Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish film director, was one of the greatest auteurs of all time. He made around 60 films for cinema and TV, a lot of theatre productions, and writings. Bergman’s influence is really huge. Woody Allen described the director as “probably the greatest film artist since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
Bergman’s film career began in the 1940s, and Roger Ebert wrote that his first films were “mixtures of Italian neorealism and Hollywood social drama and even the titles suggest their banality.” But later the director began to find his genius. In 1955, he achieved worldwide success with the romantic comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. In the iconic 1957 films The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, we can already find variations on central themes in Bergman’s work: human existence, the meaning of life, faith and doubt in God, and loneliness. Since then, he’s made many timelessly beautiful movies, three of them (The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, Fanny and Alexander) winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Many critics hold Bergman’s Persona in the highest regard as one of the greatest films ever made. Let’s look at the best movies from Bergman, ranked.
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7 Scenes from a Marriage
Sveriges Radio
Bergman’s 1973 television miniseries tells a deeply moving story of the disintegration of the marriage over the span of 10 years. Scenes from a Marriage follows Marianne (played by Liv Ullmann, in another of her several frequent collaborations with the director), a divorce lawyer, and Johan (played by Erland Josephson, who worked frequently with Bergman too), a psychology professor. Johan confesses to Marianne that he has fallen in love with another woman. Despite the marriage of Johan and Marianne falling apart, their love will not. The director and his leading actors create one of the most powerful, truest, and heartbreaking human portrayals ever.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
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Bergman’s miniseries influenced Woody Allen’s filmography, Richard Linklater’s romantic drama Before Midnight, and Noah Baumbach’s film Marriage Story. In 2021, Scenes from a Marriage was adapted by Hagai Levi into an HBO miniseries of the same name; Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain step into the leading roles.
6 Fanny and Alexander
Sandrew Film & Teater
Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, the 1982 drama Fanny and Alexander is an astonishingly beautiful, big, and life-affirming family chronicle. The film follows two siblings, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and Alexander (Bertil Guve), and their family in the early 20th century Sweden. The full 312-minute version of Fanny and Alexander is one of the longest cinematic films in history. The director made a real portrait of an era. “Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander was intended to be his last film, and in it, he tends to the business of being young, of being middle-aged, of being old, of being a man, woman, Christian, Jew, sane, crazy, rich, poor, religious, profane,” film critic Roger Ebert wrote.
5 Autumn Sonata
Constantin Film
In the powerful 1978 drama Autumn Sonata, Ingmar Bergman’s famous namesake, the great Ingrid Bergman, gave her final film performance. She steps into the role of a world-renowned pianist, Charlotte, who neglected her daughter Eva (Liv Ullmann) for many years. Their meeting unleashes a lot of pain and resentment. It is a meaningful tale of unresolvable tension between mother and daughter and simply one of the best movies about complicated parent-child relationships.
4 Cries and Whispers
Svensk Filmindustri
Bergman’s affecting 1972 drama Cries and Whispers follows the cancer-stricken and dying Agnes (Harriet Andersson) and her emotionally distant sisters. Unlike the director’s previous films, Cries and Whispers uses color, extremely saturated red in particular. It is a disturbing, painful, and deep examination of the loneliness in the face of death. The Guardian described Cries and Whispers as “diabolically inspired claustrophobic horror” and wrote that “this film burns, like ice held to the skin.”
3 Wild Strawberries
AB Svensk Filmindustri
One of the director’s warmest and most touching films, the 1957 drama Wild Strawberries uses lonely 78-year-old professor Isak Borg’s (played by silent film legend Victor Sjöström) journey across Sweden to show the metaphorical journey of his soul. Borg is forced to see all his life in a true light and discover himself. The film is notable for its dreams and memories sequences that are mixed with the main character’s reality. It is a thought-provoking, profound, and beautiful tale of introspection and human existence.
Wild Strawberries won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the 8th Berlin International Film Festival and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film influenced Woody Allen’s Another Woman and Satyajit Ray’s Nayak, among several others.
2 The Seventh Seal
The Seventh Seal is an iconic 1957 historical fantasy that depicts the quest for answers about life and death through a game of chess played between the Grim Reaper (Bengt Ekerot) and a disillusioned knight (the always brilliant Max von Sydow) during the Black Plague. “The film is about the fear of death. And it freed me from my own fear of death,” Ingmar Bergman wrote. The Seventh Seal is visual poetry, a timeless meditation on essential philosophical and human issues, and a masterpiece of cinema with great international impact.
For The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman won the Special Jury Prize at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival. After this film, the director established himself as the world-class auteur of arthouse cinema. Like all such iconic movies, The Seventh Seal has been parodied by everyone from Monty Python to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey.
1 Persona
Regarded as one of the greatest movies ever made (and an experimental film everyone should see), the 1966 Swedish psychological drama Persona centers on well-known actress Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), who suddenly stopped speaking in the middle of a performance, and nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), who was assigned to care for Elisabet. While isolated together, two women explore their personal identities and undergo emotional transference. It is a sensually brilliant, dreamlike, and deep study of the nature of human beings. Persona has often been described as a watershed in the director’s career, a new level of his mastery. Ingmar Bergman wrote, “I feel that in Persona – and later in Cries and Whispers – I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instance, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.”
David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories, Robert Altman’s Women, and many other films were inspired by Bergman’s identity-merging masterpiece. While practically ever Ingmar Bergman film after 1955 is a must-see, Persona stands as one of the greatest examples of cinema.
