Marc Gervais, a leading authority on Ingmar Bergman, got quite the shock Monday evening on his return from a brief vacation in Maine. News of Bergman's death hit the airwaves Monday morning but the Montreal writer and scholar didn't learn of the passing of the iconic Swedish film auteur until he arrived home to a slew of telephone messages that night after driving home from Goose Rocks with his brother and wife.
"It was a blow, like (a death in the) family," said Gervais, on the phone Tuesday. "I felt like some of my past was dying. He was so central to my life."
Gervais, a Jesuit priest, has been obsessed with Bergman ever since he caught a double bill of Bergman's atypical romantic comedy Smiles of a Summer Night and the wild Biblical allegory The Seventh Seal while studying in Washington, D.C., in the late 1950s. He hasn't stopped analyzing, teaching and writing about the Scandinavian film master ever since.
During his four-decade tenure as a communications professor at Concordia University, Gervais has turned several generations of students on to the weighty charms of such Bergman films as Persona, Scenes from a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander. In 1999, McGill-Queen's University Press published Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet, Gervais's thoughtful humanist/Christian re-assessment of Bergman's oeuvre.
Gervais was one of the first non-Swedish writers to be granted a full-length interview with the famously press-shy director, and that chat in Stockholm in the late '60s - which aired on CBC Radio at the time - remains one of the highlights of Gervais's lengthy career as a film journalist.
Bergman was raised by a strict Lutheran clergyman father, and Gervais believes that dour strain of Lutheranism was central to Bergman's films. But for reasons even Gervais doesn't fully comprehend, there was, for quite some time, a number of what he calls "Bergman priests" scattered across the globe. These Catholic men of the cloth were all fascinated by the religious themes at the core of so many Bergman flicks.
"I was the official Bergman priest for Canada," Gervais said.
Original article (here)
No comments:
Post a Comment