Margarethe von Trotta’s Anxiety of Influence: Searching for Ingmar Bergman

Actress, director Margarethe von Trotta was not thinking of making a documentary film, but when offered the opportunity to honor Swedish director Ingmar Bergman who would be 100 this year with a film about him, she could not say no. Von Trotta is best known for her feature films, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosenstrasse, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (co-written and co-directed with her ex-husband Volker Schlondorff), among them, now screening at Quad Cinema for a retrospective of her work. And with Criterion putting together a boxed DVD set of Bergman’s films, she accepted the challenge of making the documentary, wondering, she told me this week on the phone from Munich, “how can I make a film about such a genius?” Told, do it in a personal way, she made Searching for Ingmar Bergman a most insightful, entertaining tribute from one filmmaker to another.

Featuring interviews with many who have collaborated on his films, Searching for Ingmar Bergman follows von Trotta through Europe, by plane to Stockholm and boat to Faro, to speak to those who knew him best. Perhaps the biggest coup: Because she was a filmmaker herself Bergman’s son Daniel, a filmmaker himself, reticent to be interviewed in the past, allowed her into his home. He also presented the biggest challenge. “When you do a feature,” said von Trotta, “you have a script to follow. In documentary, I never knew what people would say.” Daniel Bergman was the hardest to interview because he knew what he wanted to say about his father. He was so admiring of him, he fought and cried with him. His father as a human being—his dislike of any emotional display, his narcissism-- was not what she expected. And she had to accommodate him; “I wanted to stay with Daniel in the library. I had to follow him into the kitchen.”

Other challenges came: Another filmmaker insisted, “Why don’t you make a film about me?” Age was a factor in shooting actress Gunnel Lindbloom—from Bergman’s Silence and Virgin Spring—“She’s a wonderful person and still looks great,” said von Trotta, “but it was difficult for her to speak English, and to remember.”

Beginning with a dreamy sequence evoking Bergman’s masterpiece among masterpieces, The Seventh Seal, von Trotta takes the viewer back to her own history in the 1960’s, tracing the line from this pivotal film to her time in Paris, recounting how his work inspired her career, appreciating the master’s technical skills. Her interview with actress Liv Ullmann, co-star with Bibi Andersson of Persona, reveals much about his way of working with women. Filmmaker Olivier Assayas, and author of Conversations with Bergman, is particularly eloquent on the subject: “He looks for the light in his actresses, and they radiate in his films.” And yet on the personal side, he often got them pregnant—he would say, now I know you love me, and then he left them. For his 60^th birthday, the many half-siblings came together, some meeting for the first time.

Margarethe von Trotta divides her time between Paris and Munich where Bergman lived for seven years making theater. Writer Jean-Claude Carriere, von Trotta’s friend and neighbor in Paris--they share a courtyard in Pigalle—was eager to weigh in on Bergman’s way of establishing a visual Scandinavian landscape. Carriere’s place had been a whore house, in the early part of the last century, von Trotta is delighted to point out. Laughing, she notes, Jean-Claude had a connection to both Bergman, and Liv Ullman with whom he had an affair for a time. Of that, she said, he was very proud.

Regina Weinreich

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