Jornal da Mostra

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INGMAR BERGMAN

CINEMA LOSES SWEDISH MASTER INGMAR BERGMAN

“There is no initiation to cinema without a plunge into the Bergmanian universe, with its tormented beings facing God’s silence”. I keep this statement in my filmgoer memories, from repeated articles in French and Argentinean magazines, when we didn’t have them here, during the military dictatorship. Without flying any ideological flag, Bergman was able to furnish our longing for reactions towards shame and will to live.


The passionate exercise of decoding Bergmanian codes was an initiation to legions of admirers who received the news of his death on July 30, 2007. As very few filmmakers in the world, his name is an adjective forever immortalized to represent a state of the soul of unforgettable characters that will always be remembered for their own rhetoric.


Through the São Paulo International Film Festival we were able to show great admiration to his works and keep some conversations with the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman. His films should be kept as World Heritage forever. Bringing to the 29th Mostra the trilogy “Bergman Och Filmen, Bergman Och Teatern, Bergman Och Farö”, Bergman says to director Marie Nyreröd he kept good memories of São Paulo, the city whose critics first recognized what he was worth in the whole world. I tell Marie Nyreröd to take our invitation to Bergman to come to São Paulo in the following year, for the 30th São Paulo International Film Festival, in 2006. To reinforce the request and to have an answer to his repeated argument, that he no longer traveled because of his age (87 in 2005), I ask documentary maker Marie Nyreröd to be photographed side by side with the vigorous Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira (then at the age of 98) who comes to São Paulo whenever he can to show his new films. Marie took the best documentary award and the photo with Manoel de Oliveira from the Mostra. We later learned that Bergman took a good laugh out of the teasing suggestion.


To see Bergman’s films has always been a challenge against mainstream. In 1977, the year the São Paulo Film Festival was born, I was still in charge of the film programming at the São Paulo Art Museum, and had the crazy opportunity to bring from Italy, with the support of the Italian Culture Institute, a collection of old films by Bergman, all of them translated into Italian. I made a beautiful and well-succeeded cycle, adding some more films from the collection of the Rio de Janeiro Modern Art Museum, and baptized it as ‘Young Bergman’. Unforgettable movie club exercises.


Another interlocutor who introduces us to the admirable universe of thinker Ingmar Bergman is the Göteborg Film Festival director at the time, documentary maker Gunnar Bergdahl, who brings for the 21th Mostra “Bergman’s voice”, made during the rehearsals for the classic play “Ghost”, by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. By a suggestion of Bergman himself, the multilingual poster of the documentary comes translated into Portuguese as well.


The 29th São Paulo IFF also charmed its spectators with a retrospective of Swedish pioneer filmmaker Victor Sjöström, whose film “The Phantom Chariot”, from 1921, would be one of Ingmar Bergman’s favorite and most seen films. At the same retrospective, the inclusion of “Wild Strawberries”, a classic directed by Bergman in 1957, where the filmmaker pays homage to Sjöström giving him one of the remarkable roles in the film.


Bergman’s and his tormented characters’ legacy will still tell many stories and have in them revelations to legions of new spectators who have cinema as a conducting line of life and intelligence.


English version: Laura Rebessi

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