A Dozen Movies From the Master

Here are a dozen Ingmar Bergman films that deserve inclusion in any library.

Summer With Monika (1953) The director's rapt exaltation of the fleeting joys of a Scandinavian summer. Two bored young lovers run away from their stultifying duties and attempt to live without consequences on the shores of the Swedish archipelago. It all ends in tears, of course, yet the viewer is left with a sense of primal affirmation. The 19-year-old Harriet Andersson, who would soon become Bergman's lover, is breathtaking: Radiant, dynamic and spectacularly muscled, she glows as memorably as the northern sun.

Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) This elegant, formal comedy of manners is often cited as necessary proof that Bergman had a sense of humor. It is not only pleasurable in and of itself but served as the direct inspiration for Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music." Bergman called it a "mixture of operetta and comedy": Lovers fall in and out of each other's beds, and joys and sorrows succeed each other in rapid pace. The ensemble work is extraordinary; it was the first film to win Bergman a world audience.

The Seventh Seal (1957) Not everybody would describe this as Bergman's best film, but it is unquestionably his most famous and arguably his most "Bergmanesque." Set in the 14th century, amid the ravages of the Black Plague, it is a sober, but far from completely pessimistic, meditation on life, death and what may or may not come after. Max von Sydow is Bergman's Everyman, engaged in a terminal chess game against a foe that none of us can beat.

Wild Strawberries (1957) Yes, the comedic scenes are dated and exasperating. But who can forget what may be the most terrifying dream sequence ever filmed (the clock without hands, the absolute silence on the soundtrack, the enveloping coffin) or the finale, with the old professor's face transfigured with joy as he looks back on his long and fruitful life? Starring Victor Sjostrom, who, some 40 years earlier, had been one of Sweden's first great directors.

Winter Light (1962) This austere masterpiece is one of the great religious tracts of the 20th century. Gunnar Bjornstrand plays a country priest who doubts his faith, his abilities and even his capacity for human feeling, and passes through the fabled "dark night of the soul" over the course of one long afternoon. Ingrid Thulin is magnificent as the schoolteacher who loves him, despite it all; what other actress could have managed the naked and devastating monologue, filmed in an unbroken close-up that goes on for several minutes? A perfect film.

The Silence (1963) "In a kind of frenzy, I supplied the world with dreams, intellectual excitement, fantasies, fits of lunacy." So Bergman once described his art, and his words are especially applicable to "The Silence," one of his most difficult and draining films. Not for children, or for beginners, but this study of a sexually repressed and mortally stricken scholar in a bizarre imaginary city has its admirers, grateful for the list of a few "words in a foreign tongue" that is the dying woman's sole legacy.

Persona (1966) "Persona" marks the apogee of Bergman's modernism and is sometimes hailed as his most significant accomplishment. This is a film that is not only about its ostensible subject -- the nervous breakdown (or perhaps an obscure breakthrough) of an actress -- but also about itself as a motion picture, complete with fragments of cartoons, the sound of celluloid rattling through camera sprockets and, at one point, a moment when the combined heat of the projector lamp and the emotional intensity depicted on screen seem to set the film itself ablaze. Enigmatic, elliptical and unforgettable.

Shame (1968) Bergman's most political film, "Shame" is the chronicle of two married musicians (Von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) whose lives are ruptured by the advent of a mysterious war that devastates the peaceful island to which they have fled. Friend turns against friend, lover against lover, and the simple act of survival necessitates the abandonment of one's humanity. Released at the height of the Vietnam War, "Shame" is as bleak a film as Bergman ever created, and the unusually spartan simplicity of his storytelling makes it all the more affecting.

Cries and Whispers (1972) Bergman's debt to the playwright August Strindberg grew more and more apparent over time, and "Cries and Whispers" is a tribute to Strindberg's "chamber plays." The three totemic heroines of Bergman's films -- Andersson, Thulin and Ullmann -- join forces for the only time, as sisters reunited at the family homestead after many years, and all are predictably magnificent. Yet the most searing moment in "Cries and Whispers" comes when Bergman employs the Sarabande from Bach's fifth cello suite to convey profound human emotions -- love and reconciliation -- in a scene where words could no longer tell the whole story.

Scenes From a Marriage (1974) Soap opera taken to the ultimate artistic heights, this six-episode drama (adapted from Swedish television) explores the dissolution -- and possible rehabilitation -- of a marriage from a truly adult standpoint. It can, and perhaps should, be seen by young people, but I don't think anybody can truly understand it until what passes for full maturity has descended like a yoke upon us. Ullmann and Erland Josephson are the happy-jealous-miserable-lustful couple.

The Magic Flute (1975) With the exception of Hakan Hagegard's vibrant Papageno, the cast for this staging of Mozart's fanciful opera leaves much to be desired. Never mind -- it's still Mozart, it's still Bergman, and the shots of the beaming young woman in the audience enjoying the overture encapsulate the joy of listening to sublime music.

Fanny and Alexander (1982) The grand farewell: the longest, most costly, most densely populated, and most honored film Bergman ever made. Not since Giuseppe Verdi went against form and wrote the comedy "Falstaff" as his last opera has such a great master gone out on such an exuberant note.