Bergman and the Switching Off of Lights

Abstract

One of the main reasons for Ingmar Bergman’s immense popularity among art-house enthusiasts during the late 1950s and early 1960s was because a fear of collective death overshadowed society, and Western society in particular. The hydrogen bomb was detonated on Bikini atoll in 1954, and protest marches in the United States and Britain indicated the degree of anxiety felt about the prospect of nuclear annihilation (Bergman [1963] specifically talks about this danger in Winter Light). The Cold War came to a peak in 1962, when the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev dispatched nuclear missile launchers to Cuba.