STOCKHOLM, Sweden: An international symposium on Sweden's famed movie and stage director Ingmar Bergman opened on Monday in the Swedish capital, featuring experts and people closely connected with his career spanning decades.
The three-day event was held at several prominent Stockholm venues, including the Royal Dramatic Theatre, the Royal Opera and the Swedish Film Institute, all of which have played a crucial role in Bergman's development as an artist of film and theatre. The symposium was open to academics and the general public.
Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker who put Swedish cinema on the map, did not, however, attend. The 86-year-old master of cinema lives on a small island in the Baltic Sea and seldom appears in public.
The symposium had various themes, including Bergman as a stage director and how this influenced him as a filmmaker. Also under scrutiny were his interest in, and intimate knowledge of, music, as exemplified by productions of Mozart's "The Magic Flute," Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" and Bortz' "The Bacchae."
Norwegian actress and filmmaker Liv Ullman, who worked closely with Bergman and was romantically linked to him, emphasized in her opening remarks the importance of art, "not least because I feel like the world is governed by people who just talk about meaningless things.
"Because of this, artists are needed more than ever before to take care of what people dream about and long for. And here Ingmar comes in as a worthy representative of these people," she said.
The symposium, organized by Stockholm University and the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, was being held three years after Bergman's unique collection of manuscripts, behind-the-scenes films and notebooks 44 packing cases in all arrived at the Swedish Film Institute.
"This is something I have wished right from the outset, to have a meeting point for the world's leading Bergman scholars in the form of a symposium," said Ase Kleveland, chair of the foundation and the executive head of the film institute. "Our aim is to make it a regular event to be held once every two years."
Bergman, widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, first gained international attention with "Smiles of a Summer Night," a 1955 romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical "A Little Night Music."
But it was "The Seventh Seal," released two years later, that riveted critics and audiences. An allegorical tale of the medieval plague, it contains one of cinema's most famous scenes a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.
Bergman, whose 1983 film "Fanny and Alexander" won an Oscar for best foreign film, made about 60 movies before retiring from filmmaking.
Because Bergman has worked in several genres, including cinema, theatre, literature, radio and television, the framework for the symposium was the field of research known as interart, or intermedia studies, which focuses on the interplay between diverse art forms and media.
Invited speakers were distinguished scholars in their respective disciplines, among them professor Thomas Elsaesser from the University of Amsterdam, Janet Steiger from the University of Texas at Austin, and Robin Wood and Paisley Livingston, writers of highly acclaimed books on Bergman.
Many of Bergman's co-workers, such as set designer Goran Wassberg and pianist Kabi Laretei, were also invited to attend.
(China Daily 06/04/2005 page9)
