{"id":9125,"date":"2018-02-20T10:37:19","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T08:37:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/?p=9125"},"modified":"2018-03-01T13:51:12","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T11:51:12","slug":"bergman-why-are-the-great-directors-women-all-tragi-sexual-goddesses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openasia.org\/en\/2018\/02\/bergman-why-are-the-great-directors-women-all-tragi-sexual-goddesses\/","title":{"rendered":"Bergman: why are the great director’s women all tragi-sexual goddesses?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Guardian<\/a>\u00a0– Ingmar Bergman\u2019s spellbinding films made his female stars immortal. But they weren\u2019t all grateful. Could this famously manipulative genius have survived in the #MeToo era?<\/strong>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1971, Ingmar Bergman had just completed his first English-language film, The Touch. It starred Elliott Gould as an American archaeologist in Sweden, who has an affair with a beautiful, troubled woman, played by Bergman regular Bibi Andersson. To promote it,\u00a0Bergman and Andersson made an extraordinary appearance on America\u2019s Dick Cavett Show<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 an unimaginably rare TV outing for this director, rather like seeing Jean-Luc Godard pop up on Trevor Noah\u2019s The Daily Show.<\/p>\n

Seated next to his very quiet star, Bergman declared: \u201cI think acting is a very special\u00a0women\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>profession.\u00a0Women<\/a>\u00a0have much more talent for acting. I think women, perhaps from education, are more used to enjoying looking into the mirror that is the audience or the camera\u2019s eye. If a man stands in front of a mirror, he can perhaps feel a little bit ashamed. He looks at his clothes, his hair and his face. A woman by education is not ashamed of looking at herself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could Bergman really have been so naive as to think that was true? Did he really imagine that a wince of dissatisfaction at one\u2019s own reflection was restricted to balding, ageing males, and that women were all as beautiful as the goddesses of his own movie universe? Or was he using women and female characters to exalt his own narcissism and male anxiety?<\/p>\n

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\"Guilt<\/picture><\/div>
\u00a0<\/span>Guilt and despair \u2026 Liv Ullmann in Cries and Whispers. Photograph: Ronald Grant<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1983, he made a short film, Karin\u2019s Face, all about family photographs of his mother Karin (it was a name he continually favoured for characters). A Freudian interpretation of Bergman\u2019s women is tempting, if glib \u2013 although the director is himself virtually a parallel Freud, presiding over his own modern mythology of sexual dysfunction and family tragedy.<\/p>\n

Bergman \u2013 the great poetic master of doubt, faith, love, erotic enchantment and the silence of God \u2013 was born 100 years ago this year. Although he had the seriousness and poise of Ibsen or Strindberg, in his younger days he was capable of great comedy and gaiety. His centenary is being celebrated with a complete retrospective at London\u2019s\u00a0BFI<\/a>. Among many other things, this is a chance to look anew at the generation of female stars who found immortality through his movies.<\/p>\n

These women also found themselves submitting to an intense and intimate working relationship, which sometimes became a sexual one. Bergman was married five times and a great deal of his income was earmarked for child support. Many female stars found him intrusive and oppressive: he might conceivably today find himself liable to a #MeToo complaint. There is something uneasy about the fact that Harriet Andersson began her relationship with Bergman after going to his office to discuss her career over tea.<\/p>\n

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\"Son<\/picture><\/div>
\u00a0<\/span>Son of a minister \u2026 Ingmar Bergman on set in the 60s. Photograph: Bonniers Hylen\/AFP\/Getty<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

No one did more to popularise Bergman for English-speaking audiences than Woody Allen. Like his Swedish idol, Allen adored and fetishised women, returning to the same faces like Monet to his lilies. Bergman, though, did not share Allen\u2019s obsessive interest in younger women. It is worth pointing out that the Swede\u2019s 1978 film Autumn Sonata \u2013 starring Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann as a mother and daughter \u2013 is about a stepfather abusing a young teen stepdaughter and being specifically identified as morally culpable.<\/p>\n

There was almost a Bergman \u201ctype\u201d, and it is no accident that such stars were often cast as sisters or even mirror-images of each other. The Bergman female star would be lit, framed, styled and cast in a distinctive way \u2013 an open-faced, often blonde woman whose beauty was complicated by a pained or martyred aspect.<\/p>\n