Smiles of a Summer Day - looking for Bergman

 

At the end of our garden, across the water, we can see the small island of Faroe, and even though we haven't really explored most of Gotland, we felt tempted to visit it.

Faroe island is known for being rugged and beautiful, but its primary claim to fame is probably that it, for many years, was the home of the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. 

Here he built a marvelous, secluded house, and we decided today to make it our mission to find it - hidden as it is somewhere along the rugged coast.
 
 You can't just ask locals for directions to the place. We tried, but they must have been used to sheltering Bergman from prying eyes and they obviously still feel somewhat protective of their famous, former resident.

The answers were each time along the lines of 'The Bergman house? Gee, I don't know exactly. It is far from here. Very far from here!'

What we could do, was finding an old photo of the house to see how it looks, and then, by following the island coastline on aerial photos, we finally located it - way out on the peninsula of Hammars.

Now we had to get close, but it seemed impossible as most of the peninsula was fenced off behind massive closed gates and concrete barriers with barbed wire - like the perimeter of an abandoned prison camp.

After several tries, we gave up on taking the direct approach and decided to try to hike towards the house by traversing the rocky, somewhat inaccessible shore.

We drove for miles to our chosen insertion point and passed on our way through windswept, verdant landscapes with beautiful old weathered windmills.

Some rocky beaches were lined with row after row of so-called raukars - massive twisted limestone monoliths, which date back several ice ages.

When the dirt road finally ended inside a cool, dank pine forest, we parked, mounted our rucksacks and began hiking towards the sea. 

 Our intrusion did not go unnoticed! Two huge, gray, almost threatening sheep, the size of llamas, followed us at a short distance.

When we stopped, they stopped as well. Maybe they were trained gatekeepers? They looked at us coolly, through the orange horizontal splits in their eyes and we hoped they were just measuring us up.

The walk along the rubbled  coast took about two hours and in the autumn heat and baking sun, we were almost about to give up, when, just after climbing a low fence, we finally saw it: A beautiful, huge, modern house just at the forest edge, facing the wide, desolate beach.

 

Here Bergman and his love, the actress Liv Ullmann, lived their private lives many years ago.

Here he dreamt up some of his spectacular movies - Persona, Shame, The Passion of Anna, and Scenes from a Marriage

It was a wonderful feeling to be standing where Bergman once stood, admiring the exact same vistas, which inspired him so many years ago.

And when we walked all the way back along the coast, towards the car, we were once again followed by the two huge, watchful sheep

 

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 A footnote:

In his later years, before dying in 2007 at the age of 89, Bergman absolutely abhorred any ideas of people eventually creating a Bergman Shrine at Faroe.

In his usual unsentimental recklessness, he demanded all his possessions, properties, furniture, and manuscripts, to be sold at auctions to the highest bidders.

- This is, he wrote in his will, my definite wish and it must not be the subject of any discussion or any emotional uproar.

As he had willed, everything was sold - and the prices were exorbitant.

When the various auctions were finally over, it turned out ALL the properties and most of the furniture and personal effects were bought by one single person - a Norwegian IT-billionaire.

The billionaire was neither a movie - nor a Bergman aficionado, but he knew Lin Ullmann, the daughter of Ingmar and Liv, and on the secret behest of Lin, he bought everything to create a foundation, which to this day  runs the properties as a summer refuge for authors, directors, artists, and other creative persons.

Thus, by a cruel twist of fate, Bergman, who did not want to be consecrated after death, now has a Bergman refuge in his old house, and around the island, there is a Bergman cinema, a Bergman museum, a Bergman library  and every year movie buffs from all over the world assemble at Faroe for the weeklong Bergman tribute festival.

'Sic transit Gloria Mundi'. Not always true!