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Abstract
Ingmar Bergman’s cinema has been distributed around the world to varied, constantly evolving public response. In this 1998 essay, Birgitta Steene assesses data collected from film viewers in five countries – Brazil, France, India, Sweden, and the United States – to ultimately illuminate a complex transcultural circulation process comprised of three stages that are discussed at length: transmittance, annexation, and assimilation. Through this process, distributors and marketers frame work for audiences who claim it according to perceived differences and familiarities before finally assimilating it into their particular, individual world views. This study exemplifies a practicable approach not just to Bergman Studies but the transnational dissemination of art and media generally.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. One of Sweden’s major film reviewers at the time wrote the following critique of The Seventh Seal after its release in early 1957: “When leaving Ingmar Bergman’s new film The Seventh Seal, one is depressed and brooding. One remembers the artistic photography of Gunnar Fischer, the superior performance of Gunnar Björnstrand and the novel pleasure of seeing Max von Sydow. But apart from that, everything is a failure. And one feels sorry for the director who apparently wished to return to the tragic genre after his last few years of mishmash; and one must ask why one is so untouched” (Hjertén, Citation1957, p. 4).
2. Each national group consisted of between fifty and several hundred people attending repeated showings of Bergman’s films, who responded to a questionnaire. Among these a small percentage, chosen according to the age and gender composition of the returned questionnaires, was selected for interviews. These respondents constitute the representative target groups. The interview method used originated with American broadcast scholar Herta Herzog. In an attempt to break with the tendency to rely on quantitative figures in public reception research (e.g. Gallup polls) Herzog, aiming at qualitative responses, devised an interview method based on so-called “uses and gratifications” criteria. In applying this method to the Bergman project, respondents were asked to talk about the role of Bergman’s filmmaking in their personal, professional, and social lives, and to specify what aspects of his films they had found important and which aspects had seemed less relevant. In interpreting the responses, equal weight was given to esthetic and moral evaluations, but the predominance of one or the other within a given group was also used as a basis for structuring the material pertaining to that group. Each target group had its special reception persona, defined by such factors as cultural circumstances, ideological climate, and range of exposure to Bergman’s filmmaking.
3. A 63-year-old retired waitress expressed her sense of alienation in her own society with regard to Bergman’s filmmaking: “My family laughs at my interest in Bergman’s films. They say: Well, perhaps Fanny and Alexander is OK, but the rest is too gloomy, too difficult. They don’t understand how I can go down to that movie house voluntarily and see his films. So sometimes I’ve been thinking: Couldn’t we form some kind of Bergman club?”
4. In the limited space here, it is impossible to historicize the cultural contexts that support my nomenclature. Suffice it to say, using the United States as a condensed example, that in the United States the impact of Bergman’s films seems to have rested on a need for artistic articulation of a postwar spiritual crisis that led a generation of college-age students to question the religious beliefs of their elders; Bergman’s The Seventh Seal was introduced by American critic Andrew Sarris, who also launched the auteur concept in the United States and introduced The Seventh Seal as “the first truly existential film” (Sarris, Citation1959, p. 51). One reason Bergman’s impact in the United States has penetrated deeper than other non-American filmmakers of his generation may be due to the fact that his major films of the fifties are quite story-oriented and in this respect they reminded viewers of the American emphasis on narrative.
5. The earliest international award dates back to 1954 when Sawdust and Tinsel received a prize in São Paulo, Brazil. The latest award [at time of this article’s original publication, eds.] is the 1997 Cannes recognition of Ingmar Bergman’s life work in the cinema. For a fuller list of awards, see my reference work Ingmar Bergman: A Guide to References and Resources (Steene, Citation1987).
6. Bergman articulates his professional creed in a number of shorter essays. During his formative years, the most important one seems to be “Varge film är min sista film,” in which he lists his three “commandments” (Bergman, Citation1959, pp. 1–8). This essay appears in translation in a number of non-Swedish publications, for instance, as “My Three Most Powerfully Effective Commandments,” in Film Comment (Bergman, Citation1970, pp. 8–13).
7. Bergman contributed freely to such a portrait in both words and action. “Always crazy” he wrote on the back of a photograph of himself taken in the 1940s. See my “Gossen Ruda eller svensk ikon” (Steene, Citation1997, p. 190).
8. For the Swedish response to Bergman’s films, see my study Måndagar med Bergman (Steene, Citation1996).
9. To exemplify one might choose from Artur Lundkvist’s review of the film Eva, scripted by Bergman: “It is a frenzied, uptight product, a serial story with action and boldness on the surface, but banal and untenable underneath. […] In this film too, people talk a lot of pathetic nonsense that gives me the creeps” (Lundkvist, Citation1949, pp. 52–53).
10. This idea is derivative of an axiom in cognitive theory put forth by Frederick Bartlett in his discussion of mental schemata, which appeared in a 1932 study titled Remembering. According to Bartlett, our present perceptions are colored by the way we store our memories, which we do in a highly selective way, so that our recollection of an event is never an exact photographic rendering of that event. Schemata have their internal priorities in our minds. If we use our response today to a Bergman film as an illustration, we bring to that viewing a set of recollections of earlier viewings or of hearsays about the film or of our stored conception of Bergman as an artist and cultural personality. Our mental storage room is more or less cluttered with paraphernalia we have collected over the years, and since we start collecting very early in life, even a fairly young respondent to a Bergman film today, will bring some stored experiential data to bear on his or her viewing of that film. There is no completely “blank” previewing stage. We watch a Bergman film filtered through our personal and limited perception apparatus, which is shaped by the intellectual and cultural context in which we live and have lived (Bartlett, Citation1995).
11. The interview group, selected in accordance with the age, profession and gender of the questionnaire respondents, consisted of 30 interviewees. 70% were people above age 50.
12. The most frequently discussed films were The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through a Glass Darkly, and Cries and Whispers.
13. Only two Bergman films have had a commercial distribution in India: Autumn Sonata and Fanny and Alexander.
14. Indian respondents who singled out other Bergman costume films found that these too transcended national boundaries. The Seventh Seal, telling the story of a medieval knight’s encounter with Death, was considered archetypal rather than national in its dramatic juxtaposition of quester and destroyer; Wild Strawberries was seen as an old man’s gradual achievement of peace of mind through self-contemplation and resignation; a development with parallels in Hindu philosophy.
15. Audiences elsewhere have tended to see Monika in a much more negative light, as an escapist and irresponsible mother figure. Cf. discussion of French and American responses to film below.
16. The Finnish filmmaker and Bergman biographer Jörn Donner expressed similar views in his book Djävulens ansikte (Citation1962), translated into English as The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman (Citation1964).
17. Among them are Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow, and Ingrid Thulin.
18. “Bergman is a person who has done all we dreamed of doing. He has written films the way a novelist writes a book. Instead of the pen he uses the camera. He is an auteur de cinéma” (Truffaut, Citation1972, p. 40).
19. Despite its confiscation in Los Angeles, Summer with Monika circulated for five years (1954–59) as a mutilated sex movie in drive-in theaters in the American Midwest.
20. “Exoticism” and “mythos” are not to be confused, though both concepts refer to abstracted cultural phenomena. Widerberg, who objected to Bergman’s use of “Swedish exoticism” as an effort to reinforce preconceptions of Swedish culture among foreign viewers, defined “exoticism” as “Swedishness” romanticized by foreigners. Mythos on the other hand rests on a residue of native cultural norms that help define the ethnic parameter of a native audience response. Widerberg used it in his own filmmaking in depicting the summer landscape in such films as Elvira Madigan and Ådalen 31. By the time Ingmar Bergman made his summer films, the Swedish genre had developed what American communications scholar James Carey has called “a ritual model,” i.e. a symbolic sphere within a given culture or ethnic group where common norms are represented and within which people sharing this model recreate, preserve or challenge their reality (Carey, Citation1992, pp. 13–36). When Bergman arrived at filmmaking in the mid-forties, the ritualized summer model was as ripe with meaning and fixed expectations to Swedish audiences as the Western was to American filmgoers.
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Birgitta Steene
Birgitta Steene is Professor Emerita in cinema studies and Scandinavian literature at the University of Washington. She is also the recipient of the Honoris causa doctorate from the University of Uppsala for her research on Strindberg and Bergman. Dr. Steene is widely considered the world’s preeminent scholar on Ingmar Bergman.