Bergman: A year in a Life

In 2013, Jane Mag­nus­son invit­ed an impres­sive col­lec­tion of inter­na­tion­al film­mak­ers to Ing­mar Bergman’s home on Fårö to com­ment on his VHS col­lec­tion and con­sid­er his lega­cy. The result was Tres­pass­ing Bergman, an engag­ing but hap­haz­ard doc­u­men­tary, mem­o­rable pri­mar­i­ly for Lars von Tri­er mus­ing on his idol’s mas­tur­ba­tion habits.

Ing­mar Bergman: A Year in a Life is a more robust and illu­mi­nat­ing piece of work. The year Mag­nus­son has cho­sen to build her film around is 1957, which makes sense when you look at what he achieved in the span of 12 months. Two of his most beloved mas­ter­pieces (The Sev­enth Seal and Wild Straw­ber­ries), a film for tele­vi­sion, a radio play and four ambi­tious stage pro­duc­tions, all while jug­gling an increas­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed per­son­al life.

It’s an out­put that might have impressed Fass­binder, who famous­ly blitzed his way through projects with a cock­tail of drugs, but Bergman’s furi­ous work rate was appar­ent­ly sus­tained by noth­ing more stim­u­lat­ing than yoghurt and bis­cuits. ​“He didn’t have the top one, in case some­one touched it. Instead he’d fid­dle one out from under­neath,” Lena Endre says, recall­ing the pack­et of bis­cuits that was per­ma­nent­ly with­in reach on set.

Endre is among the many con­trib­u­tors who knew and worked with Bergman, either in film or the­atre, and they offer a greater sense of inti­ma­cy and insight than Tres­pass­ing Bergman’s inter­lop­ers could achieve. Their per­spec­tives allow us to see Bergman from a mul­ti­tude of angles, and instead of stick­ing to the events of 1957, Mag­nus­son uses it as a jump­ing-off point to study dif­fer­ent aspects of his career.

For exam­ple, there is lit­tle to be said about the 1957 stage pro­duc­tion of Molière’s ​‘The Mis­an­thrope’, but it leads us to his trou­bled 1995 ver­sion of the same play, which involved a heat­ed bat­tle of wills between Bergman – by this point the all-pow­er­ful author­i­ty in Swedish cul­ture – and the up-and-com­ing star Thorsten Flinck.

This shift­ing back-and-forth can make A Year in a Life feel a lit­tle bag­gy and unfo­cused, but so much of what Mag­nus­son has unearthed is rev­e­la­to­ry. No mere hagiog­ra­phy, the film explores the Nazi sym­pa­thies Bergman expressed as a young man and the dom­i­neer­ing ego and tem­per that often left those around him strick­en with fear. It reveals an account of a shock­ing­ly vio­lent fight between Bergman and his ex-girl­friend Karin Lann­by, which he wrote about and then excised from his auto­bi­og­ra­phy ​‘The Mag­ic Lantern’.

Mag­nus­son sug­gests that he lat­er used this inci­dent in From the Life of the Mar­i­onettes, and it often seems that real life for Bergman was noth­ing more than raw mate­r­i­al to be exploit­ed in his art; this was the man who had a doc­tor fab­ri­cate a grave diag­no­sis for Gun­nar Björnstrand so he would be suf­fi­cient­ly dis­tract­ed and depressed in Win­ter Light.

A genius and a tyrant, a mas­ter of his craft, and a dis­as­ter at home. It’s a famil­iar sto­ry, but Mag­nus­son does an admirable job of pre­sent­ing this artist in all of his com­plex­i­ty, respect­ing his bril­liance while ask­ing pierc­ing ques­tions. By the end of A Year in a Life we’ve learned a great deal about Ing­mar Bergman, but one feels we haven’t yet unlocked all the secrets that made him tick. As Mag­nus­son notes in her nar­ra­tion, ​“If you look for Bergman, the only place you find him is in his films.”