The Family Setting

Some dates of birth seem auspicious from the start. Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on Sunday, July 14, 1918. According to Swedish folklore, a child born on Sunday is gifted with second sight, whereas July 14 – Bastille Day – is one of those historical dates that have forever taken on symbolic meaning, signifying rebellion and protest. No astrological prediction could have been more appropriate in Bergman's case. When he burst onto the Swedish theatre and film scene in the early 1940s, two things became immediately clear: He was a remarkably intense and gifted young man drawn both to the stage and the screen, and he also had a vision aimed at penetrating beneath surface reality to reveal a world of metaphysical and depth-psychological dimensions. Above all, he was a rebel spirit who challenged established social and professional conventions. In youthful defiance he once declared:

Such a self-confident outburst belies, however, the fact that Ingmar Bergman's start in life was rather problematic. The middle child in a bourgeois clerical family, he was a sickly boy whose arrival in the world was overshadowed by a crisis in his parents’ marriage. His mother Karin had fallen out of love with her husband, Lutheran pastor Erik Bergman, who showed signs of a nervous condition, which affected family life.