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Telegraph
15-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Was Ingmar Bergman really a Nazi?
During his lifetime, and beyond, the film director Ingmar Bergman was widely believed to be a genius. Yet even geniuses have their flaws, and Bergman came festooned with his: allegations (put into the public domain by himself, before he thought better of it) that he raped a former partner of his; an embarrassing arrest for tax evasion and, most notoriously of all, the suggestion that he spent his youth as a fully paid-up Nazi supporter who bitterly mourned the death of Hitler. The last and most damaging story recently re-entered the public domain courtesy of the actor Stellan Skarsgård. While Skarsgård was attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's acclaimed new film Sentimental Value, in which he plays a Bergman-esque director named Gustav Borg, he was asked about his own relationship with Bergman. (He had acted for him in the Eighties in a stage production of Strindberg's A Dream Play.) Skarsgård did not mince his words. 'Bergman was manipulative. He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.' Skarsgård acknowledged that Bergman was still capable of greatness as an artist, if not a human being. 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he explained. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an a--hole. Caravaggio was probably an a--hole as well, but he did great paintings.' Skarsgård wasn't commenting on any fresh revelations, yet the actor's remarks have nevertheless caused something of a furore – not least because Bergman, who died in 2007, is widely regarded as one of the most significant and important film directors who ever lived. From his breakthrough in the 1950s with the films Smiles of a Summer Night and, especially, the seminal The Seventh Seal to such classics of cinema as Cries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, and Persona, Bergman became synonymous with challenging, always boundary-pushing cinema that appealed to audiences and his peers alike. Martin Scorsese said that 'it's impossible to overestimate the effect that Bergman's films had on people' and Stanley Kubrick wrote privately to the film-maker: 'Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today.' Woody Allen went further, however, not only by calling Bergman 'probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera', but by making several pictures, including Interiors and Another Woman, that were overt homages to the director. His 1982 film A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy was a loose remake of Smiles of a Summer Night. Such was Allen's admiration for Bergman that, when he even glowingly reviewed his memoir for the New York Times in 1988, he did not even consider the revelation worth mentioning. 'The picture one gets,' he wrote, 'is of a highly emotional soul, not easily adaptable to life in this cold, cruel world.' However, his idol's party line was to admit to a youthful flirtation with fascism, something that was long since abandoned by the time that he became one of the world's best-respected film-makers. Bergman first saw Hitler when he was 16, on a school exchange trip to Germany in 1934, when he was taken along by his Hitler Youth-supporting host, Hannes, to the Weimar Republic. The impressed youth later described the dictator as 'unbelievably charismatic… he electrified the crowd.' Hannes's father, a clergyman, was sufficiently impressed by the Führer not only to festoon his house with images of him, but to give Bergman a picture of his idol as a gift on his 17th birthday, 'so that you will always have the man before your eyes'. When his young guest, anxious to fit in, asked at what point during the rally he should shout 'Heil Hitler', the pastor replied: 'That's considered more than mere courtesy, my dear Ingmar.' By Bergman's own admission, he was a 'pro-German fanatic' by the time that he returned home to Sweden, seduced and impressed by Hitler and all things National Socialist. Unfortunately, he found himself in simpatico company. His father Erik, who later inspired the film Fanny and Alexander, was an unrepentantly Right-wing figure who believed that Hitler was the answer to the world's problems. As Bergman told the writer Maria-Pia Boëthius in 1999 – she was questioning the truth behind Sweden's much-vaunted neutrality in the Second World War – 'The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful. The big threat were the Bolsheviks, who were hated.' Although the director himself did not participate in any overt anti-Semitic actions, his brother Dag joined some friends to attack the house of a local Jewish man, covering the walls with swastika symbols. (Dag would later become a respected diplomat.) Bergman himself soon saw the consequences of his association in a small but chilling fashion. When he visited Germany, he befriended a local girl named Renata, and began a correspondence, only for this to come to an end when Renata and her family simply vanished one day. They were, of course, Jewish. Although Bergman spent some mandatory time in military service in Sweden, he did not fight in the war. If he had done so, it is likely that his loyalty would have been to Germany. Unlike Dag, however, he was never a member of the Swedish National Socialist Party, which his brother was responsible for founding and operating. Still, as he wrote in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern, 'for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' Yet the eventual awakening that he faced came shortly after the end of the war and the subsequent collapse of Hitler's regime. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes,' he would say. 'When the truth came out it was a hideous shock for me. In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' Those who have attempted to excuse Bergman's youthful folly have argued that, although Bergman did not fully repudiate Hitler and Nazism until 1946, when he came to an understanding of what he had been impressed by, it was a seismic shock to him that changed the course of his life and career. As he told his friend and producer Jörn Donner: 'My feelings were overwhelming and I felt great bitterness towards my father and my brother and the schoolteachers and everyone else who'd led me into it. But it was impossible to get rid of the guilt and the self-contempt.' Thereafter, many of his films and stage productions dealt explicitly with the evil caused by the Nazi regime, whether it's his English-language picture, 1977's The Serpent's Egg, which is set in 1932 Berlin, or his decision to stage Peter Weiss's The Investigation, about the Auschwitz trials, in Stockholm in 1966. Several of his most acclaimed pictures also looked, more obliquely, at themes of guilt and lack of communication brought on by conflict, including 1963's The Silence, which follows the journey of two sisters and was inspired by Bergman spending time in post-war Germany. Or 1968's Shame, in which a marriage, and an unnamed country, are both torn apart by civil war. It would be reading too much into these films to see them as a straightforward apologia for his earlier beliefs – which in any case were not common knowledge until the publication of his memoir – but there can be little doubt that they weighed upon him. It would also be a mistake to take Bergman's comments at face value. As Jane Magnusson, who made the documentary Bergman: A Year in the Life, said in 2019: 'The fact that he had sympathies with Hitler… he wanted to talk about them. And nobody else did. He was pretty much alone in Sweden when he came out in the 1980s and said, 'I went to Germany, I was in Weimar during the parade and I yelled 'Heil Hitler!' And I loved it.' 'It's horrible that he didn't reject Hitler before 1946. It is very late. That's a problem. But I don't think Bergman thought Hitler was a good idea because he hated Jews. Sweden was very afraid of Russia at that time and I think he just thought that it was better than what's going on with them.' It is also likely that Bergman never fully repudiated his youthful Right-wing views. The director Roy Andersson, who studied at the Swedish Film Institute Film School in the late Sixties, remarked that '[Bergman] 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 movies… If you continue with that you will never have the possibility to make features. I will influence the board to stop you'. Bergman often described the most traumatic event of his lifetime as being his 1976 arrest on income tax evasion charges. These were eventually dropped, but caused him to leave Sweden for Munich. From there, he continued his career, albeit to diminishing artistic returns. It would not be until he returned to Sweden in 1982 for Fanny and Alexander – an epic often considered Bergman's crowning achievement – that he would make another truly acclaimed film.
The Guardian
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stellan Skarsgård on Ingmar Bergman: ‘The only person I know who cried when Hitler died'
Stellan Skarsgård has weighed in on famed director Ingmar Bergman's Nazi sympathies as a young adult. The actor was speaking at the Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's film Sentimental Value, inspired by the late Swedish director. Skarsgård expressed his personal dislike of Bergman, with whom he worked on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play. 'Bergman was manipulative,' said the 74-year-old Swedish actor, as first reported by Variety. 'He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.' Bergman, who died in 2007 at the age of 89, spoke openly of his past sympathies for nazism while growing up in a rightwing Swedish family. In 1999, the director explained to Maria-Pia Boëthius, author of a book questioning Sweden's neutrality during the second world war, his positive feelings for Hitler after attending a Nazi rally during an exchange trip to Germany in 1934, at the age of 16. 'Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,' he said. He added that his family put a photo of the fascist dictator next to his bed after, because 'the nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.' The book also details how Bergman's brother and friends vandalized the house of a Jewish neighbor with swastikas – and that he was 'too cowardly' to raise objections to the attack. The director also acknowledged his past Nazi sympathies in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern: 'For many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' He told Boëthius that he maintained support for the Nazis until the end of the war, when the exposure of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust changed his views. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open,' he said, 'I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' Bergman went on to explore anguish over the horrors of war in such films as Winter Light, The Silence and Shame. This is not the first time Skarsgård has criticized Bergman openly – in a 2012 interview with the Guardian's Xan Brooks, Skarsgård said of Bergman: 'I didn't want him near my life.' 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he said at Karlovy Vary. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.' Sentimental Value, which premiered to rave reviews at May's Cannes film festival, is tipped for awards success later this year.
The Guardian
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Stellan Skarsgård on Ingmar Bergman: ‘The only person I know who cried when Hitler died'
Stellan Skarsgård has weighed in on famed director Ingmar Bergman's Nazi sympathies as a young adult. The actor was speaking at the Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's film Sentimental Value, inspired by the late Swedish director. Skarsgård expressed his personal dislike of Bergman, with whom he worked on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play. 'Bergman was manipulative,' said the 74-year-old Swedish actor, as first reported by Variety. 'He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.' Bergman, who died in 2007 at the age of 89, spoke openly of his past sympathies for nazism while growing up in a right-wing Swedish family. In 1999, the director explained to Maria-Pia Boëthius, author of a book questioning Sweden's neutrality during the second world war, his positive feelings for Hitler after attending a Nazi rally during an exchange trip to Germany in 1934, at the age of 16. 'Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,' he said. He added that his family put a photo of the fascist dictator next to his bed after, because 'the nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.' The book also details how Bergman's brother and friends vandalized the house of a Jewish neighbor with swastikas – and that he was 'too cowardly' to raise objections to the attack. The director also acknowledged his past Nazi sympathies in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern: 'For many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' He told Boëthius that he maintained support for the Nazis until the end of the war, when the exposure of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust changed his views. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open,' he said, 'I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' Bergman went on to explore anguish over the horrors of war in such films as Winter Light, The Silence and Shame. This is not the first time Skarsgård has criticized Bergman openly – in a 2012 interview with the Guardian's Xan Brooks, Skarsgård said of Bergman: 'I didn't want him near my life.' 'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he said at Karlovy Vary. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.' Sentimental Value, which premiered to rave reviews at May's Cannes film festival, is tipped for awards success later this year.
Al Arabiya
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Al Arabiya
Czech International Film Festival Opens with Honors for Actors Peter Sarsgaard and Vicky Krieps
The Czech Karlovy Vary International Film Festival was kicking off its 59th edition on Friday with honors for American actor Peter Sarsgaard and actress Vicky Krieps from Luxembourg. Sarsgaard and Krieps are both slated to receive the Festival Presidents Award at the opening ceremony. The festival will screen Shattered Glass, a 2003 movie directed by Billy Ray, for which Sarsgaard was nominated for a Golden Globe. To honor Krieps, who received a European Film Award for best actress for her role of the rebellious Empress Sisi in Corsage (2022), the movie Love Me Tender (2025) will be shown at the festival. American actress Dakota Johnson, who will receive the same award on Sunday, was set to present her two latest movies, Splitsville and Materialists. The festival will close on July 12 with an honor for Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, recognizing his outstanding contribution to world cinema. He will present his new movie, Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier, that won the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival. In an anticipated event, Hollywood actor Michael Douglas arrives at the festival to present a newly restored print of the 1975 Oscar-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which was directed by the late Czech director Miloš Forman and which was produced by Douglas and Saul Zaentz. The grand jury will consider 12 movies for the top prize, the Crystal Globe.
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Renate Reinsve rejects her famous actor father in Joachim Trier's Sentimental Value trailer
Gustav may not be the worst person in the world, but to his daughter, he is. Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård lead Joachim Trier's latest affecting character study about a stage actress, Nora (Reinsve), who rejects a role in her famous actor father's (Skarsgård) comeback film. Will we ever be free from the shackles of the year of the nepo baby? Luckily, this doesn't seem like a project critics want any sort of distance from. Sentimental Value was a huge hit at Cannes, where it won the Grand Prix this spring. Now it has a trailer for the rest of us, which you can watch below: The beginning of the trailer immediately establishes that once again, we're dealing with complicated people. 'I can't work with him,' Nora tells Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), a young American actress who takes on the role Gustav had previously offered his daughter. 'We can't really talk. My father is a very difficult person.' The film's official synopsis reads as follows: 'Sisters Nora (Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) reunite with their estranged father, the charismatic Gustav (Skarsgård), a once-renowned director who offers stage actress Nora a role in what he hopes will be his comeback film. When Nora turns it down, she soon discovers he has given her part to an eager young Hollywood star (Fanning). Suddenly, the two sisters must navigate their complicated relationship with their father — and deal with an American star dropped right into the middle of their complex family dynamics.' Nora may not have wanted to work with her dad, but Reinsve was clearly game to reunite with Trier, whom she previously worked with on the very-much-not-the-worst The Worst Person In The World. Sentimental Value also reunites Trier with Worst Person co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt. 'We had this feeling that if we thought too much about the pressure of following that one up, we'd be hindered from reaching in and getting more emotional,' Trier told Vanity Fair of the pressure associated with this feature in May. Luckily, it seems like they didn't struggle all that much in that department. Grab a box of tissues and head to theaters for Sentimental Value, premiering November 7. More from A.V. Club The Old Guard 2 is half an entry to a flailing franchise 3 new songs and 3 new albums to check out this weekend Jason Blum understands why audiences didn't want to play with M3GAN 2.0
