Film: Seeking God Unawares

Last year at Cannes in honor of his 75th birthday, Swedish author/director Ingmar Bergman received a special tribute. This summer there is a four month Bergman festival in New York City. These events and many others remind us of Bergman’s singular presence in the history of cinema. Simply put, he is the greatest single talent in the history of motion pictures.

Various ways of interpreting Bergman have surfaced over the years. Some critics have focused on his treatment of women, others on his exploration of heterosexual relationships, others on his probings of the human psyche. While each of these approaches is fruitful and Bergman’s genius can be revealed in all of them, I have never found any sufficiently radical to capture the uniqueness of Bergman’s accomplishment. Ingmar Bergman is the most artistically successful philosopher in the history of film. In movie after movie Bergman cinematically explores questions that have preoccupied philosophers: What is the ultimate meaning of human existence? Is there a God? If so, what about God’s silence? What is the ultimate significance of human love? What is the meaning of death?

From The Seventh Seal (1957) to Fanny and Alexander (1982) Bergman engaged in a series of philosophical inquiries that produced a twenty-five year corpus of film unequalled in its metaphysical depth or artistic beauty. No director can match the number of masterpieces that Bergman created. Nor can any director match Bergman’s success in creating films that dramatize philosophical questions.

My interpretation of Bergman’s vision is that there is a parallel between the perceived silence of God and the success or failure of human love. Any film from 1957 to 1982 could be used to illustrate this. Two obvious examples are The Seventh Seal and Shame (1968). In the earlier film Jof (Nils Poppe) and Mia (Bibi Andersson), who with their child are a symbol of the Holy Family, are believers and their love endures even to the point of escaping Death. In Shame Eva (Liv Ullmann) and Jan (Max von Sydow), having lost belief in God, suffer a marriage that seems like a sadistic/masochistic battlefield.

Over the twenty-five year period religious symbols continue to appear but they point less and less toward the mystery of God and more and more toward human relations. I think of the secular Mass-like liturgy in The Rite (1969), the larvae infected statue of Madonna and Child in The Touch (1971), the hollow reference to St. Paul’s 13th chapter of Corinthians in Scenes from a Marriage (1973), the awkward presence of a minister in the face of death in Cries and Whispers (1973), the secularized resurrection in Face to Face (1976), the childish blasphemies in Fanny and Alexander.

What is especially interesting, and not often noted, is the vision of art that emerges from a study of Bergman’s films. Many critics have noted autobiographical aspects of Bergman’s work as if he is working out on film his relationship with his parents. More interesting to me is Bergman’s cinematic self-reflection on the role of the artist in society. In The Seventh Seal, an artist, while painting the plague on the walls of a church vestibule, muses on the role of artists in the world, whether it might be to please or disturb. In The Magician (1958) Bergman has an actor, Albert Vogler (Max von Sydow), a fraudulent Christ-figure who tricks people into believing in the supernatural, held up to ridicule, although a deus ex machina ending justifies his vocation as an entertainer. In Through a Glass Darkly (1961) a novelist (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is so self-centered that his daughter’s descent into madness interests him only as an artist.

Claiming that religion and art are kept in existence for sentimental reasons, Bergman once compared art to a lifeless snakeskin inhabited by ants, a snakeskin that occasionally moves. All that mattered was that his art pleased him—it need have no further significance. Given his denial of God, Bergman can affirm nothing more, which makes him a poor interpreter of his own art.

The Swedish director compares and contrasts to another important director, Michelangelo Antonioni. In films such as La Notte (1961), Red Desert (1964), Blow-up (1966), and The Passenger (1975), Antonioni, like Bergman, explored a contemporary wasteland from which God seemed absent. But Antonioni’s nihilism eventually destroyed his art: If absolutely nothing matters, why should one of his films? Bergman’s preoccupation with the mystery of love, and his hope, however minimal, preserved his art from self-destructing. While in statements about his films Bergman sounds as nihilistic as Antonioni, in the films themselves Bergman’s actual depiction of love illuminates us sufficiently that the films have a beauty and power that their creator cannot justify. Thus, a great film like Persona (1966) transcends and negates its own theme— that nothing matters.

Bergman’s failure to grasp adequately the deepest significance of his films reminds me of Sigmund Freud’s failure to explain what he was accomplishing as a therapist. Psychologist Rollo May pointed out that Freud, because he was a mechanist, denied the existence of human freedom when discussing his own work. Similarly, because of his disbelief in God, Bergman misses the mystery that his art explores so profoundly. There is more to Bergman’s art than Bergman can speak.

Author

  • Rev. Robert E. Lauder

    Rev. Robert E. Lauder is a Brooklyn diocesan priest and professor of philosophy at St. John's University, Jamaica, New York.

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