But Ingmar Bergman's life was nobody's business. Once he had become world famous, he sought to protect his privacy from goofball fans who trekked all the way to his home on the remote island of Fårö to catch a glimpse of him. In 2013, five years after Bergman's death, a documentary was released called Trespassing Bergman. The title of this curiously mocking documentary comes from the garrisoned house on Fårö (off Götland, if that is any help) to which some of the people in the film - all filmmakers - come to visit, where Bergman lived and worked (on and off) for forty years. To any true cinephile who ever held the work of Ingmar Bergman in high esteem (and I don't believe it's possible to be one and to not do the other), the film lurches from touching reverence to effrontery and back again.
There is a quite bizarre fetishism at work here, almost as if Bergman's corpse was in the room while some of the people invited inside were poking around his inner sanctum (his study, his movie-viewing room), rifling through his books and collection of videos. Daniel Espinosa confesses that he feels like he is "trespassing" in Bergman's home, and Claire Denis becomes strangely spooked and has to leave the house. But a number of them had clearly shown up to bury Bergman rather than praise him. And what a very odd bunch of people they assembled to trespass on Bergman! Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Michael Haneke, John Landis, Lars von Trier, Tomas Alfredson, Daniel Espinosa, Claire Denis, Wes Craven, Ang Lee, Thomas Vinterberg, Isabella Rossellini, Harriet Andersson, Zhang Yimou, Woody Allen, Laura Dern, Francis Ford Coppola, Takeshi Kitano, Holly Hunter, Wes Anderson, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Pernilla August, Alexander Payne - all of them have something to say about Bergman's films, sometimes illuminating, sometimes not.
Ask your average movie fan today to name a "great" director and you might get answers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or Ridley Scott. Further down the scale you might get J. J. Abrams, James Gunn, or Matthew Vaughn. Ask them to name a great foreign director and you would probably get the name of one of the many foreign directors who, early in their careers, defected to Hollywood. Like Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Denis Villeneuve, or Alfonso Cuarón.
Well, none of these "great" directors comes even close to my standard of greatness - a standard established by Ingmar Bergman and a handful of other filmmakers. I simply can't use the word in connection with them without putting it between quotation marks. Some of them have made good films. Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou. And I got the feeling that the makers of Trespassing Bergman at least sensed this as well. At one point, John Landis calls The Seventh Seal, the film that made Bergman almost a household word, a "joke" and Alexander Payne claims that it "doesn't hold up" and its once "profound" qualities are now "laughable." One of the problems that The Seventh Seal presents to the viewer is its solidity and concreteness. It isn't in the least abstract, which was Bergman's point. He wanted to show how, in the Middle Ages, things like death and hell weren't just concepts but extremely real, and he used medieval church paintings that represented death and the devil almost as everyday, familiar objects, as his jumping off point. Just because the film has been parodied so much doesn't diminish its power. People can parody the pared-down writing style of Ernest Hemingway without diminishing the greatness of The Sun Also Rises.
The worst offender by far is Lars von Trier, the Danish imbecile who appears to lack the ability to control the puerilities coming out of his mouth. After showing off an obscene figurine on his desk, he asserts that, because Bergman supposedly claimed to be in a constant state of sexual arousal, even into old age, he must have been masturbating nonstop. Coming from someone who has by now made several quite ineffective hardcore pornographic films, Trier's remarks are merely asinine.
Martin Scorsese speaks about his first encounters with Bergman's early films, especially Summer With Monika, but then points out that, for a Roman Catholic like him, Bergman was on the "condemned list." And Robert de Niro appears briefly to inform us that, because he was too busy to watch the Bergman films with which the filmmakers provided him, he wasn't able to comment on them. Wes Anderson, whose Paris home is shown off to no purpose, makes some remarks about the lack of "comedians" among Bergman's actors. Anderson is becoming somewhat legendary for producing the longest string of totally pointless films on record. He should be in the Guinness book by now.
But before we're halfway through the film, the focus shifts abruptly from Bergman's work to Bergman's women. One of the things that the film points out is how Bergman was attacked by a new generation of Swedish filmmakers and critics and how Bergman responded to them in The Silence and Persona, radical departures from conventional narrative films. Bergman could have easily ignored the new generation and relax in his renown, without making another film to stand alongside Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal. The fact that he continued to make films that challenged viewers, like Winter Light and A Passion attests to his stature as an artist.
The 1970s were by far the most turbulent and difficult years for Bergman. He gave up asking difficult questions about God and death and focused instead on marriage and family. He had to flee charges of tax evasion in Sweden and work in Germany. I think his work during this period began to parody itself. When Woody Allen, who has always revered Bergman, made Interiors, which was released almost simultaneously with Bergman's Autumn Sonata, Vernon Young suggested that Bergman was copying or even parodying the style of Allen's film, rather than vice-versa. Isabella Rossellini makes the pertinent point that Bergman's portrayal of a successful woman ( Ingrid Bergman is a concert pianist in Autumn Sonata) who neglects her children and her family obligations is quite sexist, not to mention outdated.
Finally arriving at Fanny and Alexander, which was the most expensive film ever made in Sweden, earning the Swedish Film Institute some criticism for spending its entire budget for the year on one film, some actresses mention their nervousness working with Bergman, but Lars von Trier expresses his - justified, I think - outrage about how "blasphemous" Fanny and Alexander is because it is little more than a travesty of his life's work.
The film returns repeatedly to shots of Fårö, its stark landscape and stony beaches, its occluded horizons. You get a sense of how much it might have inspired Bergman, looking out on that denuded island, blasted by Baltic winds. It doesn't seem lonely so much as it might be populated by ghosts. There is a starkness that is beautiful, even lyrical, that only someone like Bergman would notice. After covering so much ground, the film closes with a touching moment when, in still photographs, a very old Bergman embraces Ang Lee. It offers us a kind of forgiveness for the trespassing we have all committed by watching this exasperatingly uneven documentary.
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