It is important first of all to note that this chapter will not make the claim that Ingmar Bergman was an environmental activist. The reference to ecocriticism in the title refers not to any political engagement on Bergman’s part, but rather to the way in which his films create natural spaces and reflect on the non-human environment and its relation to the human. In particular, the focus is on one aspect of the non-human environment, a phenomenon that appears in almost all of his films, occasionally in obtrusive ways: the presence of birds. Looking closely at the representation of birds and their song in Bergman offers insight into the way his films frame the relationship between humans and the non-human environment, but also how they create a space for the human position within nature. Birds in Bergman’s films sometimes seem to be ‘merely’ part of a film’s ambience, a concept that deserves more detailed exploration, since it has special significance both in ecocriticism and in cinema. It might be argued that the ambient in a cinematic mise-en-scène illuminates a film’s ecological position.

There are other moments in Bergman’s films in which birds function not as creatures in their own right (albeit singing anonymously in the ambient background), but as part of a human symbolic language. The raven or the crow or the owl signifies disaster or death; the cuckoo sings prophetically of the potential for love or loss of love; and the song thrush (called ‘night watch’ in one Swedish dialect) sings in consonance with the humans in a film who sit and wait in the darkness before dawn. This human appropriation of birds and their song is the kind of practice that motivates Jacques Derrida’s cry of protest in his The Animal that Therefore I Am, when he insists on pointing not to a symbolic cat, but the cat as subject, as individual: ‘No, no, my cat, the cat that looks at me in my bedroom or bathroom, this cat that is perhaps not “my cat”, or “my pussycat”, does not appear here to represent, like an ambassador, the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race.’¹ But though ‘the immense symbolic responsibility’ which humans impose upon animals seems to divest them of their singularity and agency, it also hints at the degree to which human translation of the world depends on human enmeshment and encounters with animals. The drive to capture animals within the net of human meaning points to a desire to draw the unknowable (the mind or the life of the animal) into a safer context of human meaning and comprehension. Thus the symbolic use of animals unveils the fact of our unknowing, but also mirrors the fact of the unknowable animal within us; humans, too, are animals, and tend to see animals as projections of our own animal essence, our desires, our fears, our prophetic suspicions. In Bergman’s film Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf, 1968) the shadow figure of the demonic ‘Birdman’ encapsulates that projected unconscious image of the animal within, the figuration that has obsessed humans since prehistoric times.

In Bergman’s film settings we hear birds call or sing or see them swimming or flying as they do in the natural environments that define the films’ geographic space: various regions of Sweden, from the southern coast to the Stockholm archipelago. There are rooks, finches, jackdaws, gulls, swans, crows, magpies, roosters, thrushes, tits, cuckoos, owls, ravens, and many more, some visible on the screen, some only audible on the soundtrack. Because the birds we see and hear in Bergman’s films define the place and time of the film’s action—Sweden in the seasons of the year in which the film narratives are set—one can at first easily imagine the birds as mere elements of the film’s ambience. But there is a slippage between what we might call a representation of birds as ambient nature and the use of birds as meaningful signs; Bergman’s birds migrate easily from the natural realm to the human realm of signifiers. The sounds or appearances of birds in these instances are often marked in some explicit way that asks to be interpreted. Bergman’s strategic use of birds and their calls reveals a thorough acquaintance with the meaning of birds as it is understood in Swedish folklore, for instance, which raises the question of how much a non-Swedish audience will comprehend. And beyond folkloric and other symbolic uses of bird imagery, there is an oblique reference to birds through Bergman’s repeated use of the surname Vogler across several films and theatre pieces. ‘Vogler’ is a rare name in Sweden; it originates in German-speaking lands, where the name denotes an old profession: ‘bird-catcher’, which is the profession of Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, an opera filmed and cited by Bergman. In Hour of the Wolf, Bergman creates an odd link between the demonic Birdman figure and Mozart’s comic Papageno, which calls for further interpretation and relates to Bergman’s ornithology more generally.

The first area of contact with birds is the natural realm, which invites a consideration of the concept of ambience in both cinema and ecocriticism. In cinema, I will focus on the concept of ambient sound, for it is in the audial realm that the birds of Bergman are most interesting. A straightforward definition appears on the website mediacollege.com: ‘Ambient sound (also known as ambience, atmosphere, atmos, or background noise) means the background sounds which are present in a scene or location’.² But what is the sound doing there? One scholar of film sound, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, begins to explain: ‘In film and media production, ambient sound is a standard term that denotes the site-specific background sound component providing locational atmospheres and spatial information of public places.’³ In his view, ambient sounds ‘sculpt the presence of a site by producing an embodied experience of the site’ and ‘inject life and substance not only to what we see on the cinematic screen but also to the off-screen story-world’.⁴ This is true because ambient sound can provide continuity in screened space, linking one location with another, and also reference to space that is seen neither by the film audience nor by the characters in the film, as in the space birds occupy in trees, in bushes, or in the air. In the cinematic space, the invisible overhead presence of birds (signalled by their song and calls on the soundtrack) carves out the overhead space of the world, the one occupied by unseen observers: the birds, a potential deity, and, by association, the film’s viewers.

The ecocritical idea of ambience finds full and complex expression in Timothy Morton’s 2007 book, Ecology without Nature, where he describes a ‘poetics of ambience’ that is the distinguishing feature of what he calls ‘ecomimesis’. To put it simply, ecomimesis is a representational practice in literature and art which attempts to recreate the experience of nature, as when Wordsworth writes about daffodils or a film incorporates images, light, and sound to give the impression of a particular place or time in nature. Ecomimesis, writes Morton, ‘involves a poetics of ambience. Ambience denotes a sense of a circumambient, or surrounding, world. It suggests something material and physical, though somewhat intangible, as if space itself had a material aspect […] Ambience, that which surrounds on both sides, can refer to the margins of a page, the silence before and after music, the frame and walls around a picture.’⁵ Here the consonance between Morton’s definition and Chattopadhyay’s unpacking of ambience in cinema comes into view. Morton goes on to use the term ‘rendering’ to describe how ecomimesis is achieved, drawing on cinema as his example: ‘First and foremost, ambient poetics is a rendering. I mean this in the sense developed by the concrete music composer and cinema theorist Michel Chion. Rendering is technically what visual- and sonic-effect artists do to a film to generate a more or less consistent sense of atmosphere or world.’⁶ So far, Morton’s ecocritical definition of ambience does not differ significantly from the cinematic definition. Both ambient film sound and ambient poetics aim to conjure up an embodied world. But Morton goes on to explore the implications and challenges of creating what he calls ‘a copy without an original’—that is, a representation of the natural world which is in fact a constructed aesthetic object, a construction that pretends to some degree to be natural.⁷

Ambience in film is of course not truly ambient (that is, outside the margins of the narrative), but it is part of the construction. That this is true is beautifully illustrated in Alexis Luko’s book on music and sound in Bergman’s films when she cites the working notes on a conversation between Bergman and a sound engineer who are putting together the rendering for Aus dem Leben der Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes, 1980):

The attention to detail as the two men go over a sequence frame by frame highlights the degree to which the visual and audial dimensions of film are constructed, but what is striking about this particular exchange is Bergman’s interest in including birds. Ultimately the completed film contains no birdsong at all, which is unusual among Bergman’s works, but here is the evidence that if birdsong is in a film, it is not necessarily because birds happened to be singing in the background during filming: someone decided to put it there. Because ambience in film is indeed a construct, film has to use what Morton, borrowing from Derrida, calls a ‘re-mark’ in order to try to show the viewer what is significant both in the visual frame and on the soundtrack; what are we really supposed to listen to and attend to in order to derive meaning, and what is merely ambient? Focusing on an object or face, lighting or camera tracking to pick out part of the screen, bringing a sound to the fore, making it part of the narrative—all of these are re-marking strategies. The answer to the question ‘what is merely ambient?’ is that nothing is merely ambient; everything carries some type of significance because it is all part of the rendering. What is in the background has the potential to be brought to the foreground, but then has to be pressed out to the margins by the narrative focus. ‘Ambience’, says Morton, ‘can only be glimpsed as a fleeting, dissolving presence that flickers across our perception and cannot be brought front and center.’⁹ Sometimes it is true, as Morton says, that the ambient sound only flickers briefly at the corner of our attention. Other times we are made more aware of what is supposedly in the background, as a sound is re-marked.

This is what happens in some of Bergman’s bird sequences. Morton makes the argument for a re-marking, an awareness of the ambient as a kind of moral imperative. He declares that we must stop thinking of the ambient as something outside our margins. Quoting Bruno Latour, who insists that we are obliged now, in this moment of ecological crisis, ‘to internalize the environment that [has been viewed] up to now as another world’,¹⁰ Morton argues for the re-marking of the ambient as a general practice. It is by re-marking the margins, the ambient background, as significant, at least for a flickering moment, that we become aware that the ambient carries a critical message.

We see an example of the re-marking of the ambient in Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring, 1960). The ambience is a Swedish summer night; the narrative focus is a father’s preparation to avenge his daughter’s murder. In the background we hear the persistent voice of a song thrush (taltrast in Swedish). That bird’s call continues from the shot of the vengeful father (played by Max von Sydow) within the walls of his homestead through a brief cut to his anxious foster daughter, and it persists as he approaches a slender birch tree, which he pulls down in order to cut branches for a purifying sauna bath. Even as he falls on the tree, bringing it crashing to the ground, we can hear the voice of the bird clearly over the loud swish of moving branches and his hoarse breathing. The viewer’s primary attention at that moment is in all likelihood riveted to the tall blond man and the slender white tree which, in its vulnerable isolated position against the horizon, calls to mind an association with the murdered daughter. Like the birdsong, the tree seems re-marked. The narrative at this point is intense; the father has just discovered that his daughter’s murderers unwittingly arrived at his house and spent the night. At the same time, the thrush’s call is persistent and striking, acting as a link between visual scenes, but also flickering into our attention, in part owing to the silence of the humans. Though there may well have been a thrush singing on site (we catch a brief glimpse of a flying bird on the screen), the song is deliberately rendered on the soundtrack to be strongly perceptible, in a way that feels obtrusive and insistent. Because we know that ambient sound is engineered, we are placed in the position of having to determine its significance if we can.

Unlike some of the birds Bergman engages in his films, the song thrush does not have a strong folkloric identity; the bird is migratory, and so its presence on the soundtrack indicates that the time of year must be spring or summer, which we already know through the narrative of the film, though the bird’s voice can add to the sense of embodiment within time and space. A descriptive dialect name for the taltrast is nattvaka, or night watch, because the bird sings through the night. Though to non-Swedish eyes this sequence might appear to be filmed during the day, it is actually a light summer’s night. Following his purifying sauna, the father will keep a vigil together with the girl’s mother; they sit watching the sleeping murderers in a remarkable performance of patience, waiting for true day to come so that the father can exact his revenge when the murderers are fully awake. But a viewer’s knowledge of bird lore would have to be rather extensive to associate the night watch bird with the vigil of the parents. Another, easier reading of the bird’s persistent song would be its lack of correspondence to the narrative action that takes place on screen. There is a rift between the continuous vibrant presence of an active non-human world and the desperate crisis of the human figures; the bird does not know or care about the girl’s murder, and non-human life continues as usual, with the human drama at the margins of the bird’s world. In this way the film signals the relative insignificance of the human crisis when nested within the larger natural narrative.

The opening credit sequence of Sommarlek (Summer Interlude, 1951) is backed by both symphonic music and a birdsong medley, with a visual focus on a flowering landscape and special attention to a prästkrage (oxeye daisy), a flower associated with Midsummer. Summer light characterizes the flashback scenes of the film, which will stand in stark contrast to the autumnal atmosphere created through dark forest, keening wind, and crow calls that mark the present time of narration. The defining sound of the summer flashback sequences is the cuckoo’s call; in Sweden the cuckoo is present only during the summer. A traditional practice is to go into the forest on Ascension Day (which normally falls in May) with a picnic in order to listen for the cuckoo’s call, which was believed to prophesy marriage or a good or poor fortune in the year to come. This particular re-mark (that is, that the cuckoo has prophetic significance, particularly for a Swedish viewer) might be easy to discount as mere ambience, except that Summer Interlude offers additional (and more re-marked) examples of prophecy delivered by birds. One example occurs as the protagonist Marie arrives on the island to confront her past and encounters a woman who, in another scene in the film, is said to embody death. The ambience is autumn, with bare branches and a cold wind blowing on the soundtrack; but again this bird’s voice, even more than the thrush in The Virgin Spring, is insistently re-marked, and this time the calling bird is visible, the visual focus of the frame. A flock of crows is called a murder of crows in English; similarly, in Sweden crows were believed to prophesy death.

Further, in the sequence before the one in which the young male protagonist, Marie’s lover Henrik, dies in an accident, Marie hears the call of a bird and is terrified. At first the mood between the two young people is cheerful and flirtatious, but then suddenly they hear the eerie call of an unseen bird, and Marie cries out ‘God, how horrid! What was that?’ Henrik answers, ‘That was an owl; don’t you recognize it?’ ‘God, how horrid!’ she repeats. The Swedish word she uses, ‘otäck’, also carries some connotation of the uncanny or weird. ‘Did it scare you?’ asks Henrik. ‘I don’t know’, she says. ‘I just feel as if I want to cry tonight.’ The bird the script identifies is a berguv, a horned owl. According to Swedish folk tradition, this owl’s call foretold storms and accidents to such a degree that children were forbidden to imitate it.¹¹ And indeed, the call occurs shortly before Henrik’s accident. The call on the soundtrack, however, does not belong to a horned owl; it is the voice of a kattuggla or brown owl, whose cry, again according to Swedish folk legend, foretells death if it is heard in the vicinity of a house.¹² It is difficult to know whether the film means to foreground the berguv (in the script) or the kattuggla (on the soundtrack), but essentially the re-mark remains the same: impending disaster linked to the voice of an owl.

In Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), elderly protagonist Isak Borg’s second nightmare opens with a remarkable flight of shrieking birds. Appearing at first superimposed on Isak’s head, as if they represent his dark and overwhelming thoughts, the flock of screeching jackdaws takes flight as the first transitional image from waking into dreaming. Subsequently in the dream the object of Isak’s affection appears, his cousin Sara, comforting a baby with the words, ‘Don’t be frightened of the jackdaws.’ And indeed jackdaws, when appearing in flocks, foretell war or epidemics, particularly the plague. But in this context, they do not obviously possess that folkloric function only. Instead they indicate how what seems to be merely ambient in the natural, waking world (a flock of birds) is in fact a phenomenon from the natural world, an ambient phenomenon, which has been re-marked in Isak’s dream and attached to a meaning in Isak’s dreaming consciousness. In other words, jackdaws are real, live beings that behave precisely in the way they were recorded for the film. But within the film’s narrative they are also an interior projection of Isak’s troubled mind. (Students in courses I have taught have misidentified the jackdaws as bats, because they associate this type of terrifying flock of creatures with bat symbolism.) Here is a way that the environment has been internalized, though perhaps not as Bruno Latour intended.

Another potential confusion of ontological space in connection with nature and birdsong occurs in Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957). When Jof, a medieval performer, leaves his wagon after waking one beautiful summer morning, he apparently sees a vision of the Virgin Mary, holding the toddler Jesus’s hands as he learns to walk. Jof watches this action unfold in a sunlit glade a little distance from his wagon; before the Virgin appears, there is a medley of summer birdsong on the soundtrack. That birdsong continues as an extradiegetic music joins in, signalling the beginning of the vision. The birdsong continues, clearly audible along with the music, until Jof rubs his eyes, and both the Virgin and the music disappear. But the birdsong remains. As discussed earlier in the explanation of ambient sound, the birdsong serves to create a continuity of time and space, suggesting that the vision Jof experiences does not interrupt the sensory experiences of the natural world, but is in harmony with them. ‘Vision music’ and birdsong occupy the same summer space in the film.

In contrast, the examples cited from Wild Strawberries and Summer Interlude, in which birds prophesy death, point towards a demonic image of birdlife; but one might even argue that the supposedly benign representations of birds and birdsongs retain something demonic, or at least uncanny. Theodor Adorno, in his aesthetic theory, presents an unusual reading of birdsong: ‘The song of birds is found beautiful by everyone; no feeling person in whom something of the European tradition survives fails to be moved by the sound of a robin after a rain shower. Yet something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed.’¹³ Adorno’s (admittedly Eurocentric) argument seems to be staked in an understanding of birdsong as something essentially mechanical. He notes that unlike human song, which is produced by an individual as an act of volition, birdsong is not an act of will but a kind of mechanical response that is provoked by environmental conditions, such as the need to protect territory or find a mate.

Further, while the songs of some birds, such as the nightingale, the European blackbird, the mockingbird, and the lyrebird show amazing variation, the reason that we are able to identify species via call or song is that the sound is not unique to individuals, nor does it vary significantly. Adorno’s argument runs counter to the argument implicit in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale ‘The Nightingale’, in which a ‘real’ nightingale vanquishes a mechanical nightingale in a kind of contest of song because the true nightingale can vary his repertoire, while the machine repeats the same tones again and again. Perhaps more importantly, Adorno’s representation of birdsong runs counter to the traditional association of ‘birds’ and ‘freedom’. The forced repetition of the same songs again and again emphasizes nature’s lack of subjective will, the deadness or machine aspect of nature. One might read the song of the thrush in The Virgin Spring in that way, or the endless repetition of the cuckoo at the beginning of Summer Interlude, a repetition that was no doubt an inspiration for the cuckoo clock.

In Hour of the Wolf, the artist protagonist Johan Borg shows his frightened wife a notebook in which he has drawn the demonic figures that plague him. We cannot see the notebook, but we see him point to an image, saying, ‘And here: he’s the worst of the lot …. I call him the birdman. I don’t know if it’s a real beak or only a mask. He’s so strangely quick and he’s related to Papageno of The Magic Flute.’ Later in the film we see an encounter between the artist and the demon, a man who turns into a huge raven or crow; and at the film’s conclusion, the birdman again transforms into his bird shape, attacking Johan violently. It seems easy at first glance to relate the birdman to the demonic and violent flocks in Hitchcock’s The Birds, which had come out five years earlier in 1963. But something more is happening in Bergman’s evocation of birds. In Alexis Luko’s book on Bergman, one chapter is entitled ‘Listening to Bergman’s Monsters’. In particular, Luko focuses on a concept developed by Michel Chion, the acoustic being, an entity that is heard but usually shrouded from view.¹⁴ Chion’s argument is that the sound of the unseen monster in films creates a special kind of horror. This concept can be extended to include birdsong and the calls of birds, imagining that while certain kinds of bird voices and ambient soundscapes are meant to be beautiful and evoke associations with such positive emotions as love and happiness, Bergman’s birds, even in apparently positive renderings of environmental ambience, have the potential to turn into acoustic beings, unseen horrors, representations of soullessness or, as Adorno might have it, enmeshment, imprisonment. The dual possibility of the bird finds expression in Johan Borg’s odd link between the demonic birdman and Papageno, the comic birdcatcher of Mozart’s Magic Flute. How can the birdman be demonic bird and birdcatcher, Vogelfänger, Vogler, all at once?

As noted earlier, Bergman employs the surname Vogler for a number of his characters in several films. Albert Emanuel, Amanda, and Granny Vogler appear in Ansiktet (The Magician, 1958) as the leaders of a troupe of wandering magicians; Elisabet Vogler is the protagonist who falls mute in the midst of a theatre performance in Bergman’s Persona (1966); Veronica Vogler is the demonic lover of the artist-protagonist in Hour of the Wolf; veteran Bergman actor Erland Josephson plays both Henrik Vogler, a theatre director in Efter repetitionen (After the Rehearsal, 1984), and Osvald Vogler, a mental patient in Larmar och gör sig till (In the Presence of a Clown, 1997). A characteristic of enmeshment or imprisonment governs several of these figures in significant ways: both Emanuel Vogler and Elisabet Vogler have elected to be (or have been forced to be) mute. This would make them voiceless mutes, the counterpart to Chion’s acoustic beings: rather than being heard but not seen, they are seen but do not speak. Luko proposes that both the acoustic beings and the voiceless mutes retain the power of surveillance and observation, which is certainly one of the uncanny things about both birds as acoustic beings and Voglers as voiceless mutes. Veronica Vogler is trapped within an erotic fantasy with Johan Borg; Henrik Vogler is trapped within the structure of repetition that governs both the theatre’s endless rehearsals and performances and his relationships with women. Osvald Vogler is insane, confined at one point in an asylum. The Voglers, then, cannot be associated with the free flight of birds or Papageno’s easy seduction and capture of birds; they themselves reside within cages.

For a key to understanding Bergman’s involvement with birds, we can return briefly to Morton, who at one point seemed to be saying that all we needed was to internalize the ambient world. He writes, ‘If we could not merely figure out but actually experience the fact that we were embedded in our world, then we would be less likely to destroy it.’¹⁵ But being embedded in the world is not a blissful experience of one-ness with the universe, not in Morton’s view and not in Bergman’s, either. As Morton notes, ‘The ecological thought, the thinking of interconnectedness, has a dark side embodied not in a hippie aesthetic of life over death, or a sadistic-sentimental Bambification of sentient beings, but in a “goth” assertion of the contingent and necessarily queer idea that we want to stay with a dying world: dark ecology.’¹⁶ Bergman’s recurrent image of entrapment, his use of birds and birdsong as prophecies of death or as voices indifferent to the human sphere or as acoustic beings could be said to reflect a kind of dark ecology; and as in Morton’s assessment of dark ecology there is a duality there, a queer representation of both beauty and terror. In an interview in 2001, Bergman said, ‘I normally am afraid of birds.’¹⁷ This is a quotation that some have linked to the negative representation of the members of the Vogler family. But he goes on to say that he had a dream of ‘a large, shimmering green bird’, which he took to be a message from his late wife, Ingrid. The beauty of birds, as Adorno writes, is undeniable; but the uncanniness of birds, their power of surveillance, their potential to turn into the monstrous beings of Hour of the Wolf or Hitchcock’s Birds, is undeniable as well. The return of the dead as birds, as messengers from the realm of the dead, can be associated with Morton’s notion of dark ecology, the desire to stay with a dying world. In Bergman’s films, the birds embody both the beauty of that world and its horrors.