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The U.S. was touched by Bergmania late in 1958, when The Seventh Seal was released by Janus Films. Skeptics tried to write off Bergman's work as Norse opera for the intellectuals, but a few months later the smash success of Wild Strawberries made the U.S. aware that there was much more to Bergman than that. This winter as many as five Bergman films have been running at once in Manhattan. Next week another, a lustily ironic comedy of morals called A Lesson in Love, is scheduled to open. Week after that The Magician is booked into the big Fox West Coast chain; in late March it will ride the circuits from coast to coast. And among the art-house exhibitors Bergman is acknowledged as "The Big Swede" who pulled the foreign-film business out of a substantial slump. "It's incredible," says a sociologist. "As though the visions of Zosimos had hit the bestseller list."*
Bunyan of Show Business. At 41, Ingmar Bergman is scarcely ready to be counted among the profounder prophets. A lot of celluloid must run through the camera before he can even be discussed as the cinematic Strindberg that the Berg-manites insist he is. Nevertheless, Bergman is unquestionably one of the most forceful and fascinatingly original artists who now confront the U.S. in any medium.
It seems easy to explain the influences that shaped him: the formal agonies of the medieval morality play, the psychotic tensions ,of classic Swedish drama, the nightmares of German expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Jean Cocteau's "invisible cinema," in which the eye is wrenched so violently from one image to another that the spectator stops seeing what is physically there and starts seeing what is not. Yet Bergman has traveled far from his sources—and just as far from such contemporary tendencies as the Neorealist movement of social protest in postwar Italy and the New Wave of romanticism in France. He has created an unmistakable style of his own, a form of what he calls picture thinking about "the reality beyond reality."
He is not easy on his audiences, but he is more spectacularly entertaining, over a greater range, than any moviemaker now at work. In Waiting Women, for instance, Bergman develops what may be the most charming seduction scene ever captured by a camera: a sequence in which boy meets girl through a closed door. In A Lesson in Love he stages a barroom brawl that is probably the funniest thing of its kind since the confetti scene in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. In The Magician, he masterfully mingles horror and hilarity when a corpse rises up to haunt the stubborn rationalist who is dissecting it.
The Bergman boom fits into the cultural context of the times. His is a voice crying in the midst of prosperity that man cannot live by prosperity alone. Turning from the troubled scene around him—"I have no social conscience," he has said—Bergman has focused his lens on the interior landscape, and his work emerges as an allegory on the progress of the soul—his own, and by inference the soul of modern man. He is a Bunyan in show business, a religious artist whose glimpses of the dark heart of man are without equal in the history of cinema.