by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein
Ingmar Bergman passed away on July 30, 2007 at the age of
89. As soon as the sad news got around, the world honored his oeuvre as that of
one of the greatest directors in the history of cinema. In Sweden flags
were flown half-mast and the nation was aware that it had lost its most famous
son. In this context, some Swedish journals could not ignore the fact that the
Bergman phenomenon has something uncanny (or should we say Bergmanesque?) about
it: in a way, this artist, who exposed themes that are familiar to every Swede,
had been “too large” for this small country.
Foreign journals, on the other hand, seldom mentioned
details about Bergman’s cultural context. As a matter of fact, explorations
into this theme are rare; just as rare as philosophical examinations of
Bergman’s films, though his films are (as everybody agrees) as profound and
metaphysical as the work of, say, French existentialist writers.
The death of this giant produces an uncanny feeling:
there is a gap between the explicit concreteness with which Bergman described
the relationships between “real” (Swedish) humans, and his abstract way of
sticking out of a culture to which he is so strongly linked and at the same
time not linked at all. The most uncanny of all questions can thus be
formulated like this: is Bergman too big not only for the Swedes but also for
everybody else?
Bergman is indeed full of contradictions. Seemingly
mainly preoccupied with his own pains and indifferent about “influences,” he is
at the same time recognized as an integral component of European cinema. When
he received the Erasmus Prize for his artistic contribution to European culture
he declared, in the official speech that he held, that in his opinion European
culture would simply not exist. This was perhaps, as wrote Vernon Young, the
“most sovereign discourtesy publicly committed by any artist in our time”
because the Erasmus Prize is explicitly awarded for the “intensification of
European spiritual life.”
But there are more contradictions. Bergman was highly
professional though at the same time widely “self-taught;” he was cultivated
and profound though he preferred to describe himself modestly as an
“entertainer;” his films are vernacularly savage though speaking at the same
time the artistic language of an international bourgeoisie; throughout his
career Bergman remained internationally influential though he clung at the same
time to an outside position from which the world can be observed rather than
changed.
If we really want to understand Bergman we should perhaps
catch up some basic understanding about the evolutionary process of culture
through a dialectical exchange between periphery and centre. First of all,
instead of putting Bergman into the mausoleum of great directors we should try
to perceive his work through the cultural context established by, for example,
Mauritz Stiller (the Finnish-Swedish film director who “discovered” Greta
Garbo), Victor Sjöstrom, or the Dane Carl Dreyer. Then, Bergman can be studied
as the perhaps unique case of an artist who not only came from the periphery
but who stayed in the periphery without turning the periphery into a center.
Bergman influenced the center from the periphery and this is indeed uncanny or
simply Bergmanesque.
Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is professor of philosophy at Zhejiang University, China. He is the author of the upcoming book Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-Wai.
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