Ingrid Bergman excelled at playing strong-willed, independent-minded women; she herself was one, and she paid a higher price for her artistic ambition and personal freedom than did any other movie star. Her centenary is being celebrated in retrospectives at MOMA (Aug. 29-Sept. 10) and BAM Cinématek (Sept. 12-29), which feature her greatest films (including all those mentioned here) and her most infamous ones—and some that manage to be both.
In her early years in Hollywood, Bergman was directed by such luminaries as George Cukor (“Gaslight”) and Alfred Hitchcock (the thrillers “Spellbound” and “Notorious,” and the Gothic-erotic drama “Under Capricorn”). In 1948, she wrote to the innovative Italian director Roberto Rossellini and offered to work with him. Bergman had a child with Rossellini while they were filming in Italy, and before divorcing her then-husband, sparking denunciations of her in the press, and even the Senate, as well as officials’ demands for a ban on her movies. Although Bergman went from heroine to pariah, her artistry rose to new heights. Rossellini directed her in four of the harshest and most insightful movies ever made about marriage: “Stromboli,” “Europa ’51,” “Voyage to Italy,” and the last and rarest of them, “Fear,” from 1954 (screening at MOMA Sept. 4 and Sept. 9).
“Fear” is set in Munich, where Irene Wagner (Bergman), an adept businesswoman, runs a pharmaceutical company founded by her husband, Albert (Mathias Wieman), who is its chief scientist. Irene is having an affair with a playboy whose ex-lover, the showgirl Johanna (Renate Mannhardt), turns up and blackmails her, threatening to inform Albert of the affair if Irene doesn’t pay her off. As Johanna ratchets up her demands, Irene tells Albert ever more complex lies to explain sudden absences, requests for money, and missing pieces of jewelry. Under increasing strain, Irene is pressed to the breaking point. Rossellini likens the Wagners’ private torments to the tensions within Germany itself, its rigorously rational order built on frenzied concealment and the fear of crimes revealed. Utterly in her element as the free-spirited but besieged executive, Bergman lends Irene a frozen and fractured stillness. Irene, contemplating suicide, calmly dusts, with one finger, between the buttons of her office telephone, a touch of actorly genius that intimates the grandeur of her passions.
Soon after making “Fear,” Bergman and Rossellini separated, largely because she insisted on making movies with other directors. The first of them, Jean Renoir’s effervescent comedy “Elena and Her Men” (MOMA, Aug. 31 and Sept. 6), from 1956, has as its subject the successive affairs of a woman who is both muse and enchantress. Bergman plays the worldly Polish princess Elena Sokorowska, whose self-appointed mission is to help men realize their destinies—which she sees more clearly than they do. Set in fin-de-siècle Paris, the story—built on tensions between France and Germany and a general’s plan for a coup d’état—revisits scenes from the director’s prewar classic “The Rules of the Game,” as well as from “Notorious,” fusing Bergman’s bold and graceful romanticism with the upheavals of history. ♦
