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Karin Bergman had the flu when she gave birth to her second son, Ingmar, on July 14, 1918. It was a summer Sunday in Upsala, a town near Stockholm, in southeastern Sweden, and the future filmmaker came to the world with so little hope of life that they had to baptize him urgently at the hospital. In the opening pages of The Magic Lantern his memoir, Ingmar Bergman recounts that since his birth and during his infancy he has suffered from a series of indefinable diseases – "as he did not know. Had not finished deciding to live "- and that he remembers everything, but without being scared. Fear, he says, came later
It is possible to guess that Bergman's fears are not born as late as he says if we take into account that his upbringing and that of his brothers were based on the limitation of his creative abilities. as sin, punishment, forgiveness, but especially guilt. Concrete factors in the relationship between parents and children, and with God. "There was an internal logic that we accepted and understood, which may have contributed to our passive acceptance of Nazism, we had never heard of freedom and we never heard of it. had no idea what it was like in a hierarchical system, all doors are closed. "
Erik, his father, was a strict Lutheran pastor who taught his children to religion from an early age. became chaplain of the royal court of Sweden.His mother was a nurse.Ingmar Bergman says that he came to pretend to have the disease to have his mother closer and to receive his affection, because he discovered that when he came to give her free love, it was not well received.His father was still the authoritarian and punitive character, while the relationship with his brothers – Dag, four years old older, and Margareta, four years younger – did not Neither close nor comforting, she says that the lives of her brothers have been ruined, that her father has destroyed Dag with her severity, while Margareta has opted for "annihilation and agitation" in the face of Possessive love that his parents have professed him. He is, he says, the one who's behaved best because he's become a liar. "I created a character who, externally, had very little to do with my true self.As I did not know how to maintain the separation between my true self and my creation, the resulting damage had consequences in my life up to adulthood and creativity.I have sometimes had to comfort myself by saying that one who has lived in deception loves the truth, "he writes
. It is unfair to say that his genius is due to an unhappy and lonely childhood, it is impossible to deny his influence on his career and the virtue of the filmmaker to turn his own coal into a diamond.
-The cinema in As a Redemption-
In 1937 Bergman entered the Faculty of Arts and History of the University of Stockholm, where he distinguished himself by publishing news and novels in several magazines, as well as through his active participation in student theater. In 1940, he began working in the professional field, as assistant director at the Royal Theater in Stockholm
. His film career began in 1944, when he met Carl Anders Dymling, president of Svensk Filmindustri, who offered him to devote himself to film. He ordered her to do an original script. It is there that was born Tormento a film directed by Alf Sjöberg, the most eminent filmmaker of Swedish cinema of the time, that Ingmar Bergman deeply admired . It tells the story of a woman's addiction to alcohol and men, and the power games between two of her lovers. In history, the life of the three protagonists is portrayed as a tremorless tragedy. And that would be the constant that Bergman will develop since then.
The following year, he debuted as a director with Crisis a film about the loss of innocence. It is the story of Nelly, who lives with her adoptive mother, but decides to run away from home when she meets Jenny, her biological mother. She arrives in Stockholm to meet her and there she will be seduced by Jack, Jenny's lover. Thus, Nelly reaches a world where she will lose her innocence not only in the sexual domain, but also through what it means to move to the big city. The film was premiered in 1946, and although the reception was rather cold, it was a promising start and a starting point for some themes and forms of storytelling that will later develop with mastery in its other deliveries. Here, Bergman is concerned with showing the need for communication of human beings through their bodies and the importance of physical contact as opposed to verbal incommunication. As the film critic Adrián Massanet points out, the theme of parents and children, so close to Bergman, is already explored, as is the theme of Swedish women in the middle of the century. "It's not a coincidence if Bergman is considered the great director of actresses and female characters, since he's already starting to show his mastery in this territory," he adds
and then a more personal film, written and directed by him: Prision (1949), the story of a director who plans to shoot a film about the devil and is immersed in a series of 39 dreamlike and supernatural experiences, which demonstrate the absolute power of Beelzebub. Questions such as disenchantment, the silence of God and the need for faith spring up and develop with the naturalness of those who know them throughout their lives. The influence of their religious formation is revealed