One can easily demonstrate that most of Bergman's films deal with themes or concerns absolutely central to human experience: themes that are either the most fundamental or the most banal, depending on the artist's response to them: transience and mortality; marriage and family; the varieties of love; the shadow of death; old age and the need for self-knowledge.
Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman (Praeger, 1969).
Before I saw Howard Hawks's El Dorado and read Andrew Sarris's book on American cinema my favorite director was Ingmar Bergman: his movies were foreign, with subtitles; dealt with serious issues of life, death and man's relationship with God; and were often frank about sex, including even some nudity! Bergman's films were intelligent and austere, made in black-and-white and eschewing even musical scores unless the music was actually part of a scene, e.g., coming from a radio. These days few people under 60 seem to know or care about Bergman's films while to me they seem more relevant than ever, though I would no longer say that Bergman is a greater artist than the classical American directors.
Susan Sontag once wrote: "It is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color" (there is truth in this; Bresson's color films I find much inferior to his black-and-white ones, for complex reasons) and the same was true for Bergman until 1969, when he made The Passion of Anna in color, presumably for commercial reasons. With the exception of The Magic Flute (1975) I find Bergman's color films not as interesting as the black-and-white ones. Like Bresson, however, Bergman came to color late in life and late in his career and then tended to overdo it (compare his use of red to how Nicholas Ray uses it in Rebel Without a Cause, made in 1955, when most films still were in black-and-white). Autumn Sonata is a relatively successful late Bergman film, its color mostly utilitarian in what is something of a chamber piece, as Charlotte (played by Ingrid Bergman in her only Ingmar Bergman film) comes to visit her daughter Eva, played by Liv Ullman, veteran of many Ingmar Bergman films. The film includes beautifully framed flashback shots of Eva's childhood, as Eva gets more and more angry about how her mother neglected her, constantly going on concert tours and eventually leaving the family for another man. "I had to comfort Papa," says Eva. As Eva and Charlotte talk the camera (of the reliable Sven Nykvist) frames them in one shot, with Charlotte's profile overlapping Eva's frontal face. Many of Bergman's films have one of the four seasons in their title, though in this case I think autumn means that both Bergmans are in that period of their life (Ingrid died in 1982 at the age of 67; Ingmar lived to be 89, dying in 2007).
Smiles of a Summer Night is Bergman at the peak of his powers, making a Mozartian film that looks forward to The Magic Flute. Smiles of a Summer Night is about finding the right lover and, since this takes place around 1900, one from the right class and of the right age: the maid ends up with the footman, the older lawyer ends up with an old lover, an actress, while the lawyer's son ends up with his father's young wife. The unfaithful soldier (who at one point says "my wife can be unfaithful but not my mistress" and another time says the precise opposite) and his unfaithful wife end up reconciled and swear fidelity. Most of this takes place on one summer night, as Bergman uses the short summer in Sweden as a metaphor for life. The film ends with the soldier playing Russian roulette with the lawyer, who shoots himself with the soot that the soldier had put in the gun in place of the bullet. "Do you think a nobleman would allow himself to be shot by a shyster?" The last image in the film is of windmills, suggesting that we are all tilting at them in our attempts to find love. The general tone of this film is of a slightly arch comedy but I have never found Bergman to have much of a sense of humor and for me that doesn't matter, since I think the best comedies are the most serious and whether they make one laugh is not as important as, in this case, the intense analysis of human behavior.
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