Battlefield family

Abstract

While the legacy of August Strindberg has been very much in the forefront of Ingmar Bergman studies, the influence of Henrik Ibsen on Bergman’s work has yet to be fully acknowledged. This chapter demonstrates Ibsen’s influence on Bergman’s TV dramas in the early 1970s, exemplifying with an in-depth analysis of his production of The Lie (Reservatet, 1970) for Swedish television. It is one of Bergman’s least-studied works and also one of his most overtly feminist ones, contradicting the ideological appropriation of Bergman by some of his critics as a bourgeois director. The Lie merges elements of his own artistry with those of August Strindberg’s play The Father (Fadren, 1887), Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879), and The Wild Duck (Vildanden, 1884) and contemporary melodrama in order to reach a mass audience with his portrayal of a middle-aged bourgeois couple in marital crisis. By reversing the gender roles, he gives the drama a gender twist that, in the spirit of Ibsen, truly deconstructs the idealization of women while ironically undercutting patriarchal ideology. In accomplishing that, it points forward to the dramatic strategies of his later TV productions, especially Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap, 1973). The Lie was a huge success at the time of its release, first in Sweden and then in the European Broadcasting Union’s 1970 Eurovision exchange of TV plays. At the dawn of second-wave feminism, it reached an audience of approximately 50 million on TV, thus becoming one of Bergman’s politically most influential works.