c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It was fitting that Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director, died this week (July 30) at his home on bleak Faro Island in the harsh North Sea. The 89-year-old Bergman was personally and artistically obsessed with his cold lonely quest for God.

Bergman, the son of a Lutheran minister, lived his life devoid of his father’s Christian faith. Young Ingmar spent many hours in his father’s church _ enduring countless “boring sermons,” as he told one interviewer _ and that experience never really left him. Many of his films feature stark images of sanctuaries, stained-glass windows, and what he called “angels, saints, dragons, prophets, humans.”

I saw my first Bergman film, “The Seventh Seal,” at an art theater in Washington, D.C., in the late 1950s. In those days, taking a date to a foreign language movie was considered the height of sophistication. Besides, the price of the ticket included espresso coffee.

For me, “The Seventh Seal” still remains enigmatic. Shot in black and white and seen with terse English subtitles, the film contains one of the most enduring images in movie history: the Christian Crusader playing chess with Death during the bubonic plague that swept Europe. As with all Bergman films, residual images linger in one’s brain long after the theater lights come on.

After the movie, my date and I adjourned to a Hot Shoppes restaurant “to analyze and explore” the movie’s meaning. But we quickly lost interest in “The Seventh Seal.” Bergman was clearly too “arty” for us. Our conversation moved to a meaningful discussion of onion rings, French fries, and milk shakes.

My next encounter with Bergman came a few years later in Japan. The film was “The Virgin Spring,” a story of rape, multiple murders, and a father’s vengeance set in Sweden during the Middle Ages. I had foolishly believed such an internationally acclaimed motion picture would merit both English and Japanese subtitles. No such luck.

The unknowable Swedish dialogue was accompanied by the equally unknowable Japanese subtitles. The small theater screen was almost obscured by the audience’s cigarette smoke. I was compelled to forget the dialogue and focus instead on Bergman’s remarkable imagery and Sven Nyquist’s extraordinary camera work.

Bergman’s English-language film, “The Serpent’s Egg,” is set in 1920s Berlin and it offers ominous warnings about the horrific rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Because films are powerful teaching tools, I urge synagogues and churches to present “The Serpent’s Egg” along with “Schindler’s List” and “Cabaret” in their Holocaust education programming.

“Winter Light,” Bergman’s personal favorite of his nearly 50 films, should be required viewing for rabbinical students and Christian seminarians. “Winter Light” is a warning of spiritual burnout, a common malady among many clergy.

It is the tale of Pastor Tomas Ericsson, a widower who serves two small Swedish churches. Only a handful of people attend the first service of the day. Included in the small group is the pastor’s atheist mistress, Bergman’s cinematic alter-ego.

Ericsson, a man without faith, offers no solace or hope to a desperate member of the congregation seeking meaning in life. The pastor’s dreary response matches the film’s austere lighting:

“If there is no God, would it really make any difference? I had great dreams once. I was going to make my mark on the world. The sort of ideas you have when you’re young. I knew nothing of evil. When I was ordained, I was as innocent as a baby. Then everything evil happened at once … If there is no God, life would become understandable. What a relief.”

The depressed congregant returns home and shoots himself, but even in the face of a suicide, Ericsson provides nothing to the bereaved wife. Instead, he travels to the day’s second service where only a drunken organist and a hunchbacked sexton are in attendance.

The latter asks Ericsson about suffering and pain. When the sexton concludes his long monologue, the spiritually bankrupt pastor merely says, “Yes.”

Woody Allen has called Bergman “probably the greatest film artist … since the invention of the motion picture camera.” In fact, Bergman wrote his own epitaph: “No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down in the dark rooms of our souls.”

And Bergman knew better than most of us that we all dwell “deep down” in those “dark rooms.”

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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