That's part of media literacy.
So, I want to dig into some comments made by actor Stellan Skarsgård, who has labeled legendary director Ingmar Bergman a "Nazi."
Stellan Skarsgård, known for his roles in Dune and the Mamma Mia! franchise, did not mince words when discussing his complex relationship with iconic filmmaker Ingmar Bergman.
Skarsgård worked with Bergman on the 1983 TV adaptation of Molière's The School for Wives. He said of the director, “My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy. He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings."
Skarsgård went on to say, “Bergman was manipulative. He was a Nazi during the war, and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it when he was manipulating others. He wasn’t nice.”
These comments have cast a new light on the legacy of Bergman, who is widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.
I had no idea of this stuff from his past, and I found it pretty eye-opening to learn that Bergman's own writings have acknowledged an admiration for the Nazis.
In order to research this, I dug into the BBC archives, which has an article from 1999, in which Bergman talks about his own flirtations with Nazisim, with excerpts from Ingmar Bergman: His Life and Films and Bergman's autobiography, Laterna Magica.
"Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd," said the filmmaker.
At the time, it was 1936, and Bergman was 16, and his father was apparently ultra-right-wing and brought the sentiments of Hitler into his household.
"The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful," Bergman said.
But this all changed after seeing what the Nazis had done during the Second World War. "When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes," said Bergman.
He continued, "When the truth came out, it was a hideous shock for me. In a brutal and violent way, I was suddenly ripped of my innocence."
As far as I could dig in, this was when Bergman stopped identifying with the Nazis, according to him. But obviously, Skarsgård had a different opinion of who he was and how it was working with him.
So I did even more research.
If you look at the footnotes in this scholarly article on antisemitism in Swedish filmmaking, the 27th footnote had this interesting tidbit:
"A few things could be said about antisemitism in light of Bergman’s own life, since this is a discussion that has recurred a few times in Swedish public debate. After the publication of Laterna magica, Bergman’s (1988) memoir, author Jan Myrdal questioned Bergman’s alleged unawareness of Nazi Germany’s antisemitic persecutions and genocide. In the late 1990s the same allegations were brought up by journalist Maria-Pia Boëthius (for an overview of this debate, see Steene 2005, 984). After Bergman’s death in 2007, the debate surfaced once again in Swedish newspapers, with Boëthius and journalist Cordelia Edvardson questioning the public appraisal of Bergman’s oeuvre, in light of his possible fascination with Hitler (Ohlin 2009). This was, however, refuted by journalist Cecilia Hagen, who argued that these allegations were exaggerated and that Bergman’s memoir should be read as an artistic dramatisation of his life and not as a literal account of actual facts (Hagen 2007). While the Swedish public’s relation to Bergman and to his possible antisemitic and Nazi past could indeed have been interesting to analyse in relation to the overall topic of this dissertation, this chapter, however, focuses neither on Bergman’s biography, nor on the reception of his oeuvre, but is restricted to an analysis of Fanny and Alexander."
This is obviously a very complicated issue. Bergman is dead, and therefore we can't sit across from him and ask how far his Naziism went and how it influenced him later in life. But it is something to know about when watching his work and analyzing its themes.
Let me know what you think in the comments.
