Cinema's Shakespeare

...Cinematographers were picked with equal care...

...in Bergman, the close-up very nearly is the film...

...Neither of them has been or is likely to be equaled...

...There have been other great film directors: Fellini, whom Bergman loved...

...But even more important, his films are built on musical principles: on duration and contrasts, on rhythm and harmony—even counterpoint...

...They carried black-and-white cinematography to extraordinary heights, and then proceeded to even greater advances in the use of color...

...Think of the emotional use of color in The Passion of Anna and the symbolic one in Cries and Whispers...

...And he never shied away from the great, tragic truths...

...What distinguishes Bergman's films fundamentally from those of nearly all other directors is the love of music, and the conscious and unconscious influence of that love on his films...

...war, though not combat (the background in Thirst, The Silence, Shame), religion (The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, Through a Glass Darkly), family chronicle (Wild Strawberries, Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander), the supernatural (The Virgin Spring and, intermittently, others), love and death (repeatedly...

...His soundtracks, always respectfully sparing of music (none of those Hollywood orgies), employed the best from the past and the present, such Swedish contemporaries as Karl-Birger Blomdahl and Daniel Bortz...

...Bresson, whom Bergman selectively admired...

...There he exhibited his superb command of dialogue, another thing that brings him close to Shakespeare...

...His reactions to, and comments on, them would have provided him with the perfect exit lines, and us with a great summation...

...Renoir, in a couple of films, approached this...

...After that, the first sentence runs: "Ingmar Bergman is, in my most carefully considered opinion, the greatest filmmaker the world has seen so far...

...But none of them so expressed the whole human being, so encompassed human variety...

...Of course, the choice of actors for, among other things, the expressiveness of their faces helped...

...Bergman used Hild-ing Bladh, Goran Strindberg, Gunnar Fischer, and above all, Sven Nykvist, with whom he made most of his finest films...

...It is Bergman the completist— like Shakespeare—whom I want to address here, and show how he had it all, and not, like the best of the rest, only part...

...He had been, briefly, an actor, and all through his life directed theater, where the actor-director relations are closer than in film...

...The uncut version of Scenes from a Marriage may be the profoundest movie treatment of man-woman relationships ever made...

...Anto-nioni, whom he came to appreciate...

...Importantly, he had a kind of resident company of film actors on whom he could rely, and for whom he tailored his screen characters—only Kurosawa had something vaguely resembling it...

...Thirty-five years later, upon news of Bergman's death last month, that is still my opinion...

...The Swedish title of what in America became The Magician was The Face...

...His verbal gift comes across better in translations of his later fictions and autobiographies...

...On film, he made thrillers and melodramas (early works...

...Unlike most directors, Bergman wrote most of his screenplays himself...

...Few other filmmakers made so many movies (50-plus) and none so many masterpieces...

...speare, Bergman had bright moments in his darkest films, as dark ones in his lighter ones...

...and Renoir, who mostly left him cold...

...In Persona, the faces of the two women merge in what may be the ultimate cinematic meditation on per-sonhood...

...English subtitles, to be sure, rarely if ever do his language full justice...

...he was horrified by Hitchcock, whom he perceived as hating them...

...Other directors have made much of close-ups...

...It is a great pity that he did not live another year...

...Sven and I are like an old married couple," Bergman would say, although the two of them never socialized...

...Over and over he spoke of his fascination with the human face, which his films invariably celebrated...

...He also understood and loved actors as no other director did...

...American titles tended to be diminishing, if not downright gross, as in The Naked Night...

...Wrong...

...One of Bergman's wives was the distinguished pianist Kabi Lar-etei, who further developed his musical tastes and was often heard on his soundtracks or providing background music for his stage productions...

...No less important is that, like ShakeJohn Simon writes about theater for Bloomberg News...

...the greatest filmed opera ever (The Magic Flute), horror (Hour of the Wolf), farce (The Devil's Eye, Now About All These Women...

...And how well he could write or talk about them, though never in excess...

...Smiles of a Summer Night, a great film, is serious comedy, and so even better...

...Bergman scored bull's-eyes in almost all genres, which doesn't mean that, like all experimenters and pioneers, he escaped the occasional miss...

...A Lesson in Love and the brilliant elevator episode in Waiting Women are sheer comedy at its best...

...And an oeuvre that hasn't been surpassed in 35 years stands a very good chance that it will never be...

...Biography and history excepted, Bergman tackled all genres, especially if you know his work in the theater, television, and opera...

...wonderful documentaries that he shot himself about simple people on his small island...

...In all his films, women figure as importantly as men, and often more so...

...Bergman, who loved music from Bach to Bartok, and listened to it passionately, often got ideas for his films from it—most conspicuously in Autumn Sonata...

...Let me put it this way now: What Shakespeare is to the theater, Bergman is to cinema...

...Lesser directors have been influenced by paintings, still lesser ones by (usually inferior) fiction...

...But some benighted or uninformed souls think of him as merely a gloomy Scandinavian with no sense of humor...

...He understood them and empathized with them...

...Come next Bastille Day he would have been 90, and major celebrations and retrospectives will take place worldwide...

...He was a man who loved women, and sometimes resented them, which comes with the territory...