revenge drama The Virgin Spring (1960). In 1972, Wes Craven moved the action to present-day America, threw in a few chainsaws, and slasher horror was born, in the still controversial The Last House on the Left. The truly Bergmanesque slasher pic, however, is yet to be made – I Know What You Did Last Summer With Monika.

Jonathan Romney