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Telegraph
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Was Ingmar Bergman really a Nazi?
During his lifetime, and beyond, the film director Ingmar Bergman was widely believed to be a genius. Yet even geniuses have their flaws, and Bergman came festooned with his: allegations (put into the public domain by himself, before he thought better of it) that he raped a former partner of his; an embarrassing arrest for tax evasion and, most notoriously of all, the suggestion that he spent his youth as a fully paid-up Nazi supporter who bitterly mourned the death of Hitler. The last and most damaging story recently re-entered the public domain courtesy of the actor Stellan Skarsgård. While Skarsgård was attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's acclaimed new film Sentimental Value, in which he plays a Bergman-esque director named Gustav Borg, he was asked about his own relationship with Bergman. (He had acted for him in the Eighties in a stage production of Strindberg's A Dream Play.) Skarsgård did not mince his words. '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.' Skarsgård acknowledged that Bergman was still capable of greatness as an artist, if not a human being. 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he explained. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an a--hole. Caravaggio was probably an a--hole as well, but he did great paintings.' Skarsgård wasn't commenting on any fresh revelations, yet the actor's remarks have nevertheless caused something of a furore – not least because Bergman, who died in 2007, is widely regarded as one of the most significant and important film directors who ever lived. From his breakthrough in the 1950s with the films Smiles of a Summer Night and, especially, the seminal The Seventh Seal to such classics of cinema as Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, and Persona, Bergman became synonymous with challenging, always boundary-pushing cinema that appealed to audiences and his peers alike. Martin Scorsese said that 'it's impossible to overestimate the effect that Bergman's films had on people' and Stanley Kubrick wrote privately to the film-maker: 'Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today.' Woody Allen went further, however, not only by calling Bergman 'probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera', but by making several pictures, including Interiors and Another Woman, that were overt homages to the director. His 1982 film A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was a loose remake of Smiles of a Summer Night. Such was Allen's admiration for Bergman that, when he even glowingly reviewed his memoir for the New York Times in 1988, he did not even consider the revelation worth mentioning. 'The picture one gets,' he wrote, 'is of a highly emotional soul, not easily adaptable to life in this cold, cruel world.' However, his idol's party line was to admit to a youthful flirtation with fascism, something that was long since abandoned by the time that he became one of the world's best-respected film-makers. Bergman first saw Hitler when he was 16, on a school exchange trip to Germany in 1934, when he was taken along by his Hitler Youth-supporting host, Hannes, to the Weimar Republic. The impressed youth later described the dictator as 'unbelievably charismatic… he electrified the crowd.' Hannes's father, a clergyman, was sufficiently impressed by the Führer not only to festoon his house with images of him, but to give Bergman a picture of his idol as a gift on his 17th birthday, 'so that you will always have the man before your eyes'. When his young guest, anxious to fit in, asked at what point during the rally he should shout 'Heil Hitler', the pastor replied: 'That's considered more than mere courtesy, my dear Ingmar.' By Bergman's own admission, he was a 'pro-German fanatic' by the time that he returned home to Sweden, seduced and impressed by Hitler and all things National Socialist. Unfortunately, he found himself in simpatico company. His father Erik, who later inspired the film Fanny and Alexander, was an unrepentantly Right-wing figure who believed that Hitler was the answer to the world's problems. As Bergman told the writer Maria-Pia Boëthius in 1999 – she was questioning the truth behind Sweden's much-vaunted neutrality in the Second World War – 'The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful. The big threat were the Bolsheviks, who were hated.' Although the director himself did not participate in any overt anti-Semitic actions, his brother Dag joined some friends to attack the house of a local Jewish man, covering the walls with swastika symbols. (Dag would later become a respected diplomat.) Bergman himself soon saw the consequences of his association in a small but chilling fashion. When he visited Germany, he befriended a local girl named Renata, and began a correspondence, only for this to come to an end when Renata and her family simply vanished one day. They were, of course, Jewish. Although Bergman spent some mandatory time in military service in Sweden, he did not fight in the war. If he had done so, it is likely that his loyalty would have been to Germany. Unlike Dag, however, he was never a member of the Swedish National Socialist Party, which his brother was responsible for founding and operating. Still, as he wrote in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern, 'for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' Yet the eventual awakening that he faced came shortly after the end of the war and the subsequent collapse of Hitler's regime. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes,' he would say. '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.' Those who have attempted to excuse Bergman's youthful folly have argued that, although Bergman did not fully repudiate Hitler and Nazism until 1946, when he came to an understanding of what he had been impressed by, it was a seismic shock to him that changed the course of his life and career. As he told his friend and producer Jörn Donner: 'My feelings were overwhelming and I felt great bitterness towards my father and my brother and the schoolteachers and everyone else who'd led me into it. But it was impossible to get rid of the guilt and the self-contempt.' Thereafter, many of his films and stage productions dealt explicitly with the evil caused by the Nazi regime, whether it's his English-language picture, 1977's The Serpent's Egg, which is set in 1932 Berlin, or his decision to stage Peter Weiss's The Investigation, about the Auschwitz trials, in Stockholm in 1966. Several of his most acclaimed pictures also looked, more obliquely, at themes of guilt and lack of communication brought on by conflict, including 1963's The Silence, which follows the journey of two sisters and was inspired by Bergman spending time in post-war Germany. Or 1968's Shame, in which a marriage, and an unnamed country, are both torn apart by civil war. It would be reading too much into these films to see them as a straightforward apologia for his earlier beliefs – which in any case were not common knowledge until the publication of his memoir – but there can be little doubt that they weighed upon him. It would also be a mistake to take Bergman's comments at face value. As Jane Magnusson, who made the documentary Bergman: A Year in the Life, said in 2019: 'The fact that he had sympathies with Hitler… he wanted to talk about them. And nobody else did. He was pretty much alone in Sweden when he came out in the 1980s and said, 'I went to Germany, I was in Weimar during the parade and I yelled 'Heil Hitler!' And I loved it.' 'It's horrible that he didn't reject Hitler before 1946. It is very late. That's a problem. But I don't think Bergman thought Hitler was a good idea because he hated Jews. Sweden was very afraid of Russia at that time and I think he just thought that it was better than what's going on with them.' It is also likely that Bergman never fully repudiated his youthful Right-wing views. The director Roy Andersson, who studied at the Swedish Film Institute Film School in the late Sixties, remarked that '[Bergman] was a so-called inspector of the film school that I attended, and each term we were called and we had to go to his office and he gave some advice, or even some threats, and he said, 'If you don't stop making Left-wing movies… If you continue with that you will never have the possibility to make features. I will influence the board to stop you'. Bergman often described the most traumatic event of his lifetime as being his 1976 arrest on income tax evasion charges. These were eventually dropped, but caused him to leave Sweden for Munich. From there, he continued his career, albeit to diminishing artistic returns. It would not be until he returned to Sweden in 1982 for Fanny and Alexander – an epic often considered Bergman's crowning achievement – that he would make another truly acclaimed film.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Sentimental Value' Review: Joachim Trier's Wise and Ecstatically Moving Family Portrait Searches for Intimacy Through Filmmaking
'It's hard to love someone without mercy.' Sitting across the dinner table from his actress daughter after sweeping back into her life with a high-concept plan for reconciliation, acclaimed filmmaker and absent father Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) offers that wisdom to Nora (Renate Reinsve) as if directing her on how to forgive him. And in the wake of his ex-wife's death, that's precisely what Gustav intends to do — not by apologizing for his decision to leave their family when Nora was still just a child, but rather by casting her in an autobiographical Netflix drama about his own life. More from IndieWire Cannes 2025 Palme d'Or Contenders Ranked: Who Will Win the Top Prize? 'Honey Don't!' Review: Ethan Coen's Second Lesbian Caper Is a Mishmash of Parts That Don't Fit Together Exploitative as that sounds, Gustav isn't just hoping to make Nora say the words he's always longed to hear from his firstborn daughter in exchange for a cut of Ted Sarandos' money. On the contrary, his plan — like everything else in the transcendently moving 'Sentimental Value,' a layered masterpiece that 'The Worst Person in the World' director Joachim Trier has been working toward for his entire career — is layered with a delicate sense of personal history. Because the (once) great auteur Borg doesn't intend for Nora to play a version of herself in his movie. No, he insists on using her as a stand-in for his mother, who committed suicide in the sun-bathed Oslo house that has belonged to their family since at least the start of World War II. Gustav has never understood the reasons why his mother took her own life after kissing him goodbye one morning — he was only a child at the time. Now a 70-year-old Volker Schlöndorff-type who's been fading toward irrelevance in the 15 years since his last narrative feature (and has only found late-career success by entombing himself in a documentary about his life's work), Gustav is convinced that the answers he seeks are still hiding somewhere in the Borg's ancestral home. That home contains several generations of secret feelings that will only reveal themselves to those who know how to find the cracks in its foundation. Nora — whose emotional avoidance has fueled the same acting career that it threatens to derail with stage fright, as we see in a funny and spectacularly fraught scene where she demands that her married lover (Trier mainstay Anders Danielsen Lie) either fuck or slap her before she greets the opening night audience of her latest play — has zero interest in helping Gustav look for where those cracks might be. She also vehemently rejects her father's offer to star in his film. But as he charges forward with the project anyway (which he intends to shoot in the actual house that inspired its story, and still legally belongs to him), each of the surviving Borgs will be forced to navigate the resentful ocean of lost time that stretches between the truth of who their parents actually were, and the fiction of the characters they've created for them to play in their minds. Few recent movies have reconciled the difference between those distant shores with the same tenderness that 'Sentimental Value' achieves by the end of its soul-melting final sequence (though Charlotte Wells' more haunted but equally poignant 'Aftersun' comes to mind). Even fewer have so elegantly literalized how the love that parents are able to share with their children — and vice versa — can be limited by their ability to express it. Almost none have more beautifully explored the role that making art, which is to speak without talking, can play in facilitating that process. In the Borg house, Nora would always have to put an ear up to the old stove pipes if she wanted to hear people say their truths. As a girl, she thought of those pipes as the innards of a house that she always managed to be alive, and Trier's signature voiceover — which continues to epitomize the goosebump effervescence of his cinema — introduces us to the structure as if it were a character with thoughts and feelings of its own. The house likes to be full. It doesn't enjoy silence. It's splintered down the middle in a way that makes it seem as though it's sinking in slow motion. In the first of Trier's films to operate as a family portrait instead of a more focused individual profile, the Borg house will come to assume the gravity of a dying star that gives meaning to the constellation of people who are pulled ever closer towards its orbit. By the time Trier and Eskil Vogt's dazzling screenplay arrives at a final scene whose power is all the more immense because viewers will see it coming a mile away, we're so familiar with the house's energy and layout that any change to it lands with the force of a wrecking ball. 'Sentimental Value' starts and ends with Nora's home, but this is no claustrophobic chamber drama. Gustav insists that any movie worth its celluloid must 'have the visuals,' and Trier — whose images DP Kasper Tuxen endows with a bittersweet texture you can feel on your skin — wouldn't dream of disappointing him, even if Gustav threatens to use Netflix's gaudy digital aesthetic as an excuse to betray his own cinematographer. Segmented with blackouts and shot with an attentiveness that always feels alive to its own beauty, the story follows Nora deep into the narrows of her fraught personal life at the same time as it spends time with her married younger sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), who was the child star of their father's movies before she grew up to embrace her role as the more 'practical' sibling. From there, Trier nimbly pivots to a crucial scene from one of Gustav's films, a clip that somehow manages to convince us that he was a great director in the very same moment that it establishes why he's fallen out of favor. (This is the kind of thing that movies about movies almost never get right, and 'Sentimental Value' nails so hard it makes the rest of its drama all the more credible.) A restoration of his classic is screening at the Deauville Film Festival, where American starlet Rachel Kemp — played by Elle Fanning, extraordinary in a needle-threading performance that requires her to be perfectly cast as someone who's wrong for her role — sees it and decides that Gustav is the perfect director to help rescue her from the YA slop that made her famous. It's taken 10 years, but we've finally gotten a movie that looks at 'Clouds of Sils Maria' from the same distance that 'Clouds of Sils Maria' looked at 'Twilight.' Cut to: Rachel showing up at the Borg house in Oslo to begin rehearsing the role that Gustav had written for his daughter, which inevitably triggers a certain vertigo for Nora, even if Gustav isn't trying to bait her. He's not the most gracious man in the world (he once walked out in the middle of Nora's 'Medea' because he couldn't stand the scenography, though I suppose that was after he had already walked out on her mother), but he isn't deliberately cruel. Like the rest of the film around him, he's often very funny. Indeed, the heartbreak of Skarsgård's magnificent, career-defining performance — heartfelt but hulking, and always suspended between two different generations of hurt — is that Gustav feels a half-step removed from all of the pain he causes, as if he were just a conduit for it, innocently passing it along from a trauma that we'll come to understand so well that it will seem as if we bore witness to it ourselves. 'Sentimental Value' takes several detours to explore the origins of Gustav's pain, but each of them — some flashbacks, others wrapped up in a research project that Agnes embarks upon — ultimately serve to place the Borg family's present-day crisis into sharper relief. To no one's surprise, Reinsve is immaculately attuned to Trier's energy, and 'Sentimental Value' is carried by the manic frustration she brings to her part, which is as fun as it is freighted with crisis. Nora became an actress because she didn't want to be herself, but when Gustav rehearses in the house with Rachel, she's forced to watch an actress perform herself, and to hear her father offer someone else the warm insight and encouragement he was never around to share with his children. Nora's mom was a therapist, and her father directs like one, constantly turning Rachel's questions around on her with a sly 'What do you think?' And what does Nora think? In a film that is always as suggestive and open-ended as the swooning Terry Callier song that plays over its opening credits, a canny moment of directions offers our best hint: Nora thinks that her life has become the stuff of theater, and that her worst stage fright is the kind she's always suffered while trying to play Gustav's daughter. Overflowing with life from the moment it starts, 'Sentimental Value' nevertheless remains laser-focused on building toward an overlap where Nora, Gustav, and his mother might be able to commune with each other as clearly as the shared memories of the house where they all lived at some point in their lives. It's the same overlap Gustav refers to as 'a perfect sync between time and space,' and that Terry Callier sings about in the song that floats above the film's opening credits. The road there will be rapturously lush with details, but also winding as hell and potholed with the absent mercy that Nora needs to show Gustav — and recognize within him — if they can ever hope to understand each other, or to preserve something more of Gustav's mother than the pain she left behind. Mercy, however, is not quite the same thing as forgiveness. Mercy asks for allowance, where forgiveness demands absolution. Mercy is a means, and forgiveness its ultimate end. Forgiveness is an act, while mercy is a performance. The distinction between the two may be subtle, but through the extraordinary grace of Trier's filmmaking, which here revels in the transmutational power of filmmaking itself, 'Sentimental Value' renders it larger than life. 'Sentimental Value' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters in the United States. 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