Gunnar Björnstrand brings a welcome sardonic edge to Bergman’s serious men. We especially value his Jöns in The Seventh Seal, whose humour and individuality keep us interested in the people as well as their questions.
Fi1m perspective
In The Seventh Seal (1957), Gunnar Björnstrand’s Jöns helps keep the knight’s distress from being the only thing that matters. The cynical squire belongs to a frightened world in which people still have use for a joke and one another’s company. Björnstrand gives him enough individuality that we remain interested in the man even when we can see his place in Bergman’s morality play. The broad humour is welcome, and Bergman does not need to step outside that world to find it.
His early film work was mainly in comedy. The dramatic roles with Bergman developed from 1953 onwards, while Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), in which he plays Fredrik Egerman, continued the lighter side of their work. Wild Strawberries (1957), with Björnstrand as Evald, belongs beside The Seventh Seal in that move towards more dramatic material. We would keep the comedies in view when considering the cynical, intellectual and authoritarian men he so often played.
In The Seventh Seal, his work alongside Nils Poppe’s Jof and Bibi Andersson’s Mia gives Bergman several ways to draw our attention away from the knight’s arguments. We found their companionship unexpectedly moving, because the cast makes us care about these people beyond the questions they have been written to represent. The dialogue does sometimes labour those questions; a good cast cannot make every exchange equally rewarding. Björnstrand keeps Jöns recognisable as a person, which is especially useful when the writing grows insistent.
Winter Light (1963) places him at the centre as Tomas Ericsson, a troubled priest: a useful counterpoint to Jöns’s cynicism. That is a natural next stop, but we would not let it obscure the comedy. His final film, Fanny and Alexander (1982), also belongs to the Bergman collaboration that crossed both kinds of work. Begin with Jöns, then try Fredrik Egerman in Smiles of a Summer Night; there is no need to make the acquaintance entirely solemn.
Biography
Gunnar Björnstrand was a Swedish actor. Born in Stockholm, he trained at the Royal Dramatic Theatre School and began appearing in theatre, film and radio in the early 1930s.
He is best known for his long collaboration with director Ingmar Bergman, appearing in more than a dozen of the director’s films from the 1940s onwards. His roles include Jöns in The Seventh Seal (1957), Evald in Wild Strawberries (1957), Fredrik Egerman in Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), David in Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Tomas Ericsson in Winter Light (1963), Herr Vogler in Persona (1966), Paul in Autumn Sonata (1978) and Filip Landahl in Fanny and Alexander (1982). He also worked extensively in Swedish theatre and received the Ingmar Bergman Award in 1983.
