Bergman’s Nightmare and Obscenity in Cinema

Ingmar Bergman, now eighty-two, is deeply angered. The patriarch of European cinema, the immortal creator of Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Persona, and Cries and Whispers, has turned his fury upon his own country’s filmmakers. For long, Bergman had withdrawn from the screen, vanished into silence. Today he lives in seclusion on the remote Swedish island of Fårö, far away from the bustle of cinema.
 
Yet even from that lonely island he could not remain indifferent to the current state of European film. With a bitterness that stings, he has compared the business of filmmaking to the trade of butchers and prostitutes. What provoked such a declaration? The creeping importation of pornography and fabricated sexuality into Europe’s mainstream cinema.
 
Recently, the Stockholm newspaper Expressen published one of Bergman’s strangest dreams. In this dream he saw: “Pernilla August and Lena Endre were sitting by the swimming pool in transparent bathing suits. I swam swiftly toward them with butterfly strokes, and kissed their feet.” These two women are in fact the heroines of Maria Stuart, Friedrich Schiller’s play that Bergman is presently directing for the stage.
 
It is a curious paradox—Bergman, once the titan of film, now turns to theatre, repelled by cinema’s decline. For Sweden, his departure from film is less a national loss than the symbol of an unbearable nightmare. What fool, Bergman seems to ask, would abandon all human dignity to kneel and kiss the bare feet of two women clad in scanty attire? His dream is an allegory: European directors, instead of unleashing cinema’s immense creative potential, have surrendered to the cheap titillation of pornography.
 
Adding fuel to the fire, a small documentary titled Shocking Truth has exposed an even darker nexus. The film revealed how Sweden’s private television channels—the major producers of films today—are entwined with the pornography trade and prostitution rackets. The nation’s culture minister, scandalized, raised the issue in Parliament, demanding censorship over Sweden’s otherwise censorship-free cinema.
 
The same issue reared its head at the recent Cannes Film Festival, where the union of pornography and mainstream cinema became glaringly evident. Alongside Cannes, a French pornographic film society organized a parallel Porn Film Festival. Many noted stars and directors, invited to Cannes, slipped away into the porn screenings. Across Europe, pornography has taken advantage of the loosening of censorship. Entire channels are dedicated to porn. Porn films are openly shown in theatres. The market of serious cinema shrinks further into the shadows.
 
At the Kolkata Film Festival too, one sensed this decline: new European films were disappointingly scarce. At a festival of French films, the state of new French cinema was laid bare. Each recent film screened was, in a word, abysmal—most shameless imitations of Hollywood, none carrying the old French fire.
 
Europe’s great directors have retreated into silence. Bergman spends his days on a solitary island. Godard no longer leaves his house. And the young filmmakers? They are busy producing pornographic commercials, devoid of imagination or taste.
 
Yet the authorities of European cinema dare not impose censorship. For public opinion stands firmly against it. Viewers, when asked why good films are not being made, blame the directors themselves. Their argument is simple: “Make good films, and people will not watch pornography.”
 
But the counter-question is sharper: if a producer finds greater profit in pornography, why would he risk money on serious cinema? And how shall young directors find the will to create meaningful films when the rewards of obscenity are richer?
 
Even in our own country, debates over film censorship rage endlessly. Nudity and kissing remain forbidden in Indian films. Yet the vulgar dances and obscene song sequences of commercial Hindi cinema, laced with violence, are far more degrading—something our censors seem blind to. To a healthy eye, the nudity of channels like TV6 or FTV is far more aesthetic than the crudeness of Bollywood’s so-called glamour.
 
The central government, in its hypocrisy, contemplates banning channels like Fashion TV, while taking no step to curb the obscenity of Hindi films. Thus censorship reveals its double standard, and government its ineffectiveness.
 
In Sweden, too, those opposed to censorship have turned against Bergman himself. They accuse his own films of obscenity—pointing at his nude scenes and calling them pornography. Just as once, in India, demands were raised to censor Satyajit Ray for showing a woman in undergarments.
 
If this continues, cinema will gradually lose its dignity as an art form. An artist will wake from his nightmare only to find art itself defiled.
 
And here the ultimate question arises: who decides whether art is decent or indecent? If boundaries must exist, then it is the artist’s mind alone that can draw them. He is the judge. But if the artist is motivated by commerce, then he cannot judge impartially. Business cannot be trusted with art’s conscience. Yet then, who is to draw the line between business and art? Who holds credibility? Who can we truly rely upon?