By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
A journo's last glimpse of Bergman's land
Geoffrey McNab was one of the last journalists to get near Ingmar Bergman, at last month’s Bergman Week on Faro Island. Excerpts: “He doesn’t have to meet people here. He can be alone with the stones and the heavens. It is good for the soul,” the actress Barbro Hjort af Ornas said of Faro, the remote, windswept island in the Baltic Sea where Ingmar Bergman died yesterday. She first met Bergman in the late 1930s, when she appeared in amateur plays that he directed. As a Faro resident, she understood why he sought refuge there. “The air is different, the light is different. There is a 
peace you can get here – an absolute peace. No one to see and nothing to disturb you, just nature.” During the lectures and screenings devoted to Bergman, McNab writes, “it was midsummer. It didn’t get dark at all. Not that this changed the island’s eerie atmosphere. As Bergman testified, “my ghosts, my demons, phantoms and spirits never appear at night. They often appear in broad daylight.” … He had had a hip replacement and was reportedly confined to a wheelchair. His eyesight was fading and he had stopped watching films in that specially built cinema… There were rumours that he was beginning to deviate from the rigorous daily routine he had followed for so long – brisk early morning walk, three-hour writing stint, lunch, reading and then an afternoon film… Everyone was looking forward to his 90th birthday next July. Events were being planned all over the world: retrospectives, travelling exhibitions. Now, one guesses, these events will be rushed forward… In some quarters, there will be relief at Bergman’s passing. The Swedes, who sometimes gave the impression of being embarrassed by this monumental figure in their midst, will be able to honour him without reservation. The old spats – the battle with the tax authorities that led him to live in exile, the debates about his stifling effect on younger film-makers – will be forgotten. He will take his place in the list of their major cultural figures, at least the equal of his beloved Strindberg… There was something Prospero-like about Bergman on his island. He would talk without irony about the spirits who surrounded him on Faro. He needed his demons – his fear and rage. “Of course the demons have to be around,” he told his friend and fellow film-maker Jorn Donner. “But as long as I am in the studio or theatre, I control the universe and so the demons are automatically kept under control.” [More at the link.]
