![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
By exploring the critical, journalistic and popular reception of Ingmar Bergman’s films in Australia in the late 1950s and ’60s, as well as tracing their patterns of exhibition and distribution, this essay examines how particular discourses and approaches to Bergman were already well and truly in place by the early ’60s and prior to the arrival of most of the director’s films in the country. The critical response to and release of Bergman’s work in Australia does reveal minor antipodean variations and is an important staging ground for an emerging and quickly evolving screen culture, as well as debates around film as “art”. But it is also highly referential and reverential to received opinion from overseas and evidences the truly global reach of Bergman’s cinema and reputation during this period. This essay will examine the appearance of a range of Bergman films in Australia starting with Smiles of a Summer Night in 1957 and concluding with the controversial release of the heavily censored The Silence in 1965, fashioning evidence for a boom in “Bergmania” that reaches a peak in 1961–62 and provides an important test case for the rise of “foreign” film distribution in Australia.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is a national multicultural television and radio network that began operation in Australia in January 1978. It began full-time television service in October 1980.
2. I will use the original Australian release titles for Bergman’s films throughout this essay, listing well known English-language alternatives – such as the US title for So Close to Life, Brink of Life – in parentheses next to the Australian title the first time a given film is mentioned.
3. For example, Fanny and Alexander received uniformly glowing reviews in the Australian press on its first release. Even such notoriously curmudgeonly critics as Neil Jillett (Citation1984) were swayed, gushingly titling his review “Bergman’s Beautiful Bonanza”.
4. Cinema Classics began airing in February 1983. Stratton was the host of this and several other programs on SBS. He was also the director of the Sydney Film Festival from 1966 to 1983. See Stratton (Citation2008, pp. 286–291).
5. Daniel Humphrey (Citation2008) notes the common use of the term “Bergmania” in US responses to the director’s films in the early ’60s.
6. Although most Bergman films of the time did eventually appear in Australia, many received judicious excisions from the Commonwealth Censorship Board. These often exceeded the cuts made in the US, Britain, and other Western countries and reflected a broader conservatism in Australian culture at the time. The movement against censorship gained significant momentum in the 1960s, though the fate of Bergman was not truly central to this debate as many of the films still managed to be released.
7. For detailed reminiscences about some of the releases of Bergman’s films in Melbourne in this era I’d like to thank Michael Campi, a significant figure in the film society movement and a constant contributor to film culture across subsequent decades. He is also one of the few people I could find who wrote a defense of All These Women on its Australian release (see Campi, Citation1966). I’d also like to thank Olympia Barron and Alex Gionfriddo from the AFI Research Collection at RMIT University for their always invaluable assistance.
8. As in other countries, One Summer of Happiness – inevitably censored in Australia – was fondly remembered as the harbinger of a more liberal climate for the local representation of sexuality on screen. This is evocatively recounted in Phillip Adams’ (Citation1989) reminiscence and partial obituary of star Ulla Jacobsson, “The Happiest Summer of All”.
9. Though, in some cases, these films screened briefly in other state capitals before arriving in Melbourne.
10. See the Appendix at the end of this article. This table compares Melbourne and Swedish release dates as well as lists the Australian distributor and Melbourne first-run cinema for all twelve Bergman films commercially exhibited between the late 1950s and Persona in 1968.
11. I have chosen to give details of the Melbourne releases as these were the records that I had most ready and extensive access to and because they represent the most complete screening schedule of Bergman films in Australia across this period.
12. The large festivals were very reluctant to pay screening fees to local distributors. For a contemporaneous discussion of this conflict as well as a profile of Sydney-based distributor Sidney Blake, see Higham (Citation1963).
13. For example, an unsigned feature article titled “Ingmar Bergman Makes His First English Picture” (Citation1971) was published in The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Adrian Danks
Adrian Danks is an Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is also co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, was an editor ofSenses of Cinema between 2000 to 2014, and is the author of the edited collections A Companion to Robert Altman (Wiley, 2015) and American-Australian Cinema (Palgrave, 2018, with Steve Gaunson and Peter Kunze).