A Full Integration with Film History: A Tribute to Ingmar Bergman

The Virgin Spring and The Seventh Seal: A Girardian Reading William Mishler Of his more than forty films, Ingmar Bergman has set two in the Middle Ages—The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1956) and The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1959), the latter based on an early ballad and utilizing a screenplay that he co-authored with Ulla Isaksson—which together form an instructive pair. The former, of course, represents his breakthrough as a director of international reputation. Though heralded by the powerful Sawdust and Tinsel from 1953, The Seventh Seal was his first unquestionable masterpiece. It was a film that to Bergman's own amazement "swept like a forest fire across the world."1 Today it continues to maintain its preeminent position with both audiences and critics. The Virgin Spring, however, is a different matter. Compared to his best work as a director, it has been judged a relative failure, first and foremost by Bergman himself. Initially elated by the film,2 he later became sharply critical of it. In an interview from 1970, he stated: "Now I want to make it quite plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa."3 And in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, he neglects even to mention the film4 and thus tacitly removes it from among the works by which he evidently wishes to be recognized as a director. Bergman's condemnation of The Virgin Spring is in my view excessive. Taken simply on its own terms, it possesses an undeniable power and presents sequences of great visual interest. On the other hand, it is true, the film is a far less captivating work than The Seventh Seal, less surprising to watch and less challenging to think about afterwards. Bergman locates its flaw at the conceptual level, and in my opinion he is correct to do so. After all, there is nothing amiss with the film's actors or technical resources, which are nearly identical to The Seventh Seal's. Speci106 William Mishler107 fically, Bergman locates The Virgin Spring's problem in what he intriguingly calls its "totally unanalysed idea of God."5 In the present essay I would like to open up this "totally unanalysed idea" first of all because I believe that it will hand us an important key for understanding the disparity in artistic quality between the two films and also, I hope, provide some insight into the connecting logic of Bergman's work as a director and screenwriter. To carry out this inquiry I will draw on the work of the literary critic and anthropologist René Girard, whose theories concerning the function of religion in human society strike me as offering a powerfully articulated parallel to the psychological and anthropological insights implicitly present in many of Bergman's films. I It is important in regard to the matter of religion to distinguish the two senses in which the subject is particularly relevant to Bergman—i.e., the personal and the ethical. There is on the one hand the Christianity of his childhood which shadowed him well into adulthood. As the son of a strict Lutheran pastor, Bergman grew up in an atmosphere pervaded by Christian theology and Christian habits of thought from which, as an artist, he struggled mightily to free himself. This endeavor is particularly noticeable in the films of his middle period, extending from The Seventh Seal through the so-called trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly (Sâsom i en spegel, 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgästern, 1963), and The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963). These last three record the progressive stages in an examination and rejection of the notion of God as a sufficient response to the ills of the world. Bergman has called the trilogy a "reduction," thereby pointing to the tight interlinkage among the films, each taking the minimal optimism of its predecessor, its faint glimmer of theistic possibility, and subjecting it to destructive scrutiny. By the end of the trilogy, the notion of God even as resonant absence or significant silence has been expunged. In The Silence the trio of the film's principal characters are carried deeper and deeper into a gritty...

Upon encountering a work— any work, be it in film, theatre, transcribed screenplays, dramatic texts, and memoirs—by Ingmar Bergman, there is scant little that any critic can add as testimonial to the inarguable artistic genius—and there is no other word for it—associated with the name of that distinguished Swede. His legendary output in films from the 1950s on until the early 80s is munificence enough to nourish a sensate soul’s appetite for human discernment and spiritual longings. To even suggest that works such as Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and Through a Glass Darkly are masterpieces is to state the obvious. Through piercing psychological insights into all-too-human foibles, an eye for the telling detail that lies deep and unknowable in the vast recesses of our complex psyches, and an unerring ability to mine the richly evocative personae of his actors—each of them (and I expect the reader to know who they are) a signal and equal collaborator in degree and kind to the director’s vision—Bergman’s searing depictions of relationships between people as they struggle to make sense out of their existence is unparalleled in the history of film, if not in the art of recent decades.

A Ballad and a Movie: Scandinavian TSB B21 and Ingmar Bergman's <i>The Virgin Spring</i>

The development of themes, motifs, and techniques in Bergman's films, from the first intimations in the early work to the consummate resolutions in the final movies.Known for their repeating motifs and signature tropes, the films of Ingmar Bergman also contain extensive variation and development. In these reflections on Bergman's artistry and thought, Irving Singer discerns distinctive themes in Bergman's filmmaking, from first intimations in the early work to consummate resolutions in the later movies. Singer demonstrates that while Bergman's output is not philosophy on celluloid, it attains an expressive and purely aesthetic truthfulness that can be considered philosophical in a broader sense. Through analysis of both narrative and filmic effects, Singer probes Bergman's mythmaking and his reliance upon the magic inherent in his cinematic techniques. Singer traces throughout the evolution of Bergman's ideas about life and death, and about the possibility of happiness and interpersonal love. In the overtly self-referential films that he wrote or directed (The Best Intentions, Fanny and Alexander, Sunday's Children) as well as the less obviously autobiographical ones (including Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and the triad that begins with Through a Glass Darkly) Bergman investigates problems in his existence and frequently reverts to childhood memories. In such movies as Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage, and Saraband, Bergman draws upon his mature experience and depicts the troubled relationships between men who are often weak and women who are made to suffer by the damaged men with whom they live. In Persona, Cries and Whispers, and other works, his experiments with the camera are uniquely masterful. Inspecting the panorama of Bergman's art, Singer shows how the endless search for human contact motivates the content of his films and reflects Bergman's profound perspective on the world.

This volume provides a concise overview of the career of one of the modern masters of world cinema. Jesse Kalin defines Bergman's conception of the human condition as a struggle to find meaning in life as it is played out. For Bergman, meaning is achieved independently of any moral absolute and is the result of a process of self-examination. Six existential themes are explored repeatedly in Bergman's films: judgment, abandonment, suffering, shame, a visionary picture, and above all, turning toward or away from others. Kalin examines how Bergman examines these themes cinematically, through close analysis of eight films: well known favorites such as Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Smiles of a Summer Night, and Fanny and Alexander; and important but lesser known works, such as Naked Night, Shame, Cries and Whispers, and Scenes from a Marriage.

Most standard versions of film history discuss Swedish films of the late 1910s and early 1920s in terms of a golden age, with a long run of commercial and critical successes. Swedish films were appreciated internationally for their perceived artiness, and their naturalistic acting styles, often enhanced by spectacular cinematography (most notably by ‘J. Julius’, the nom de plume for renowned cinematographer Julius Jaenzon). The then prominent film critic Bengt Idestam-Almqvist, under the pseudonym ‘Robin Hood’, had established the tone for a domestic understanding of this phenomenon by the end of the 1930s in an ambitious book, with an introduction by Victor Sjöström.1 It has since been the objective of much film scholarship in Sweden to rectify the highly dramatic and nationalistic narrative of that book. Some of the individual films discussed, like Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1920) and Mauritz Stiller's Sir Arne's Treasure (1919), both adapted from literary works by Swedish Nobel Laureate Selma Lagerlöf, are now firmly established in the auteurist canon of great European films. Sjöström as well as Stiller, the most prominent Swedish directors at the time (although Stiller was actually of Russian–Finnish descent), were eventually sought out by the Hollywood studios and made films in the USA. Sjöström has long been one of the stalwarts of Swedish film history, with a career spanning over fifty-five years. In the silent era he was an actor, director and scriptwriter; from the 1930s onwards he was mainly an actor. He was eventually given the ultimate cinematic homage in Sweden, in the role of the aged professor and protagonist of Ingmar Bergman's elegiac Wild Strawberries (1957). Sjöström was, at the time of his final contribution to Swedish cinema, seventy-eight years old. A few years ago, a new Sjöström film from the golden age – The Monastery of Sendomir (1920) – was rediscovered and screened after restoration at the Swedish Film Institute.

This article offers alternate readings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Winter Light (1963) to those proposed in a preceding article by Esma Kartal. It argues against the contention that the two films express optimism about one’s ability to resolve spiritual-existential angst and the possibility of ultimately reaffirming one’s faith. Through close analysis of pivotal scenes, including that of Death in the Castle in The Seventh Seal and the Frostnäs church service in Winter Light, the article exposes the unremitting pessimism that pervades the films’ atmospheres. In essence, the article asserts that the two films, Winter Light in particular, are among the most pessimistic in Bergman’s cinema.

This book on Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman contains 18 new essays, representing parts of modern scholarship on the director’s work, mainly in the cinema. Most of the contributors to the book, some of them Swedish, others American or British, have written lavishly on Bergman previously, some even for decades. Bergman is one of the most written about artists in film history and his fame still lingers all over the world, as could be seen in the celebrations of his centenary in 2018. The book was specifically conceived back then with the aim to present fresh angles on his work, even if many essays also focus on traditional aspects of Bergman’s art, like philosophy and psychology. Thus, the book presents a number of essential subjects which have been hitherto somewhat absent from Bergman studies: like the director’s relations with Hollywood and transnational film production. It also focuses on Bergman’s highly sophisticated use of film music and his prominence as a writer of autobiographical literature and the inevitable intermedial relations to his films that this will encompass. Finally, it also addresses Bergman’s complex relations to Swedish politics.Many different approaches and methods are employed in the book in order to show that Bergman still is a relevant and important artist. The analyses generally focus on some of his most memorable films, like Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona and Fanny and Alexander, but also on rarer material like Hour of the Wolf, The Lie and Autumn Sonata.

This book on Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman contains 18 new essays, representing parts of modern scholarship on the director’s work, mainly in the cinema. Most of the contributors to the book, some of them Swedish, others American or British, have written lavishly on Bergman previously, some even for decades. Bergman is one of the most written about artists in film history and his fame still lingers all over the world, as could be seen in the celebrations of his centenary in 2018. The book was specifically conceived back then with the aim to present fresh angles on his work, even if many essays also focus on traditional aspects of Bergman’s art, like philosophy and psychology. Thus, the book presents a number of essential subjects which have been hitherto somewhat absent from Bergman studies: like the director’s relations with Hollywood and transnational film production. It also focuses on Bergman’s highly sophisticated use of film music and his prominence as a writer of autobiographical literature and the inevitable intermedial relations to his films that this will encompass. Finally, it also addresses Bergman’s complex relations to Swedish politics.Many different approaches and methods are employed in the book in order to show that Bergman still is a relevant and important artist. The analyses generally focus on some of his most memorable films, like Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona and Fanny and Alexander, but also on rarer material like Hour of the Wolf, The Lie and Autumn Sonata.

Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal both recount a “final” journey by their central characters. It is a trip from one place to another, occupying a single very long day (approximately dawn to dawn). But in fact what appears to be linear is part of a more complicated journey that in essence starts at home, wanders far away, and finally returns to where it began. It is this last stage that we see. For Bergman, this represents a central task of adult life to return to one's past and in some way retrieve something essential in life that has been lost. It is in this return that we find our second chance. For knight Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal this would be to restore his marriage, but his time is up, and he can only rejoin his wife to await their end together. Still, he can save someone else (the juggler Jof and his wife, Mia) and thus replace his own salvation with that of another, a partial fulfillment of this essential project of return and reappropriation. Aged physician-professor Isak Borg in Wild Strawberries cannot save his marriage, since his wife has been long dead and their rupture is thus irreparable. But he can substitute his son's marriage and home for his own, becoming a true father again to his children (and grandchild). Moreover, in returning to his childhood home, he comes to feel once more alive so that at least he won't die dead. Wild Strawberries , then, is a drama of rebirth (mercy and meaning) through both reappropriation and replacement of what has been lost, whereas The Seventh Seal achieves only the latter.

Religion has been a major preoccupation throughout Bergman's career, but it became the main focus for the films of the late 1950s and early 1960s, coinciding with the period when Bergman became known outside Sweden. While films of the late 1950s (The Seventh Seal, 1956; The Face, 1958) are critical of orthodox religion and outdated religious ritual, there is nevertheless a quest for a more internally spiritual or 'truer' faith. Unique moments of happiness, like the wild strawberry sequence in The Seventh Seal, symbolize the truth in human communion, both in contrast to and as original source of religious rituals of more conventional communion ceremonies. The quest to unveil a raw, original source of truth beneath religious convention recalls the de-masking process in Summer Interlude (1950). The quest for truth begins to crumble in Through a Glass Darkly (1960), marking the advent of the three films later to be termed the trilogy,1 which focused to a far greater extent on human characters than Bergman's work of the late 1950s. With The Silence (1962), the last film of the trilogy, also comes a questioning of words and images as signs or symbols of meaning.

Alan Bilton's Silent Film Comedy and American Culture brings to mind Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery's observation that film history is not a simple empiricist history. They quote the American historian Charles Beard to remind us that, at best, film history must always remain a subjective ideological history: “Whatever acts of purification the historian may perform he yet remains human, a creature of time, place, circumstance, interests, predilections, culture.”1 Allen and Gomery divide the field of film history into four major areas, representing the major avenues of film historical investigation: Aesthetic film history deals with the history of the cinema as an art form; Technological film history involves the study of the origins and development of the technology that makes possible the creation and presentation of movies; Economic film history concerns who pays for movies and how and why they are made; Social film history is concerned principally with three questions: (1) Who made films and why? (2) Who saw films, how, and why? (3) What was seen, how and, why?2 The title of Bilton's first chapter is “Introducing America's Silent Film Comedy: Clowns, Conformity, Consumerism” and confirms what the title of his book already suggested, namely that Bilton adheres mostly to the social approach to film history with some minor attention to the economic approach. This selective approach is perhaps the book's strongest aspect and its greatest weakness in that it avoids a whole set of questions concerning the aesthetic and technological categories of film history.In his analysis of the relationship between silent comedies and the development of practical capitalism and consumerism in the U.S. during the turn of the twentieth century, Bilton relies heavily on the work of Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, who was one of Hoover's key speechwriters, as well as one of the most important architects of Western consumer culture. Bilton proposes that slapstick movies, with their use of destruction, comically uninhibited lust, illogical gags, and absurdist anarchy, provide a test case for Bernays's theories, which for the first time applied psychoanalysis to explain economic and cultural phenomena. Bilton aims to explore whether such manic energies can be absorbed and tamed by the system, or whether instead they illuminate the essential irrationality of consumer culture and the transformation of civic duty into boundless desire. Bilton quotes Rob King's study of the Keystone Film Company, which states that the “timeless” age of silent comedy can only be understood in terms of “a shift from a producer to a consumer economy” (29). Thus, Bilton claims that one should read all slapstick comedy as a form of collective anxiety dream.Bilton raises the important paradox of slapstick: on the one hand, it serves as a subversive tool that attacks social norms, while on the other hand, as comedy, it serves an essentially conservative purpose, restraining excessive activity by redirecting its energy to humor and laughter. This issue is very crucial to all humor study and is probably one of the preeminent unsolved questions regarding humor and its effects on society and politics. Analyzing Keaton and Chaplin's films, which are rich in satirical and subversive gags, could suggest a broader approach to this issue and might expose the dichotomy, which leads to the above-mentioned paradox as an oversimplified attitude. The context of the gag may be the key to understanding whether it is subversive or submissive.Bilton's narrow focus on the social perspective enables him to encapsulate the entire oeuvre of the seven most iconic and popular silent comedians: Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Rosco “Fatty” Arbuckle, Mabel Normand, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Harry Langdon. He observes that Sennett's movies should be read “not as absurd Dada provocation, but rather as a cock-eyed reflection of the immigrant experience, its kicks, knocks and scums” (48). Or as he sums it up: “If the key theme of a Demille picture is the Cinderella theme, Sennett's films remain stubbornly ugly sisters: grimy, grotty, redolent of the dirt under the audience's fingernails that Demille was so committed to scrubbing out” (59).For Bilton, Chaplin is the ultimate seismograph of time (i.e., zeitgeist) of the mechanical era and is defined as “the exemplar of a nascent machine-body for a new machine-age” (99). Bilton supports his argument using Fernand Léger's iconic image of Chaplin in his short avant-garde film La Ballet Mechanique (1924) where the Tramp is transformed into jerky cubist animation, when the bodily and the mechanical become virtually inseparable. Along these lines, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle is described as the “perfect representative of an age of gluttony and conspicuous consumption, the ravenous hunger of the market place” (114). Chaplin's most common props and sets are machines and their derivatives (statues, models, mannequins, toys, etc.), to the point that the border between people and objects is erased; meanwhile, Arbuckle's most reliable prop is food.One of the more interesting points of Bilton's analysis occurs when he applies his approach to Mabel Normand and the notion of the female clown. Through her films, Bilton explores the theoretical idea of the changing role of the New Woman in the early part of the twentieth century: “‘woman as sign’ and ‘woman as a token of exchange’”(139).Bilton tries to encapsulate Harold Lloyd's comedy as the ultimate expression of the anxieties of capitalism by focusing on one of his best achievements, Safety Last (1923). Bilton notes that the fact that Harold's character is a department store salesperson underscores the role of consumerism. Here he misses an opportunity to explore this theme and film against Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), and Keaton's Cops (1922) and One Week (1920). Such a comparative analysis could enhance his argument and show the uniqueness of each of these artists.Bilton writes that “it is Buster Keaton who most completely inhabits and exemplifies the machine age…. No other comedian of the period seems so aware of the essentially mechanical nature of the medium, its specifically machine-made possibilities and absurdities” (175). This observation is productive and accurate; however, failing to compare Keaton to Chaplin from this perspective in order to fully understand the meaning of this statement and the specialty of each of the two artists is another missed opportunity. Chaplin's work, especially the unique and sophisticated way he dealt with sound, was very much a result of his awareness of the mechanical nature of the medium.3Bilton quotes Gilbert Adair regarding the equivocal experience of watching a silent film today: “On the one hand the images feel incredibly young, with film-makers working out the possibilities of the medium for the very first time. On the other hand, however, the images appear incredibly, ineffably old” (192). Bilton suggests that of all of the great auteurs of the dead language of silent film, Keaton seems to have understood this duality most clearly. I believe that awareness of this tension between primitive, vital new medium and vanishing dying medium could provide important insight into many silent films toward the late 1920s, as the medium reached its climax.Bilton ends his survey by focusing on Harry Langdon and his “repetition-compulsion” about World War I. Using Jean Laplanche's concept of afterwardness, Bilton raises the apparent paradox of portraying World War I as comedy and describes how deferred meanings or effects can be understood to be activated only by a second occurrence of meaningful events. He argues that what in many ways distinguished Langdon's silent comedies was his ability to reveal the war's absurdity by revisiting the trenches and the expressions of the shell-shocked.In conclusion, Bilton's social approach highlights some aspects relevant for cultural studies and is particularly valuable for its contribution to humor studies. This approach allows Bilton to focus on a number of themes relevant to the social changes and developments of American society at the beginning of the twentieth century; what is more, it allows him to explore the reflection of these themes and their influence on the silent comedy and its major artists. I believe that incorporating other approaches, such as the aesthetic, technological, and economic, could enrich this analysis.Bilton's choice to focus on seven comedians and to structure the book around this idea implies a hidden assumption of what constitutes an auteur-oriented approach. There is no reference or treatment of the differences between these auteurs. Are these artists all equally auteurs? Are the differences between them only thematic or is there more that differentiates them than simply their gender and their external form/appearance? What does it mean for them to be comedians? Are we dealing with them just as clowns or actors? Or maybe one should also refer to the fact that some of them were only performers and others also writers, directors, and producers? Writing about cinema should relate to many aspects of the process of filmmaking. It is impossible to focus only on one of the categorizations that Allen and Gomery suggest. In spite of these flaws, the book gives an interesting overview and provides some insights into slapstick, one of silent cinema's greatest and most popular art forms; indeed, slapstick has proven to be an important contribution of American culture to the art of cinema, and remains as one of the greatest contributions of American cinema to today's culture.

This book resorts to a new, intermedial method in order to reconstruct the history of Brazilian cinema. It eschews teleological schemes derived from evolutionary chronologies and classical-modern or centre-periphery models, which inevitably lead to the privileging of certain film forms over others on the restrictive basis of medium-specific qualities. Instead, it proposes that different phases of a national cinema can be framed as comparable and interrelated phenomena. From its inception Brazilian cinema has combined extra-filmic artistic and medial forms, resulting in an original aesthetic blend. Theatre, dance, music, circus, radio, television and the plastic arts have left a distinctive mark on Brazilian cinema’s poetics and politics, as can be observed in a host of fascinating phenomena analysed in this book, including: screen and stage interactions in the silent era; the chanchada musical comedies, inflected by vaudeville theatre and the radio; Glauber Rocha’s intermedial cosmogony; the manguebeat and árido movie movements that blurred the boundaries between music and film; and contemporary multimedia installations among others. By adopting intermediality as a historiographic method, this book brings to the public, for the first time, the polymathic cultural wealth behind filmic expressions in Brazilian cinema through the lens of its most authoritative experts. It hopes to directly benefit academics and researchers willing to find new ways of understanding Brazilian film history, and the history of cinema in general.

Racist Film:Teaching The Birth of a Nation Paul McEwan (bio) The Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) is all too seldom taught in film studies classes, given its centrality to the development of narrative film and its usefulness as an extreme filmic example of racial misrepresentation. I teach the film in my introductory class, in film history, in film theory, and in a special topics class on historical fiction films. While the film is the focus of my research and a text I find endlessly fascinating and disturbing, it obviously presents numerous challenges in a film classroom because of its virulently racist content. It is also a three-hour silent film that can be difficult to fit into screening schedules and challenging for entry-level students who generally have no experience with silent film. But the payoffs for teaching the film are well worth its challenges, and not because it is some kind of "classic" that needs to be appreciated. The film is one of the most effective tools I have for teaching ideological analyses of film, for understanding audience reception, and for considering the ways in which films can "tell" history. Preparation is, of course, key for this film, since students need to be at least somewhat aware of what they are about to see. I tell them that this is a central text in the history of cinema, and that it brought together many of the techniques of narrative filmmaking that Griffith and others had been developing. At this point in the semester, my students have seen a range of silent films, have been taught the concept of the cinema of attractions, and are aware that Hollywood narrative techniques did not spring into existence fully formed. I also warn them that the film is one of the most racist things they will ever see, that it was the subject of protests in 1915, and that the history it purports to tell is an extremely biased one. Some kind of balance is essential to this introduction, which I provide in class beforehand and in a handout that they receive by e-mail before the screening. In general, it is more important that they are prepared to see the film as racist rather than as a formal masterpiece, so that is what I emphasize. All of our screening choices are, on some level, endorsements of a given film–unless we go out of our way to convince the students otherwise. Students naturally assume that there is some lesson to be learned from each film, and in this case that lesson is primarily about racism and not about the history of silent cinema. There is a risk, though, to overemphasizing the film's racism. In a continuing education class I taught at Northwestern some years ago, I had a much more diverse group of students than I have had in any of the more traditional classes I have taught since—a diversity of races, ages, and social backgrounds. Since I was trying to be careful about the racism in the film, and wanted to make it clear that I was not endorsing it, I explained more of the context at the beginning, including [End Page 98] the fact that the film had been used as a recruiting film by the KKK.1 At the end of my introduction, one African American student asked me "why do we have to watch a Klan recruiting film in this class?" Her question got at the heart of my reasons for using this film. I backtracked somewhat, explaining more about its significance as a milestone of narrative, and also about my motivations for providing a lesson in the particularities of early twentieth-century racism and the centrality of mediated images to that racism. She was moderately satisfied with the answer, but there was no escaping the fundamental issue: as an African American woman living in Chicago, she did not need any lessons in racism, least of all from me, a white Canadian ten years her junior. My primary reason for teaching this film—to give students a sense of the depths of American racism—does not apply to every student. Even a...

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of filmic self-reflection and its variations basing on I. Bergmans Wild Strawberries / Smultronstllet, Hour Of The Wolf / Vargtimmen, The Seventh Seal / Det sjunde inseglet. The differentiation between the notions of the authors filmic self-reflection and the characters self-reflection is marked. The author of the article draws out the notion of the helmers self-reflection and the characters one through the examples from other disciplines (philosophy, psychology, literary criticism). The analysis of the authors filmic self-reflection and the characters reflection is carried out basing on the films by I. Bergman and in the context of his subsequent statements. Since Bergman is both director and scriptwriter of majority of his films, he grounds them on his personal experience and emotional baggage. Notwithstanding this fact the scenes of these films are not precise reproduction of the reality. Based on sensual experience they are meticulously developed in its dramatic aspect. The characters self-reflection in the plots of Wild Strawberries, Hour Of The Wolf and The Seventh Seal is considered as a screenwriting tool that could help to expose the versatility of their interior worlds. Three kinds of characters selfreflection are pointed out: retrospective, introspective and prospective. Retrospective self-reflection is described on the example of Wild Strawberries. Permanent reference of the protagonist Isak Borg to the different milestones of his life becomes the principal tool of the plotting. Such kind of film narration gives an opportunity to highlight the emotional state of the hero and to unfold his way of thinking. As an example of introspective self-reflection Hour of The Wolf is analyzed. Here self-reflection of the protagonist also serves as the basis of the story. However Uhan Borg (unlike his namesake Isak Borg) does not do a journey through all his life lived but wanders in the labyrinths of his creative consciousness. Prospective filmic self-reflection is clarified on the example of The Seventh Seal. Fear of upcoming death of Knight Block is personified in the image of Angel of Death. Such the tool allows to reveal the thoughts of the characters about their future, to express their fears and dreams.