Ingmar Bergman: Faces of Faith and Doubt

“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
Ingmar Bergman

Top 10 Ranking

Film	Year
1. Persona	1966
2. The Seventh Seal	1957
3. Fanny and Alexander	1982
4. Cries and Whispers	1972
5. Autumn Sonata	1978
6. Winter Light	1963
7. The Virgin Spring	1960
8. The Silence	1963
9. Wild Strawberries	1957
10. Hour of the Wolf	1968

*Bergman sheds a warm, orange light over the interiors of Autumn Sonata, offsetting the harshness of its complicated mother-daughter relationship with a delicate tenderness.*

Best Film

Persona. This may stand as the finest formal synthesis of Ingmar Bergman’s intimate visual style of close-ups and his deeply psychological subject matter, examining the perplexing duality which simultaneously defines humans as social beings and distinct individuals. All abstract truths conceived in one’s mind must be filtered through some sensory expression to reach the outer world, and Bergman does not discount his own film from that inevitable distortion. The raw materials of cinema itself become integral to Persona’s very form, fully recognising the impossible task of creating any pure representation of reality. It is deceitful in its purposeful manipulations, but also intricately designed to evoke truths through bold, symbolic expressions. Persona features career-best work from cinematographer Sven Nykvist, editor Ulla Ryghe, and actresses Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, but it is in the way Bergman formally integrates every element of cinema at his disposal to create such an obscure, avant-garde interrogation of identity that places it right at the top.

The defining shot of Bergman’s entire career, catching both Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson’s faces looking downward in silhouette, but there is also incredible formal detail with the emphasis of Andersson’s mouth – she represents outward expressions in contrast to Ullmann’s silent introspection.

Most Overrated

Wild Strawberries. To be fair, this can only be considered overrated by comparing where it sits on my list versus the TSPDT ranking. There, the critical consensus places it as the 61^st best film of all time, and Ingmar Bergman’s 2^nd best film after Persona. I’ve got 8 other Bergman films ahead of it, but that has more to do with the strength of those than the weakness of Wild Strawberries, which is still a borderline masterpiece. There are very few negative criticisms that can be levelled at this beautifully surreal meditation on mortality, regret, and lost time.

*One of the finest compositions and edits of Wild Strawberries arrives in this long dissolve, sending a flock of crows flying across Professor Isak Borg’s head as we slip into his dreams.*

Most Underrated

All These Women. This sits far outside the TSPDT top 1000 at #9283, putting it in the very bottom tier of Ingmar Bergman’s films on the site. It has also been critically panned from some great critics, including Roger Ebert who called it Bergman’s worst film. This brightly coloured pastiche is certainly about the furthest thing one could imagine from the black-and-white meditations on faith which have defined his greatest artistic triumphs up to this point. Even his previous comedies such as Smiles of a Summer Night carry a more eloquent wit than the slapstick and buffoonery he happily indulges in here, which we see one snobbish music critic awkwardly inflict on the film’s country chateau setting while visiting famed cellist Felix. Flawed it may be, but Bergman’s experimentations with colour palettes and irreverent self-reflexivity build towards a single, unified point – art has no real relevance to the narcissistic pretensions of artists.

All These Women is closer to Peter Greenaway in its visual design than any other Ingmar Bergman film. The rigorous blocking may not be new for him, but the heavily curated colour palette and self-reflexive humour is. A rapid yet brief shift of gears that pays off in this instance, despite its formal flaws.

Gem to Spotlight

Sawdust and Tinsel. This would later be topped by many other Ingmar Bergman films, but in 1953 it was his best film to date, and the strongest hint that he was capable of creating truly great cinema. Life is a circus that creates entertainment out of humiliation, he posits in its central metaphor, and in his rich staging and screenwriting he needles its existential drama with a finer, wittier point than ever before. He finds both sympathy and pity for its hapless fools doomed to eternal ridicule, yet continues to undercut their dreams of escape with constant reminders of their own inadequacy. If there is any solace to be found, at least the humiliating stories they accumulate will make for great comic fodder down the track, offering momentary distractions from their sad, squalid circumstances.

Bergman’s blocking of faces is among the best in the art form’s history, even before he came out with his first masterpiece. Much of this has to do with the lighting, the depth of field, and of course, the actors.

Key Collaborator

Sven Nykvist. There’s a good number of actors who could fill this slot too, including Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, and Gunnar Björnstrand, but from The Virgin Spring onward Sven Nykvist is Ingmar Bergman’s most frequent and consistent collaborator. If he isn’t history’s greatest cinematographer, then he’s at least in the top 3, proving his hand at capturing both the harsh austerity of Sweden’s barren scenery and the vibrancy of rigorously curated colour palettes. Most of all though, it is his intimate close-ups which define his aesthetic with Bergman, turning faces into landscapes with the potential to be shot in an unlimited number of angles, lighting setups, and arrangements within ensembles.

*Cries and Whispers is simply one of the greatest displays of mise-en-scène put to screen, drifting through these powerful colour compositions of red, black, and white with masterful blocking.*

*Fanny and Alexander is one of Bergman’s three most beautifully shot films, competing with Persona and Cries and Whispers for the top spot.*

Cultural Context and Artistic Innovations

Early Melodramas (1946 – 1950)

Although Ingmar Bergman’s love of cinema began during his years as a literature and art student at Stockholm University College, his fascination with human relations, faith, and dreams are rooted even more deeply in his childhood. The estrangement he felt from his father, a strict Lutheran minister, would manifest in many of his films as crushing emotional and spiritual isolation, especially taking the form of melodramas in his early years.

The development of his artistic voice was slow but sure. Many of the films from this era of his career were romances and tragedies that saw young love wither into resentment, with some mix of suicide, rape, trauma, and cheating thrown in the mix. These narratives also played heavily on flashbacks contrasting the innocence of youth against the depressing burden of reality, further expressed through some sharp yet eloquent eviscerations.

“I hate you so much that I want to live just to make your life miserable. Raoul was brutal. You took away my lust for life.”
Rut (Thirst, 1949)

Easily the most consequential stylistic trait that Bergman would start developing around this time though was his blocking and framing of faces in close-ups. Port of Call is the earliest instance of this, but Thirst would push it a little further with Bergman’s first notable use of what would become one of his trademark shots – the profile of one face half-obscuring another behind it.

*The first instance of this trademark shot appears in Thirst, half-obscuring one actor’s face with the profile of another.*

Port of Call features some solid location shooting. In choosing to shoot on authentic docks and harbours, Bergman establishes his setting as a working-class port town, imbuing his characters’ troubles with a nuanced sorrow that connects to her helpless, abject poverty.

*A beautiful use of dissolves in To Joy, illustrating his characters’ passions for music by visually merging them with it.*

The Summer Years (1951 – 1955)

This is the most suitable title for the next stage of Ingmar Bergman’s career for two good reasons. From 1951 to 1955, he directed three films with Summer in the title – Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, and Smiles of a Summer Night. Later in his career he would tick off the three other seasons with The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, and Autumn Sonata, but for now his fascination laid in this fleeting period of daylight, growth, and abundance that precedes darker, colder days.

This is also the era when his cinematic artistry and reputation began to lift off the ground, seeing him further refine his style and hit greater heights than he did in the 1940s. Romantic tragedies and melancholy flashbacks are often still very much at the centre of his work, meditating on the fickle nature of human desire that keeps his characters from establishing trust in their relationships, but so too is he broadening his range as well. Smiles of a Summer Night is his first comedy, taking a light-hearted spin on A Midsummer Night’s Dream with its intricate web of affairs between aristocrats, while Sawdust and Tinsel turns a circus troupe into an existential metaphor for life’s cruel farce.

“We make art. You make artifice. The lowest of us would spit on the best of you. Why? You only risk your lives. We risk our pride.”
Mr. Sjuberg (Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953)

*Another one of Bergman’s trademark shot, this one of horizontal faces lying parallel to each other, making its first appearance in his light comedy Smiles of a Summer Night.*

Gunnar Fischer’s contributions as Bergman’s regular cinematographer during this period must be noted, contributing his eye for barren landscapes and deep focus imagery. Another Bergman trademark emerges for the first time in Smiles of a Summer Night with the parallel faces lying side-by-side, while his actors’ performances flourish even more under the intimate inspection of his close-ups. Bibi Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, and Gunnar Björnstrand each get their time in the spotlight here, but it is Harriet Andersson who truly defines this period for Bergman as an actress, exerting a feminine sexuality and emotional depth that was far from common in the 1950s.

Harriet Andersson is one of Bergman’s first true collaborators, lighting up the screen in Summer with Monika. This is the film’s single strongest shot – the camera locks Andersson’s penetrating gaze in close-up, and tracks forward as the background lighting dims.

Philosophical Dramas (1957 – 1963)

Before 1957, no one saw a masterpiece like The Seventh Seal coming from Ingmar Bergman. To then follow that up with Wild Strawberries in the same year makes for an accomplishment rivalled by very few in film history – one must think of Josef von Sternberg dominating 1930 with both The Blue Angel and Morocco, or Francis Ford Coppola releasing both The Godfather Part II and The Conversation in 1974.

These two films also mark a new trajectory for Bergman, who was now staring down the philosophical questions that had previously only lingered beneath the surface. The silence of God would occupy his thoughts in The Seventh Seal, and would become a running theme throughout the rest of this period until The Silence in 1963, while Wild Strawberries draws us into the dreams and memories of an elderly professor looking back on a life of regrets. Those flashbacks that Bergman had been using for so long by this point manifest with nightmarish unease here, similarly setting him down a path of cinematic surrealism.

“Is it so awfully unthinkable to conceive of God with one’s senses? Why should He conceal Himself in a fog of half-spoken promises and unseen miracles? How are we to believe the believers when we don’t believe ourselves? What will become of us who want to believe but cannot? And what of those who neither will nor can believe? Why can I not kill God within me? Why does He go on living within me in a painful, humiliating way, though I curse Him and want to tear Him out of my heart? Why does He remain a treacherous reality of which I cannot rid myself? Do you hear me?”
Antonius Block (The Seventh Seal, 1957)

*Historical and metaphysical iconography in The Seventh Seal’s chess game with Death, becoming a symbol of fate and futility.*

Bergman separates Max von Sydow from the rest of the ensemble in this shot, relegating him to the background and pouring in light above his head. He is the only one here not looking straight at Death, who stands just behind the camera.

Man’s faith in God, or the lack thereof, is clearly a subject that torments Bergman in this period. It was already very clear that Bergman was an immensely talented writer of dialogue, but it wasn’t until this point that he started writing some of the greatest screenplays of all time. The Virgin Spring lays out a compelling allegory of Christ’s sacrifice, while Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence constitute his unofficial ‘Faith’ trilogy, each in conversation with each other on the matter. The resentment that his characters hold towards each other frequently spills over into poetic vitriol in these films, aimed at viciously tearing each other down, though frequently revealing more about the speaker than the target of their derision.

“I’m tired of your loving care. Your fussing. Your good advice. Your candlesticks and table runners. I’m fed up with your short-sightedness. Your clumsy hands. Your anxiousness. Your timid displays of affection. You force me to occupy myself with your physical condition. Your poor digestion. Your rashes. Your periods. Your frostbitten cheeks. Once and for all I have to escape this junkyard of idiotic trivialities. I’m sick and tired of it all, of everything to do with you.“
Pastor Tomas Ericsson (Winter Light, 1963)

Winter Light is one of Bergman’s greatest screenplays and character studies, examining the paradox of a doubting priest, but he still delivers these brilliant compositions of faces. Note the detail in placing Christ’s tortured face above Tomas’ here. He looks down at the priest, who is in turn distracted and looking at Jonas, who is similarly refusing to look at the person trying to reach him.

The parallel move away from Summer-based films as well couldn’t be harsher – frozen landscapes, rural churches, and foreign hotels completely isolate his characters in unwelcome environments, cutting them off from God and the rest of humanity. His home island of Fårö features for the first time among these settings too in Through a Glass Darkly, becoming its own metaphor of emotional and spiritual solitude.

Two of Bergman’s greatest actors join his troupe in this period around this time, with Max von Sydow making an enormous breakthrough as the disenchanted knight Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal, and Ingrid Thulin leaving a huge imprint on Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, and The Silence. So too does Sven Nykvist properly enter the picture here, taking the reigns from Gunnar Fischer and establishing a working relationship that would last for decades. He had done some very solid work before on Sawdust and Tinsel, but the severe minimalism of The Virgin Spring, Winter Light, and The Silence stands among some of Bergman’s finest visuals, delivering magnificent theological symbolism.

The Virgin Spring is one of Bergman’s most violent films, with the rape and murder of an innocent girl. These dead, slanted branches are constantly obstructing his frames here, fragmenting shots into pieces that emphasise a poignant brokenness.

Bergman’s home island of Fårö features for the first time in Through a Glass Darkly as a symbol of physical, emotional, and spiritual isolation. It would later also set the scene for Persona, Shame, Hour of the Wolf, and Scenes from a Marriage among others.

Experiments in Form (1964 – 1982)

With The Silence capping the end of his thematic trilogy in 1963, Ingmar Bergman claimed he was done questioning the existence of God, and new avenues began to open that allowed him greater artistic freedom – not that his shifting focus was immediately met with widespread acclaim. All These Women is a huge swing in visuals and writing that is about far from Bergman’s typical style as possible, comically indulging in slapstick and satire that is ridden with flaws, yet still sticks the landing. It is also his first film shot in colour, which he wouldn’t return to again until The Passion of Anna in 1969. From then on though, it became the default in his filmmaking, seeing him quickly become a master of colour in Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander – two of the most beautifully shot films in history.

No longer sticking purely to philosophical dramas, Bergman began exploring other genres as well. Hour of the Wolf sees him take command of psychological horror as an interrogation of mental illness, Shame sees a married couple emotionally ripped apart by war, and Scenes From a Marriage lays out an enormous marital epic that is viscerally uncomfortable in its realism. He had been examining the constraints of human relationships ever since his earliest days of filmmaking, but this is easily his purest distillation of these concerns, trapping us in confined rooms with a husband and wife on the verge of divorce.

“We’re emotional illiterates. We’ve been taught about anatomy and farming methods in Africa. We’ve learned mathematical formulas by heart. But we haven’t been taught a thing about our souls. We’re tremendously ignorant about what makes people tick.”
Johan (Scenes From a Marriage, 1973)

*Horizontal faces lying parallel to each other – another of Bergman’s trademark shots composed with stark austerity.*

It is also with his production of Scenes From a Marriage that he became the first director to effectively make the leap from film to television while maintaining his artistic integrity, realising the potential of the miniseries format. This is something he would repeat again in Face to Face and Fanny and Alexander, even though all three would also receive theatrical cuts for international distribution. Many of his other films frequently hover around the 90-minute mark, and so for this reason it is particularly impressive that he was so successful in creating long-form cinema too.

It is Persona that stands tall as the centrepiece of this period, marking Bergman’s greatest cinematic experiment in what many have described as the Mount Everest of film analysis. It is obscure in its formal patterns and rich in its crisp visual style, studying the human face like a filter through which emotions may be either honestly expressed or deceitfully masked. The blending of identities previously explored in Wild Strawberries and The Silence also reaches a pinnacle here, and it is fascinating to see how Bergman would continue to use this device to specifically get to the root of his female characters, as we later see in Cries and Whispers. Usually if he was going to feature music in his films, it would be existing classical pieces, but it is fitting that both this and Hour of the Wolf were the two films he chose to involve avant-garde composer Lars Johan Werle, emphasising their existential terror through a pair of dissonant, experimental scores.

*Bergman first used this shot in 1949, and seventeen years later he perfects it in Persona.*

*Crisp, deep focus as Alma slides into Elisabet’s role in her relationship, patching up old wounds while Elisabet remains emotionally disconnected in the foreground.*

*An eerie spliced close-ups of both women’s faces, emphasising their similarities and revealing both as equal halves of a whole.*

*The more one studies this shot in Hour of the Wolf, the more disturbing it becomes, manifesting Johan’s demons as his neighbours.*

There is another unofficial trilogy which forms too between Hour of the Wolf, Shame, and The Passion of Anna, considering a trio of couples with artistic inclinations lost in spiritual crises. Quite significantly, this is where Liv Ullmann started working with Bergman, acting besides Max von Sydow in all three films. Later she would also follow Bergman to Hollywood when he made The Serpent’s Egg, his second English-language film after The Touch. Neither are major artistic achievements, but still demonstrate his willingness to keep moving outside his comfort zone.

Finally, Bergman’s surrealism began to settle on a series of recognisable traits during these years. Silent sequences of characters wandering empty hotels, manors, apartments, and houses turn these spaces into dreamy limbos, located somewhere within their uneasy subconscious. The sounds of ticking clocks often accompany these scenes too, implying the imminence of death even in these apparently timeless realms. The first time we witness this device may have been in The Silence, but he continues to draw it through Cries and Whispers, Face to Face, and Fanny and Alexander too, uncovering the psychological root of his characters’ fears and desires.

Characters wander apartments, houses, manors, and hotels in eerie, surreal silence. Here in Face to Face, Bergman leads one of them into a split screen manifesting two halves of a single mind like Persona.

A fantastical prologue to Fanny and Alexander that sets up Alexander, his imagination, and the huge, magnificent apartment owned by his grandmother, Helena. Drapes of green and gold hang over cased openings and windows, creating immaculate frames all through the interior space.

Television Specials

There are few filmmakers who have kept up as great a level of creative stamina across multiple decades as Ingmar Bergman, though in the last few decades of his life even he began to grow tired, and the quality of his work declined. Despite Fanny and Alexander being intended as his last film before committing himself entirely to theatre, he did keep working on television projects. He had touched on this before in specials like From the Life of Marionettes, but from here it became his entire career. Unfortunately, most of these films have very little artistic merit, plainly revealing their limited budgets in their poor cinematography and uncharacteristically messy writing.

Two exceptions stand here. The first is After the Rehearsal, which is deeply in touch with Bergman’s love of theatre. Though he sets it entirely on a stage and thus compromises its cinematic power, his formal manipulations of time through dreams and flashbacks remain strong, slipping an ageing theatre director back through time to an old relationship.

Being set in a single location, After the Rehearsal is severely compromised in its cinematic power, but Bergman’s adoration of the theatre as an art form bleeds through in its central formal conceit.

The other exception is Saraband – the last film of Bergman’s entire career, and a fitting return to form. Though often described as a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, it is much more an observation of the imprint its aged divorcees have left on the younger generations now carrying their legacies. Bergman had contemplated the regrets of old age before, but this feels far more grounded in his firsthand experience than the surreal meditations of Wild Strawberries and Autumn Sonata, now finding peace in the act of introspective reminiscence and his longstanding adoration of classical music.

Many of his usual trademarks are present in Saraband, including savage dialogue viscerally thrown between wounded characters, but in the very final minutes there are no such acts of spiritual desecration to be found. With two of his greatest actors by his side, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, Bergman finally appreciates the pure bond between lovers, parents, children, and friends that transcends all other worldly distractions.

Four years later, Ingmar Bergman passed away in his sleep at his home on Fårö. The date was 30 July, 2007 – the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni’s passing. His influence as one of the all-time great directors and screenwriters continues to be felt in the work of virtually every filmmaker working today, from the severe aesthetic precision of Paweł Pawlikowski’s films Ida and Cold War, to Paul Schrader’s direct evocation of Winter Light in First Reformed.

*Bergman’s final film Saraband is a poetic return to form after decades of less-than-admirable filmmaking, recapturing the magic between Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson from Scenes from a Marriage.*

Director Archives

Year	Film	Grade
1946	It Rains on Our Love	R
1947	A Ship Bound for India	R
1948	Port of Call	R
1949	Thirst	R
1950	To Joy	R
1951	Summer Interlude	R/HR
1953	Summer with Monika	HR
1953	Sawdust and Tinsel	HR/MS
1954	A Lesson in Love	R
1955	Dreams	HR
1955	Smiles of a Summer Night	HR
1957	The Seventh Seal	MP
1957	Wild Strawberries	MS/MP
1958	The Magician	R/HR
1960	The Virgin Spring	MP
1961	Through a Glass Darkly	HR
1963	Winter Light	MP
1963	The Silence	MP
1964	All These Women	HR/MS
1966	Persona	MP
1968	Hour of the Wolf	MS
1968	Shame	MS
1969	The Passion of Anna	HR
1971	The Touch	R
1972	Cries and Whispers	MP
1973	Scenes from a Marriage	MS
1976	Face to Face	MS
1977	The Serpent’s Egg	R
1978	Autumn Sonata	MP
1980	From the Life of Marionettes	R
1982	Fanny and Alexander	MP
1984	After the Rehearsal	R
2003	Saraband	HR

The full Ingmar Bergman collection is available to buy on Amazon.

All Ingmar Bergman Reviews

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

The vivid imagination of Ingmar Bergman’s young protagonist in Fanny and Alexander is as enchanting as it is frighteningly dangerous, expressing itself through vibrantly festive mise-en-scène and impressionistic supernatural visions, and forming the basis of a deeply sentimental rumination on childhood wonder, trauma, and grief.

Autumn Sonata (1978)

Like the persistent rotation between immaculately framed wide shots and close-ups, and the seasonal changes implied within the title Autumn Sonata, both mother and daughter are trapped within cycles of repression in Ingmar Bergman’s psychological family drama, poignantly recognising them as similarly flawed copies of each other.

Face to Face (1976)

Even by Ingmar Bergman’s standards, Dr Jenny Isaksson’s characterisation is layered with immense psychological depth in Face to Face, treading a fine line between realism and surrealism as her childhood traumas, insecurities, and mortal fear of death chaotically rise to the surface after years of emotional repression.

Scenes From a Marriage (1973)

Ingmar Bergman uses six isolated episodes of Johan and Marianne’s married life to piece together a collage of a fragmenting relationship in Scenes From a Marriage, turning their divorce not into a battle of husband versus wife, but rather lovers versus the space between them.

Cries and Whispers (1972)

Ingmar Bergman’s wrestling with matters of faith and tortured female relationships has never been so vividly illustrated as it is in Cries and Whispers, confining its three sisters and their maid to the crimson-saturated dreams of their family home, and surreally interrogating the fractures which only deepen with their parallel suffering.

Shame (1968)

From the moment the first bombs start falling, Ingmar Bergman descends Shame into an irreversible degradation of innocence, love, and compassion, tragically twisting the souls of wartime survivors into distorted shadows of their former selves and taking this study of human violence to its logical, haunting end.

Hour of the Wolf (1968)

As we trace back the steps of one mentally tortured painter through the days before his disappearance in Hour of the Wolf, it becomes clear that no other Ingmar Bergman film has come this close to outright psychological horror, surreally warping our most intimate relationships into vulnerable weaknesses where demons come to play.

Persona (1966)

The incredible formal synthesis forged between Ingmar Bergman’s intimate visual style and psychological deliberations in Persona may be the finest of his career, blending the identities of two women through an avant-garde surrealism, and studying the perplexing duality which splits the human mind into outward expressions and internal truths.

The Silence (1963)

In place of open dialogue between characters in The Silence, Ingmar Bergman leaves an apathetic void of love and communication, formally manifesting his long-running existential fears of an unresponsive, godless universe within a stifled relationship between estranged sisters.

Winter Light (1963)

A pair of lonely masses bookends Winter Light’s spiritual crisis with a robust endurance of faith, focusing Ingmar Bergman’s intensive screenplay and severe direction upon a doubting priest bearing numerous similarities to a forsaken Christ, and uncovering a humanistic resilience which transcends religious boundaries.

The Virgin Spring (1960)

Christian and pagan symbolism may be nothing new for Ingmar Bergman, but their manifestation in The Virgin Spring through such visceral violence is punishing even by his standards, thoughtfully considering in this parable of murder and revenge how virtue might survive our most guilty, godless instincts.

Wild Strawberries (1957)

Dreams, memories, and symbols drift by on the powerful current of Ingmar Bergman’s poetic screenplay in Wild Strawberries, turning one elderly professor’s road trip into a spiritual vessel of self-reckoning that confronts the many estranged relationships he has accumulated, and penetrating the surreal depths of his guilty mind through beautifully existential imagery.

The Seventh Seal (1957)

Ingmar Bergman’s pensive journey of faith and doubt leads us through barren, plague-ridden landscapes in The Seventh Seal, imposing a stark beauty on his theological iconography and poetic contemplations which confirm this existential medieval fable as a historical feat of philosophical screenwriting.

6 thoughts on “Ingmar Bergman: Faces of Faith and Doubt”

rujkoc says:

October 14, 2023 at 6:38 pm

Simply, wow.

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1. SceneByGreen says:
  
  October 14, 2023 at 11:00 pm
  
  Glad you like the page!
  
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hazz09 says:

October 21, 2023 at 3:21 pm

Awesome work, if you can do a study this big then you nothing should be off-limits to you.

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1. SceneByGreen says:
  
  October 22, 2023 at 12:50 pm
  
  Thanks Harry, virtually every other director seems less daunting in comparison haha
  
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Pedro says:

October 25, 2023 at 6:37 am

Fantastic work, Declan! SceneByGreen is becoming a better website and resource with every post – you should be proud. And this study is remarkable. It’s nice to see a completed piece with your thoughts and rankings since we kinda studied him at the same time; I loved the journey and I’m sure you did, too. It’s funny to see what we disagree on, but ultimately I think we’re on the same page: Bergman is him!

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1. SceneByGreen says:
  
  October 25, 2023 at 9:30 am
  
  Thanks Pedro! I look forward to building it out with more director studies and lists in the future. As austere as he is, Bergman was a lot of fun to study haha. He’s got a great sense of humour beneath all the heaviness.
  
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