Nykvist, Sven

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Sven Nykvist

Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006) was among the most widely recognized and influential practitioners of his art in film history, with a distinctive style that added impact to Swedish art house classics and American movie hits alike.

Nykvist's camera work was particularly identified with the films of Ingmar Bergman (1919-2007), and he developed his style largely in the films he made with that legendary Swedish director. His style depended heavily on natural light, avoiding the use of complicated studio lighting effects, and he was a master at using ambient surroundings to deepen the psychological content of a scene. Often Nykvist's brilliance lay merely in his ability to find simple solutions. “The gaffers we work with can't believe how few lights Sven uses,” American television commercial director Cal Bernstein, for whom Nykvist often worked, told Robert Goldrich of Back Stage. “Sven looks at the trucks, asks ‘What do you need all these lights for?’ … He puts one light here, one there and he's ready to go.” Bernstein also recalled a cinematographer friend who became obsessed with figuring out how Nykvist had set up the lighting in a particular scene in the film Sacrifice. Finally Bernstein agreed to ask Nykvist how he had done it, and Nykvist replied that he had lit the scene entirely with natural light, using no electric lights at all.

Saw Parents at Four-Year Intervals

Sven Vilhem Nykvist was born in Moheda, in Sweden's Smaland province, on December 3, 1922. His parents, Natanael and Gerda Nykvist, were Lutheran missionaries working in the Belgian Congo (now the Republic of Congo). They feared that their son would contract malaria in Africa, so they boarded him with relatives or in a home he shared with the children of other missionaries. As a child he lived with them for only one year of every five. Nykvist's parents sent word to his guardians that he was forbidden to go to the movies, which they considered sinful. The ban may have intensified the young Nykvist's interest in the burgeoning art form, and Nykvist's father also influenced his son in another way, as he was an avid photographer of African wildlife. Nykvist acquired a box camera and then a small movie camera, which he used to have himself filmed by a friend while practicing the high jump with his school track team.

There was no film school in Sweden in the late 1930s, so Nykvist enrolled at the Municipal School for Photographers in Stockholm. He landed his first film job at age 19, in 1941, as an assistant cameraman with Sandrews, the large Swedish studio that later issued many of Ingmar Bergman's films, working on a film called The Poor Millionaire. Unsure of his career choice, he went to visit his parents in Africa. While he was there, he shot footage for a documentary called In the Footsteps of the Witch Doctor. Back in Sweden, studio owner Anders Sandrew offered to acquire the documentary and distribute it. Nykvist then became an apprentice with Julius Jaenzon, the top Swedish cinematographer of the time, and he worked through the 1940s on a series of films that are now mostly forgotten. He never had any formal education in film, but he broadened his cinematic experience by working for a year as a cameraman at the Cinecittà studio in Rome, Italy.

Serious Swedish filmmakers of the time were often influenced by the Expressionist style, which featured heavy shadows, dramatic lighting and makeup, and sometimes surreal effects. As Nykvist gained greater experience, he began to win assignments with prominent directors such as Alf Sjöstrom. His path crossed that of Ingmar Bergman when he worked as a cinematographer filming the interior quarters of a circus troupe for Bergman's expressionist 1953 film Sawdust and Tinsel. At the time, Bergman was still working primarily with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, but according to London's Daily Telegraph he remarked to Nykvist, “I think we should work a whole life together.”

Nykvist continued to find his skills in demand in Sweden, working on seven films during the year 1956 alone. His breakthrough came in 1960 when Bergman became dissatisfied with Fischer's harsh style, on display in such stark classics as The Seventh Seal, and turned to Nykvist as he prepared to film the naturalistic revenge fable The Virgin Spring. From then on, Nykvist would work as director of photography on all of Bergman's films and television productions, except for his final film, Saraband (2003). The two men, who shared the experience of growing up in families headed by remote religious figures, worked so closely together that in many films it is difficult to tell where Bergman's inspiration ends and Nykvist's begins.

Observed Light Conditions Closely

Among the first films on which Nykvist worked with Bergman were a bleak trilogy dealing with the theme of loss of religious faith. One of the films, Winter Light (1963), dealt with a minister in a northern Swedish town, where there might be only three hours of daylight in winter. Nykvist remarked to Bergman that there would not be a great variety of lighting conditions on location, but Bergman replied, as Nykvist recalled in an American Film Institute seminar quoted on the Fathom Web site, “That's what you think. Let's go to the churches in northern Sweden.” The pair spent weeks in the frozen Swedish north, “looking at the light during the three hours between eleven and two o'clock. We saw that it changed a lot, and it helped him in writing the script because he always writes the moods.”

Thus Bergman helped Nykvist develop his famed sensitivity to natural light. Likewise, Nykvist helped devise several of Bergman's most famous cinematic images. One came in Persona (1966), a study of schizophrenia in which the personalities of two women seem to merge at one point in the film. “Nykvist,” noted the Daily Telegraph, “illustrated this in a single shot that can haunt the viewer for days afterwards. He took the left half of one girl's face and the right half of the other's and spliced them together to form a composite image that was spookily non-human.” Nykvist worked with other Swedish filmmakers during the 1960s, such as Mai Zetterling on Loving Couples in 1964, but it was his work with Bergman that began to bring his name before international audiences.

All these films were in black and white, and Nykvist and Bergman approached the use of color gingerly after the failure of their comedy Now About These Women, shot “according to the Kodak rule book,” as Nykvist said, according to the Daily Telegraph. When Nykvist did begin to work in color, however, he achieved some of his most brilliant successes. Bergman's Cries and Whispers (1972), a grim drama about a woman dying of cancer, featured powerful scenes bathed in the color red. Again Nykvist and Bergman spent several weeks observing the lighting in the house where the film was made. The amount of planning might seem excessive, but as Nykvist observed to Goldrich, “Everything [in production] goes much quicker. We finished ‘Cries And Whispers’ in 42 days.” The film brought Nykvist his first Academy Award for Best Cinematography. Other Bergman films of the 1970s, including Autumn Sonata and the made-for-television Scenes from a Marriage also brought Nykvist critical acclaim.

When he began to work in the United States, Nykvist had to make several adjustments to his methods. Leisurely preproduction of the kind he enjoyed with Bergman was impossible. And, although it was a relaxation in union regulations that allowed U.S. directors to hire Nykvist as director of photography in the first place, he was still not allowed to actually operate the camera himself, as that still had to be done by a union employee. Nykvist's first American film was Pretty Baby, made in New Orleans by French director Louis Malle; despite the new restrictions under which he worked, the firm was critically acclaimed.

Talents Stimulated Demand

Nykvist found his services in great demand in the 1980s. Bergman's output was slowing, but Nykvist worked on two of the great films of the director's later years, Fanny and Alexander (which earned Nykvist his second Oscar in 1982) and After the Rehearsal (1984). In the United States, Nykvist served as cinematographer for various high profile films, including a 1981 remake of the film noir thriller The Postman Always Rings Twice, a 1988 film adaptation of Milan Kundera's Czech novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and several films by director Woody Allen, including Crimes and Misdemeanors.) Nykvist's marriage to his wife, Ulla, which began in 1952, dissolved in 1968; it produced two sons, one of whom committed suicide. His surviving son, Carl-Gustav Nykvist, became a film director and in 2000 made a documentary, Light Keeps Me Company, about his father's work.

Even after he became widely recognized as one of the greatest cinematographers alive, Nykvist continued to work on television commercials periodically. “When you make too long a stop in between features, you can lose touch,” he explained to Goldrich. “A cinematographer is like a pianist, he has to train always. Otherwise you get like a boxer who hasn't been able to box for a long time. Commercials can help keep you sharp.” He also set down his ideas on cinematography in a series of articles for American Cinematographer, France's Positif, and other magazines in the late 1980s.

Nykvist remained active almost until the end of his long life, and he was associated with several major hits in the 1990s, among them the 1993 comedy Sleepless in Seattle. He worked closely with Swedish directors after Bergman, making What's Eating Gilbert Grape? and other films with Lasse Hallström and Kristin Lavransdotter with actressturned-director Liv Ullmann. Cinematography, like other aspects of filmmaking, was increasingly impacted by computer technology in the 1990s, but Nykvist had little interest in reinventing his art in old age. “Computers are now creating new traditions of cinematography, but I'm frankly happy I was born at the time I was and was able to experiment as I have done,” he told Marlene Edmunds of Variety. In 1996 he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Cinematographers. Returning to work with Woody Allen on Celebrity in 1998, he began to show signs of aphasia, a form of dementia, while working on the film. The last of his approximately 120 films was Curtain Call (1999). Nykvist died in Stockholm on September 20, 2006.