Ingmar Bergman

When you hear a phrase like "widely regarded as one of Europes finest ever film directors," you wish the person making that statement would add, "among film makers and film enthusiasts." Claiming that anybody is the finest anything is subjective, after all if you have no interest in sport you probably don't know the difference between Sidney Barnes and John Barnes, Clive Lloyd or John Lloyd. So restricting my criteria to his contemporaries, his peers and the generations of cineastes and film lovers who have been influenced by his work and enjoyed his contrubution to cinematic history I would have to say that Ingmar Bergman is in my Top 10 European film directors and the Top 20 of film directors from around the world.

I first got into European cinema as a 17 year old by accident. When I started work, and I apologise if this has been mentioned before, all the staff in the Bournemouth office of the international firm I was training with were, with the exception of the partners, under 30 years old. This meant that there was a variety of social activities that involved my work colleagues, one of which was Friday night touring the pubs, clubs and wine bars of Bournemouth. The evening would always end with a trip to some body's house for coffee and talking until the early hours before making our separate ways home. Now this was back in the late 1970's, in the days of three television channels and you didn't have all night television but the station with the southern ITV franchise (Southern, followed by TVS and now Meridian) showed foreign language films and we always watched them - to be honest I think it was the only chance some of my colleagues had to see some naked female flesh.

Anyway, Southern really pushed the boat out by screening Czech, Polish, Swedish, German and French films that could be regarded as classics of European cinema. They showed Bergman's “The Seventh Seal,” and “Wild Strawberries,” along with the best of the best of Fellini, Antonioni, Godard and Truffaut. Bergman’s emotionally frigid couples, his strange medieval melancholic knights, and professionals who seemed to speak some sort of strange philosophical language were part of my introduction as a 17 and 18 year old to what I came to know as European arthouse film. I've always thought that the term 'arthouse' was lazy cine-speak by people wishing to distance themselves from anything that was over analytical of human emotions, whilst refusing to acknowledge that some so-called arthouse films "Seven Samurai," "Kagemusha," and "L' avventura," have actually contributed more to our understanding of human nature than all the Die Hard films put together - but that's just me being pretentious - probably.

Bergman's films aren't an easy ride, I happen to think that art should be just as much about spiritual stimulation as visual satisfaction and the director himself believed that "film was not as a well-shaped narrative, but as “a form of art that goes beyond ordinary consciousness, straight to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” Bergman's appeal to those who study film is that what you see on the screen is a reflection of his own personal faults, his projection onto film of his guilt, dreams, desires, and confusions whilst refusing to hide beneath complex and detached mind games, his work feeds the heart and soul rather than the brain. Bergman's private life appeared on the surface to be as complex as some of his narratives: five wives and nine children — seven out of wedlock — and he admitted feeling guilty about the suffering of the wives and children he has been cruel to or deserted.

It seems ironic that his death should come at a time when his work is being reassessed in light of celebrating his fifty years of film making, but his films will remain there for generations to see and enjoy and that body of work speaks more eloquently about him than I have.