INGMAR

Ingmar Bergman just passed away on Monday. A great loss to film and perhaps Woody Allen as he was heavily influenced by Bergman -- sometimes very directly, and much of the time, in flavour. Every film enthusiast has their own story on how they discovered the master filmmaker. My story goes like this: I was watching Second City Television (as it was called in its first incarnation, before it became SCTV) back in late 1976 or early 1977 and in one episode was the spoof film, "Whispers of the Wolf". This piece was more 'interesting' than 'funny' to me at that time... I found the skit, "Mike's Mercenaries" to be more my kinda humour. Obviously, one has to know the source material to fully enjoy the parody of. (As a note, Second City also did a film spoof on 'some French movie' which, as per my young age and very early film-going phase, did not fully appreciate that also.) My all time favourite television show, All In The Family, which I started watching in 1976, had an episode where Mike ("Meathead") and Gloria were leaving the house to see "an Ingmar Bergman film". Edith glows and says to the two, "oh, I love Ingrid Bergman movies". Mike clarifies to Edith, "no Ma, Ingmar Bergman". I knew the filmmaker by name, even before witnessing Edith's confusion, but had yet to see any of his work. As I discovered Bergman, and 'foreign' films in general, everything started to make sense, especially the fact that so many artists would want to parody and be influenced by someone so special. I actually needed a little time to more than like Bergman's film, The Seventh Seal. Its imagery was no doubt vivid and unique -- helped greatly by such a non southern California environment -- but the sensibility was more of an acquired taste. This screening I attended would have been at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto; the year would have been 1986, still relatively early in my film education. I saw Seal again several years later and, as the joke goes, the rest was history. In the mid '90s I watched Wild Strawberries on VHS tape and the magic was complete. Wild Strawberries surprised me in the sense that I wasn't expecting it to be so 'moving'. These are the two important Bergman films in my education as they were of some extreme to each other and convinced me of the director's status. I discovered other Bergman films and will discover more, especially now, but it is now time to revisit these two seminal pictures. Time to be moved and awed by a filmmaker who -- with great aplomb -- actually had something to say! And someone like Woody Allen, for example, will keep on saying it...