How a week with Ingmar Bergman can change your life

I've just spent a week in bed with Ingmar Bergman.

It's been one of those twilight in-between times. Waiting to start a new job, and unwilling to start writing a new book. Not the "right frame of mind" you could call it, but mostly sheer exhaustion from having moved across continents and setting up house in Delhi. In the summer. Surely the best time to watch a string of romantic comedies? Or finally begin that second season of Orange is the New Black. Or something even more mindless. But as it so happened, in the middle of a conversation, with a film buff friend, it emerged that I'd never ever seen a Bergman movie. I knew of him, of course.(Swedish auteur, possibly one of the most influential ever, etc.) But somehow, despite discovering, and admiring, a whole host of other "world cinema" directors, Bergman had passed me by. My friend threw down the gauntlet - "A week," he challenged. "Nothing but Bergman".

Why not?

In all honesty, I wasn't in the mood for more strenuous activity.

But where would I begin? He made 67 films.

I picked The Seventh Seal, apparently Bergman's favourite. It's about a knight who plays chess with death in medieval plague-ridden Sweden. Surely, the knight would win, I hoped. Wasn't that how these tales unfolded? A hero pitted against seemingly impossible odds, whose cunning and bravery saw him through.

In short, no.

As it turns out, it's the other way round. Death defeats him by trickery.

"Nothing escapes you!" Our knight exclaims at the black-hooded figure, and all you can do is marvel at how succinctly Bergman captures all of Martin Heidegger's 600 pages worth of Being and Time.

If you haven't guessed by now, it isn't the most cheerful of tales. But it's beautiful. With frames that are taken straight from painted church tableaus, depicting postures of grief and worship. The movie embraces many elements of a traditional quest story - a knight and his squire journeying back home, after years away to fight the crusades, and all the adventures they have on the way. Except this time, along with the motley characters they encounter, the knight also meets death. Yet, as with a host of Bergman's films, as you may well know, the thematic exploration of The Seventh Seal is the "silence of god" - if you exist, he seems to be pining, show me a sign. Given our post-pious times though, the crisis seems rather outmoded.

Up next, The Virgin Spring.

While the last few frames of The Seventh Seal focus on Gunnel Lindblom's lovely face, dramatically upturned towards the hooded-figure, this one opens with her kindling a fire. She plays a "dishonoured" pregnant servant girl to a wealthy family with a golden-haired daughter, Karin, whom everyone adores. Again, like the knight and squire, they too journey on horseback on a mission - to deliver candles to the church at Easter. At this point, symbolism be damned, all I was thinking was "Two girls riding alone through the woods? Are they insane?" Terrible things unfortunately do happen. First they're separated because the maid is wary of travelling further, and Karin wishes to carry on. Then she meets three herdsmen (two adults and a boy), who she invites to share her lunch (honestly, what was she thinking?). Eventually, the two men rape, murder, and plunder her of her clothes and shoes, while the maid watches helplessly from a hidden distance. The herders flee, and unknowingly seek shelter at Karin's home.

There's a point, after supper, when her mother moves aside their bag (containing her dead daughter's clothes), and you catch your breath - for that brief moment, oddly, you can't really tell whether you panic for her or the murderers.

Even more ambiguous is that the father, when he learns of their deeds, unleashes upon them (including the guiltless boy) equal ugliness, violence, and terror. I didn't like the end of The Virgin Spring much - water springs from the earth beneath the dead girl after her father has repented (and promised to build a church on that spot). It unfolds much too neatly, and simply, like a morality play.

The one I picked next turned out to be my favourite.

In the original Swedish, Wild Strawberries is Smultronstället, which means quite literally "the wild strawberry patch", but signifies idiomatically a forgotten place often associated with personal or sentimental value. This movie too involves a journey, both literal and otherwise. Crusty old Professor Isak Borg, widowed and set in his ways, is meant to travel from Stockholm to Lund to receive a prestigious "golden" degree. In the very early hours before his departure, awoken by a nightmarish dream involving deserted streets, a clock with no hands, a horse-drawn hearse, and an open coffin, he decides to drive there instead of taking the flight. His daughter-in-law accompanies him, even though she doesn't like him or his company much. (In fact, they talk, first off, about a loan that Evald, his son and her husband, hasn't yet repaid.) Something happens though, when Isak suddenly decides to take a slight detour and stop at the house where he spent many summers with his cousins. The place where wild strawberries grow.

"What if you could make a film about this?" Bergman said in an interview, "that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door, and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives." Time, in the movie, is fluid, the past and present blur in Isak's mind. He sees his cousin Sara, the one he truly loved and lost, his estranged wife, who he neglected and disdained, his mother, beautiful and youthful. Along the way, he stops to visit her, but she's grown cold, distant, embittered by loneliness, an older version of himself. When he arrives, we see his son Evald display the same brusque traits. The ceremony rings hollow and empty. Confronted by this, something in Isak changes, softens. What invigorates him is an encounter with a trio of youngsters, who sing a farewell to him outside his window. "I love you best," the girl shouts out to him. He smiles and says, "I'll remember".

Please don't die, I muttered, when he climbed into bed at the conclusion of the film. Given the way the other two movies had ended, this was a strong possibility. But he lay there, alive, joyful. Somehow, Isak has made peace, and so has Bergman.

Perhaps it wasn't the best and brightest idea to then watch Through a Glass Darkly. This terribly grim movie takes place over twenty four hours, on an island, and involves four characters - Karin, a woman suffering from schizophrenia, her young brother, their aloof father who is a writer; and her husband, a physician. We learn Karin's recently been released from a "mental asylum", but all is not well. In fact, slowly her sanity unravels, triggered by her discovery of her father's journal where he writes that he's certain she won't ever recover. The atmosphere is tensely claustrophobic, they're hemmed in by the sea, by each other; one can almost imagine them all in a play on stage. Just as the troubled protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman story The Yellow Wallpaper, Karin also hears voices, and imagines people around her; she too walks into a room's wallpaper and allows it to enfold her. "I have seen god," she says after she tries to flee a giant imaginary spider. The notion of constructing a meaningful understanding of the world lies dismantled, ending in a storm of thunder and rain and incest. After it's over, I discover that it's merely the first in what came to be known as Bergman's "Trilogy of Faith" alongside Winter Light and The Silence.

With that, I came to the end of my week.

If you've been counting, that's only four films. (But there was Wimbledon.)

And to be honest, I had to watch some of these movies over two days. Either I started too late, or, as with Through a Glass Darkly, it was much too intense for one sitting.

There isn't going to be an "I have learned this..." kind of moment in this piece - alright, I read that Bergman "peers into the human soul" and I've learned it might have been right. And that the cinematographers he worked with, Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer, were poets with light.

Moving on, then, to the next in the trilogy. It's said that Bergman's then wife Kabi Laretei remarked, upon viewing Winter Light: "Yes, Ingmar, it's a masterpiece. But it's a dreary masterpiece". Perhaps I'll give it a skip, for now. And choose his only comedy Smiles of a Summer Night. A quick Google search tells me it's about mismatched couples and lustful servants. I'll admit, secretly, I'm relieved. Back to bed with Bergman then. Only because I've just moved and have nowhere else to sit.