A letter from Ingrid Bergman

[dropcap letter="E"]

Among so many canons of beauty, there is an Ingrid Bergman canon that captures an unusual cinematographic mobility of harmony, of its effects of grace and light, ironic, serene or dramatic. She forgot as much as the Grand Duchess Anastasia, she was Joan of Arc, she knew how to listen to the piano in a Casablanca den, she made her trip to Italy, she went mad as the mother of a suicidal child, she was going to face arduous decisions as Golda Meir, she acted as Walter Matthau's nurse and managed to embody a British missionary who saved a hundred children in Japan-invaded China. Her interpretations are weightless, endowed with so much light of their own that something unformulated overrides the merits of undeniable talent. She was born in 1915, a hundred years ago, and died in 1982. On DVD shelves today we rediscover the vital sequence of an actress who was everything in the dream factory and only allowed herself to be impressed by what matters, something that was light and true at the same time, whole, art grown in the existence of human beings who love and flee.

This is how cinematographic imagination triumphs, as an invincible illusion that manages to become art. She had learned it on the sets of the booming Swedish cinematography in the 1930s, and in Stockholm's old theatrical tradition. Then she embarked on the Queen Mary and seduced a Hollywood that was in its prime. Producer David O. Selznick's adrenaline flowed powerfully and while working on Gone with the Wind, he oversaw Ingrid Bergman's performance in Intermezzo (1939). Then came films usually considered transitory, but always touched by the actress's grace. For example, Adam Had Four Sons (1941), and the same year the not-so-catastrophic Rage in Heaven. Casablanca (1942), directed by Michael Curtiz, was a film of coincidences that has the status of an already universal misunderstanding. It would not be Ingrid Bergman's favorite. But that's how it entered the lives of millions of viewers. And her presence in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) barely manages to save the unsalvable.

It is obligatory to pay tribute to the cinema of director Leo McCarey, quite disregarded probably because he knew how to combine emotiveness and happy narrative effect, in addition to having discovered the pair Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, which is something like recycling minor Dickens characters. Wisely, Jean Renoir said that Leo McCarey understood people much better than any other Hollywood director. Ingrid Bergman appears with great public success in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), in a jubilant role as mother superior in competition with a parish priest Spencer Tracy wearing a boater hat. It is a sweet film but with a funny scene in which the mother superior gives boxing lessons to her favorite student.

So secret and labyrinthine in his desires and affections, Alfred Hitchcock always respected her. They shared champagne in privileged moments of their lives. There was in Ingrid Bergman a subtle strength, sometimes fragile, but capable of dodging Hitchcock's embittered relationships with his great blonde victims. From her stage as Hitchcock's supreme actress, Notorious (1946) borders on perfection, after the psychoanalytic paroxysm of Spellbound (1945), with Gregory Peck. Beside her, Cary Grant does not go beyond his condition of good hanger and faithful friend, an actor with irreparable tics in front of the so ductile Bergman, as attractive for her splendor as for her intelligent shyness. Her destiny crossed several times with the master Claude Rains. That compensates us for the two films she later made with Anthony Quinn. Ingrid Bergman demonstrated that fine ductility that allowed her to go from the set to the stage without losing expressive capacity for emotions, turmoil and humor, streaks of inner tension that, beyond her worldwide fame, certified a luminous art. From 1948 is Joan of Arc. She returned to one of the characters she most admired. It is a film of peculiar magnitude, though without great echo.

In 1949, after working with Hitchcock, she becomes fascinated by the cinema that Rossellini was filming in the streets of Italy, sabotaged by the war. She sees Rome, Open City (1945). She writes to him and offers to work on any of his new films. In the desolate drama of the landscape of Stromboli, Land of God (1950) begins a love story between the actress—married to a Swedish dentist and mother of a son—and the director, married and lover of Ana Magnani. The adulterous relationship—soon with offspring—scandalized at the time and in the United States there are those who denounce her as persona non grata. With Rossellini she also films I Will Love You Always (1952)—Viaggio in Italia—one of his most daring films, in which her face shines as never before beyond heartbreak and loneliness. A Rossellini precursor to Antonioni? Often genealogy blinds us. Perhaps that is why Rossellini despised cinephiles. It is still debated whether Stromboli is an incoherent and failed film. And I Will Love You Always allows for very contrasting interpretations. What remains is the ambiguity between distance and reunion. For its supporters, I Will Love You Always is a unique story of the confusion that is a constitutive part of life.

Back in the United States, she shoots Elena and Her Men (1954) by Jean Renoir, Anastasia (1956), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958), a delicious episode of The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964). She returns to the theater. She appears unstoppable in Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Then she stumbles upon the delays of Ingmar Bergman in Autumn Sonata (1978). Every time beauty is relativized, we can resort to the prodigious realpolitik of a close-up of Ingrid Bergman because that is how great actresses transfigure everything around them, making it more beautiful or more tragic, of a maximum permanence.