I would have been sixteen when I saw my first Ingmar Bergman films, a double bill of Persona and Hour Of The Wolf. Their depictions of alienation, madness and despair hit me where I lived; as a kid stuck on a farm, living in a community where my intellectual curiosity was viewed with suspicion, I felt just like Max Von Sydow stuck on that island, questioning whether the voices he heard were real.
I saw a lot of Bergman films over the next year or so. The Des Moines theater The Movies was a repertory house, booking lots of the then-standard international favorites (Fellini, Kurosawa) along with then-new or at least more recent international fare (lots of Herzog and Fassbinder). Plus lots of cult films (Eraserhead), American indies (Return Of The Secaucus Seven, Gal Young 'Un) and Hollywood classics (musicals, science fiction, lots and lots of Hitchcock).
In that pre-video era, this is where my film education took place. The things I saw there--Jesus, my mind reels. Sisters, Dark Star, Desperate Living, Paths Of Glory, Forbidden Planet, Heavy Traffic, Tales Of Hoffman, Once Upon A Time In The West, New York, New York, Walkabout, 200 Motels, Dersu Uzala, Brewster McCloud, Hollywood Boulevard.
And through the years, all those other movies stayed with me more than any of the Bergman films I saw. However much they meant to me at the time, however they spoke to me, nothing of Bergaman's has lingered, in my heart, in my mind, in my imagination. They had their moment, then it passed.
I don't mean to disparage the man or his work--I named my beloved cat Monika after a Bergman title, after all--but maybe Bergman's films have the most meaning if seen at a time when you are first asking the Big Questions, are trying to find some sort of meaning in life.
At that point in your life, they seem deep, profound, but as you move on, they lose something. It's not that you stop asking those questions, but you discover other things in life, and then you notice Bergman's works seem hermetically sealed, full of characters who aren't characters, merely vessels for their director's weighty musings, and you want to tell them and him to lighten up, stop being so dour, and just relax.
