To celebrate Film4’s Ingmar Bergman season starting tonight, Monday July 4th, I decided to use the director as the first subject in this new regular weekly series of beginners guides for WhatCulture!

Ingmar Bergman is one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema. Thematically and stylistically his work lives on through various filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola, Pedro Almodovar and most famously Woody Allen. He began his career in his home country of Sweden, where he worked as a script writer for a production company in the early 1940’s. The company asked him to watch a regular dose of American films and copy the Hollywood way of script writing but Bergman, a young man with ambitions far greater than those around him, grew frustrated as the movies he had to watch all seemed fake and superficial to him. The narrative structures too linear, the characters...