Great piece. I forgot how many great movies this guy has been.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Here's a list of tons of leftist movies.
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He’s good at whatever he does. Good guy, as well.
Bergman was definitely a Nazi in his youth but he repudiated it when he learned about the death camps. In his memoir he's very open about it (besides maybe exaggerating how young he was) but he mostly blamed his parents and the right-wing milieu he grew up in. I don't know that he really examined what led him to default to Nazism in the first place or used the experience to self-crit. It's been decades since I read his memoir and I don't have it nearby so I may be a bit off but that was the impression I got. In the '70s he was a tax exile but that's all I remember about his later politics.
Godard also had right-wing leanings when he was a teenager but he actually did grow out of them and was constantly interrogating his own politics. Not that his views became immediately pristine or anything - there's plenty to criticize Godard for even when he fully committed to the Left - but the difference seems to me to be that Bergman stopped at "I was lied to" and Godard was more likely to question why he believed certain lies.
Edit - some more Bergman recollections. He was also very open about how shitty and distant of a father he was. (This from an interview that's an extra on the Cries and Whispers Criterion disc.) He tended to be very matter-of-fact about many of his failings, and a recognition that they were indeed failings, but was too much of a fatalist to even begin the work of changing. And if I'm remembering his memoir accurately, even the Nazi confessions mostly had to do with (1) letting readers know that Sweden wasn't as neutral as it pretended to be and (2) an ingredient in what formed his attitude toward organized religion.
Apparently he used to threaten students to stop making left wing films:
LWLies: I wanted to ask you briefly about Ingmar Bergman. Were you affected by his death?
Andersson: Of course in my opinion he’s – it’s hard to say – but in my opinion he’s a little overrated. He made in the beginning of the ’60s I think there were four movies that are excellent, brilliant, good art and cinematography, but there are so many bad movies he made. And he was also very right wing politically. He was almost a fascist, he was a Nazi sympathiser, and when he grew up he was very coloured by fascistic values. He never left that himself, and it also coloured his person. He was not a nice person. He was a so-called inspector of the film school that I attended, and each term we were called and we had to go to his office and he gave some advice, or even some threats, and he said, ‘If you don’t stop making left wing movie…’ because a lot of the students were left wing at the time, Vietnam and so on… “if you continue with that you will never have the possibility to make features. I will influence the board to stop you.”
Thanks for this, I hadn't heard that.
I should watch more Bo Widerberg films to see what '60s left-wing Swedish cinema looked like. This looks like a good one to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%85dalen_31 .
And Roy Andersson kicks ass; I love Songs from the Second Floor.
P.S. A great recent film about fascist suppression of leftist film students: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_of_Knowing_Nothing