CultureShock: Fintan O'TooleIngmar Bergman worked in a very specific Swedish context, yet he managed to have a worldwide influence.
In his 1965 essay, The Snakeskin, Ingmar Bergman, who died this week, compared 20th-century art to a snakeskin full of ants: "The snake itself is long since dead, eaten out from within, deprived of its poison; but the skin moves, filled with busy life." He himself, he wrote, was one of the ants whose energetic movements made the shell of the dead creature convulse.
It was a peculiarly paradoxical image of movie-making, flagrantly at odds with the upbeat mood of the medium's Hollywood mainstream. Cinema was supposed to be the great novelty of 20th-century art, and its trick of turning money into light seemed to imbue the culture of late capitalism with a kind of magic. Bergman thought that the trick was just that - an optical illusion. Art was already dead and cinema was just another twitch of the corpse. Yet in this very disillusionment, he found a kind of absolute freedom.
Bergman's death - and to a much lesser extent that of Michelangelo Antonioni - marks the closure of an era that really ended perhaps two decades ago, with the making of Bergman's own last great film, Fanny and Alexander, in 1982 and the death of Andrei Tarkovsky in 1986.
When Tarkovsky made his last film, The Sacrifice, on Bergman's home island of Faro, using Bergman's long-time collaborators, the cinematographer Sven Nykvist and the actor Erland Josephson, he was acknowledging a connection that was not immediately obvious. Though the Swede and the Russian made very different films, they shared a notion of what cinema could be. Bergman himself summed it up when he wrote of Tarkovsky that "when film is not a document, it is a dream".
BERGMAN PLACED HIMSELF in a field of cinematic dreamers that he saw as including Tarkovsky, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini and Luis Buñuel. That pantheon is now up for revisionist questioning, but it would have been broadly accepted in the 1960s and 1970s. These were the figures who defined contemporary film as an art form. They did so, in a sense, by working against its natural grain. Film's most obvious strength is its apparent ability to reproduce reality. These men, in their widely varied ways, delighted in its ability to undermine reality. They grasped its capacity to reproduce the state of dreams, which have the visual appearance of the real world but a logic and mood all of their own.
By making this leap, they acquired an enormous cultural power. Bergman and his contemporaries were never, of course, at the heart of the commercial film industry. But that industry and its products were nonetheless influenced by their aesthetic. Audiences who never saw a Bergman film were still experiencing, albeit at a remove, the effect of what he was doing. And this effect was, for those in the anglophone world, all the more powerful because it was so angular. The distance imposed by subtitles added to the disconcerting, dreamlike feel of the films, acting like a thin gauze through which we viewed the action.
It is impossible to imagine that kind of power returning to someone like Bergman in the foreseeable future. Here was an artist working in a minority language, Swedish. He was using something like a local repertory company of Swedish actors: Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ake Fridell, Max von Sydow and others. He was working from a fixed stock of characters who appear over and over again in different guises but with the same names - all those Almas and Fredriks, Henriks and Karins, Egermans, Vergeruses and Voglers. He was dealing with death and madness, with the treachery and fragility of the human condition. And he was putting forward a notion of film, not as razzle-dazzle, glamorous showbiz, but as an essentially austere enterprise, carried on in the belief, as he put it, "that to follow one's artistic conscience is a perversity of the flesh as a result of years and years of mortification and radiant moments of clear asceticism and resistance".
Bergman, moreover, was rooted in that most local and old-fashioned of forms, the theatre. He recognised theatre as "an old and well-beloved courtesan who has seen better days", but he worked in it throughout his artistic life, a period of almost 70 years. He made his debut in an amateur production of Sutton Vane's Outward Bound in 1938, playing, of course, Death's henchman. He finished his career with a production of Ibsen's Ghosts in 2002. The impact of Strindberg, Ibsen and the great Scandinavian dramatic tradition on Bergman's films is obvious. Theatre placed him both in a recognisable, pre-cinematic artistic tradition and in a very specific Swedish working context. Yet it did not stop him from having a worldwide influence.
There is much loose talk these days of globalisation and cultural imperialism, but the mark of the deleterious impact of Hollywood dominance is the impossibility of imagining such a figure as Bergman now. The space in which the products of minority national cultures could take on immediate global significance without in any way compromising their own integrity has narrowed almost to nothing. The steamroller of cultural globalisation has flattened out the landscape. A Bergman today would have to be content either to remain an essentially local figure or to tailor his work to Hollywood norms.
The dead snakeskin may be a more appropriate metaphor for art than ever, but it is harder for ants to make it twitch.