Music, Sound, and Silence in the Films of Ingmar Bergman *

The auteur—in the lore of the medium—has been seen as the director/creator mastermind who puts his or her unique stamp on the work. This is an unreasonable idea, of course: The creation of a film is a gigantic group project, and the director is far from being the sole creator. But auteur theory, nevertheless, holds a firm grip on Ingmar Bergman scholarship, and not without reason: auteurism must include, as Janet Staiger points out, a unified personal vision across an entire oeuvre, which is easily observed in Bergman’s output. ¹ Bergman’s recycling of tropes, actors and other collaborators, and character names across a career that spanned fifty-seven years and included some fifty authored and/or directed feature films draws us to coherences in his work, and weaving a web of these threads is a gratifying task. Combine this with the mystic, often dark, metaphysical character of his dramas and a personal life that was often closely mirrored in his work, and one can scarcely fault attempts to create a coherent life-achievement-as-one-single-work. Director Oliver Assayas, who always considered artists he admired (such as Vermeer, Pierre Bonnard, and Bergman) in their entirety, expressed it beautifully: “The most apparent, the most insignificant, the most alien, is what appears as the most valuable, since it exists in a context, in a totality.” ²