Ingmar Bergman is the child of a silence that emerged whispering from the heart of darkness; the child of a light shining through an invisible window into the abandoned cellar of the human mind, illuminating a memory hidden in the shadows.
His birthday is not the anniversary of a man’s birth, but the birth of a question: the birth of doubt—a doubt suspended forever between faith and the death of faith, between the body and the soul, between truth and dream.
For me, born in the East amid philosophy, mysticism, and the poetry of Rumi and Sohrab Sepehri, Bergman’s world should be foreign—but it is not. The essence of his words contains both the strangeness of Rumi’s world and the boundless imagination of Sepehri.
To me, Bergman is not just a creator but a discoverer of invisible boundaries. His camera is like the lantern of a Sufi, wandering the unreachable alleys of Nishapur in search of the human essence. It is as if Bergman does not make films but searches for a way to speak again to his stern and authoritarian priest-father, to reconnect with the faith he lost at the age of eight while locked in a closet, or to reconcile with the silent woman weeping in the mirror—an embodiment of all the women he lost in his life.
When we speak of him, we are not merely talking about The Seventh Seal—we are speaking of a priestly dialogue between an actor who has descended from the cross and Death dressed in a chessboard cloak. He doesn’t play to win or lose; he plays to reach an inner understanding. The chess game with Death is a game with nothingness, with the silence hidden behind every word. The same silence that, in Winter Light, envelops the church like mist, leaving a priest alone amid his lost faith.
Bergman’s birth is the birth of a poet who writes not with words, but with images. His words are Liv Ullmann’s face gazing into the camera—a woman who can no longer speak, and whose name has become Persona. Persona is not a film to be understood, but to be lost in—like a mirror reflecting another mirror until one no longer knows whose image it is, or who the original face belongs to.
On his birthday, Bergman must be sought on a foggy island—the island that in Fanny and Alexander becomes a giant theater, full of magic and fear, where a child, with eyes larger than the world, watches the collapse of love, faith, and play. Where the glow of the stage lights makes truth more vivid than life itself. Bergman’s birth is the birth of a child who befriends shadows on an empty stage.
Yet Bergman is not just a storyteller of darkness. He must be seen as a poet who, even amid mourning and illness, sparks light. Remember Wild Strawberries, where an old man, at the brink of death, takes refuge in dreams where youth, first love, and untaken paths still shine. These dreams are poems in images—windows into the past, into regrets that, like dust, settle on the human heart.
On Bergman’s birthday, we must turn to those scenes where silence is heavier than any music. Like the moment in Cries and Whispers when a woman in a bathtub stares at the ceiling, as if she’s absorbed all the pain in the world. Or a scene in Shame, where amid the sound of gunfire, a man and woman—once lovers—drift apart without touching, as war seeps not only into the streets, but into their marital bed.
Bergman cannot be separated from the memory of cinema, like a spirit woven into the fibers of celluloid. He turned cinema into a church, the viewer into an anxious worshipper. He posed questions that remained unanswered—and in their lack of answers, became even more beautiful. He asked: “Is God silent? Is love possible? Can a human being live without a mask, without a persona?” And these questions were not asked to be answered, but so that we, too, might carry them with us.
His birthday is an invitation to look again—to gaze into the eyes that meet the camera with doubt and tears. To see the reflection of our own soul in scenes that, like mirrors, are bitter, bruised, and true. Perhaps Bergman was not a director at all, but a great confessor—someone who, with each film, revealed a piece of guilt: the guilt of not wanting, not having, knowing too much, or remaining silent.
On his birthday, imagine the island of Fårö—the silence of the sea, the rocks that seem to rise from the depths of history, and the man in a wooden house, writing, watching, and conversing with death in his heart. And perhaps, in that moment, he hears the voice of the priest from Winter Light whispering: “The silence of God is our greatest trial.”
