ABSTRACT
Nevertheless, Maaret Koskinen has recently drawn attention to the fact that the auteur-focused approach to Bergman has its pitfalls. 3 Not only are there similarities between Bergman’s works and those of his contemporaries: Michelangelo Antonioni’s work has long been compared to Bergman’s, for example, and the comparisons regained traction when both directors died on July 30, 2007. Idiosyncratic Swedish circumstances, typically absent in nonSwedish analyses, also curtail the auteur reading of Bergman. So do cinematic features resulting from technological changes and innovations in the movie industry and from a general Zeitgeist — or in Koskinen’s words, “intertextual patterns conducive to modernist sensitivities in contemporary European culture.” 4
In terms of sound and music in Bergman’s fi lms, there is an even greater temptation to create an all-encompassing, chronological and analytical narrative. Musically, Bergman certainly differs from most of his contemporaries, including Antonioni, although he does seem to connect with Pier Paolo
Pasolini and Andrey Tarkovsky, directors who, like Bergman, utilized Bach in several fi lms, albeit after Bergman’s fi rst unequivocal use of Bach in Through a Glass Darkly (1961).
