Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, considered one of the greatest directors of all time, was a staunch Nazi and mourned the death of Adolf Hitler. Actor Stellan Skarsgård made this revelation at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, reports Variety.
„He had a strange attitude towards people. Some he did not consider worthy of respect. You could feel it when he started to manipulate others. He was not a good person“, the actor explained.
“He was a Nazi during the war and the only one I know who mourned Hitler”, said Skarsgård.
The actor noted that he does not belittle Bergman's merits, which does not prevent him from calling the director an asshole. “Caravaggio was probably an asshole too, but he painted great“, the actor emphasized.
Ingmar Bergman is not the only great director accused of sympathizing with Nazism. In a viral thread on the social network X, a user nicknamed Uchimama posted a list of directors who allegedly had a fascist past. The list includes such great directors as Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jean Renoir, Yasujiro Ozu, and Jonas Mekas. Bergman also made the list.
The topic outraged Internet users, who noted that most of the directors were on the list completely unjustifiably.
Critics drew attention to the fact that Antonioni, who worked for several months in the 1940s for the magazine Cinema (of which Benito Mussolini's son was the editor-in-chief), was sentenced to death as a member of the Italian Resistance. Visconti was a staunch communist and participated in the Resistance during World War II, for which he was arrested by the Nazis.
Users recalled that before the war Renoir supported the French communists, and with the German advance on France he emigrated to the United States. Pasolini was drafted into the Italian army in the last years of World War II, and his regiment was captured by the Nazis after the capitulation of Italy. In the following decades, the director and poet passionately defended his anti-fascist positions.
The great Japanese director, author of “Tokyo Story“ and “Late Spring“, Yasujiro Ozu was drafted into the Japanese army in 1937 and spent two years in China during the Sino-Japanese War. He was present in Nanjing during the massacre of civilians by his compatriots. More than 200,000 people became victims of the criminal massacre. At that time, Ozu was assigned to an infantry regiment responsible for chemical weapons.
In one of the diaries that the director kept during the war, he compared Chinese soldiers to insects.
The director also spoke about the use of “comfort women“ by his regiment. Ozu and his heirs have since opposed the publication of the director's wartime diaries.
Lithuanian Jonas Mekas was part of an underground movement in the town of Biržai during World War II that supported the Nazi attack on Soviet Lithuania, according to historian Michael Kasper. The future director also wrote for several ultranationalist newspapers that broadcast German propaganda until he emigrated to the United States in 1944. He later became one of the most prominent avant-garde figures in American cinema, but in numerous memoirs and interviews he remained silent about the period of his life before moving abroad.
The author of the post about fascist directors has deleted his posts and apologized.
Following the criticism, user Uchimama deleted the infamous list and apologized to users. "It was extremely irresponsible to lump so many directors under one label, rather than examining the history of each one in more detail. Everyone has rightly noted that some directors have much more horrific pasts than others," he wrote.