As soon as Charlotte strides up the stairs into the parsonage by the lake, with her cold smile and glittering eyes of quartz Ingrid Bergman becomes the film’s central presence. In every scene, one feels the director push the actress to what he thinks is the edge, only to see her step off it and – without breaking stride – reach new heights of emotional mastery. Knowing this when watching the film allows one to follow the extra-fictional narrative played out in the film a veiled power struggle between two towering figures of Post War cinema. Ingrid, for her part, would reportedly subvert directorial cues and criticise the script in front of cast and crew. On set the relationship was combative, the director claiming the only instructions the actress would respond to were those delivered with aggression. If he did it for the money, she made him earn every krona. She charges and is paid according to current prices, just like herring and crude iron.’(1) It may be that the director saw the financial advantages of profiting on Ingrid’s still solvent brand, which led one critic to remark: ‘Ingrid Bergman is merchandise, offered on the open market. Despite the timing, it is easy to see more than charity and a desire for artistic collaboration in Ingmar Bergman’s belated turn of the camera towards his compatriot.Exiled from Sweden after allegations of tax evasion, he had just released Face to Face (1976) to lukewarm commercial reception and was not overly confident of the prospects of his next offering, The Serpent’s Egg (1977). By the time of Autumn Sonata,Ingrid was suffering terminal breast cancer and the film was to be her last. Yet this was a collaboration that very nearly did not happen. Bergman wrote Autumn Sonata in a few weeks, the fulfilment of an earlier promise to his Swedish contemporary Ingrid Bergman that he would include her in a film. How, then, to gain entry into Autumn Sonata, the inviting anteroom of Ingmar Bergman’s labyrinthine cinematic castle?īiography presents perhaps the most logical starting point. Employing cinematography of a lighter hue, and benefiting from the masterful acting of Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullman playing Charlotte and Eva respectively, Autumn Sonata is one of Bergman’s more accessible films, and thus provides a gentle entry into his imposing corpus. A late-career chamber piece, with just a few characters and the contained setting of a country parsonage, it marks a return to the almost claustrophobic intensity of earlier films like Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), The Silence (1963) and Persona (1966), all of them clearly indebted to his work in theatre. If forced to choose, Autumn Sonata (1978)would be an appropriate place to begin. The edifice of Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre is of such vast scope and is riddled with such ramifying thematic veins that it is almost impossible to treat any individual work in isolation.
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