Image My Life in Film
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My Life in Film
IngmarBergman
Translated from the Swedish by
Marianne Ruuth
Introduction by
Woody Allen
Arcade Publishing • New York
Copyright © 1990, 2011 by Cinematograph AB
Translation copyright © 1994, 2011 by Arcade Publishing, Inc.
Introduction © 2007, 2011 by Woody Allen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-041-5
Printed in China
My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles a critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.
Workbook, July 19, 1964
NOTE
A number of Ingmar Bergman’s films were released in the United States and Great Britain under different titles. In this book the first mention lists both titles wherever possible, with the British title appearing between parentheses. Subsequently, either title may be used.
Contents
Introduction
The Man Who Asked Hard Questions by Woody Allen
Dreams Dreamers
Wild Strawberries
Hour of the Wolf
Persona
Face to Face
Cries and Whispers
The Silence
First Movies
Torment (Frenzy) — Port of Call
The Devil’s Wanton (Prison)
Three Strange Loves (Thirst)
Jests Jesters
The Magician (The Face)
The Ritual (The Rite)
The Naked Night (Sawdust and Tinsel)
The Serpent’s Egg
From the Life of the Marionettes
After the Rehearsal
Miscreance Credence
The Seventh Seal
Through a Glass Darkly
Winter Light
Other Films
To Joy — Monika (Summer with Monika)
Shame (The Shame)
The Passion of Anna (A Passion)
Brink of Life (So Close to Life)
Autumn Sonata
Farces Frolics
The comedies —
Smiles of a Summer Night
The Magic Flute
Fanny and Alexander
Filmography
Introduction
THE MAN WHO ASKED HARD QUESTIONS
I GOT THE NEWS IN OVIEDO, a lovely little town in the north of Spain where I was shooting a movie, that Bergman had died. A phone message from a mutual friend was relayed to me on the set. Bergman once told me he didn’t want to die on a sunny day, and not having been there, I can only hope he got the flat weather all directors thrive on.
I’ve said it before to people who have a romanticized view of the artist and hold creation sacred: In the end, your art doesn’t save you. No matter what sublime works you fabricate (and Bergman gave us a menu of amazing movie masterpieces) they don’t shield you from the fateful knocking at the door that interrupted the knight and his friends at the end of The Seventh Seal. And so, on a summer’s day in July, Bergman, the great cinematic poet of mortality, couldn’t prolong his own inevitable checkmate, and the finest filmmaker of my lifetime was gone.
I have joked about art being the intellectual’s Catholicism, that is, a wishful belief in an afterlife. Better than to live on in the hearts and minds of the public is to live on in one’s apartment, is how I put it. And certainly Bergman’s movies will live on and will be viewed at museums and on TV and sold on DVDs, but knowing him, this was meager compensation, and I am sure he would have been only too glad to barter each one of his films for an additional year of life. This would have given him roughly sixty more birthdays to go on making movies; a remarkable creative output. And there’s no doubt in my mind that’s how he would have used the extra time, doing the one thing he loved above all else, turning out films.
Bergman enjoyed the process. He cared little about the responses to his films. It pleased him when he was appreciated, but as he told me once, “If they don’t like a movie I made, it bothers me — for about thirty seconds.”He wasn’t interested in box office results, even though producers and distributors called him with the opening weekend figures, which went in one ear and out the other. He said, “By midweek their wildly optimistic prognosticating would come down to nothing.” He enjoyed critical acclaim but didn’t for a second need it, and while he wanted the audience to enjoy his work, he didn’t always make his films easy on them.
Still, those that took some figuring out were well worth the effort. For example, when you grasp that both women in The Silence are really only two warring aspects of one woman, the otherwise enigmatic film opens up spellbindingly. Or if you are up on your Danish philosophy before you see The Seventh Seal or The Magician, it certainly helps, but so amazing were his gifts as a storyteller that he could hold an audience riveted and enthralled with difficult material. I’ve heard people walk out after certain films of his saying, “I didn’t get exactly what I just saw, but I was gripped on the edge of my seat every frame.”
Bergman’s allegiance was to theatricality, and he was also a great stage director, but his movie work wasn’t just informed by theater; it drew on painting, music, literature and philosophy. His work probed the deepest concerns of humanity, often rendering these celluloid poems profound. Mortality, love, art, the silence of God, the difficulty of human relationships, the agony of religious doubt, failed marriage, the inability for people to communicate with one another.
And yet the man was a warm, amusing, joking character, insecure about his immense gifts, beguiled by the ladies. To meet him was not to suddenly enter the creative temple of a formidable, intimidating, dark and brooding genius who intoned complex insights with a Swedish accent about man’s dreadful fate in a bleak universe. It was more like this: “Woody, I have this silly dream where I show up on the set to make a film and I can’t figure out where to put the camera; the point is, I know I am pretty good at it and I have been doing it for years. You ever have those nervous dreams?” or “You think it will be interesting to make a movie where the camera never moves an inch and the actors just enter and exit frame? Or would people just laugh at me?”
What does one say on the phone to a genius? I didn’t think it was a good idea, but in his hands I guess it would have turned out to be something special. After all, the vocabulary he invented to probe the psychological depths of actors also would have sounded preposterous to those who learn filmmaking in the orthodox manner. In film school (I was thrown out of New York University quite rapidly when I was a film major there in the 1950s) the emphasis was always on movement. These are moving pictures, students were taught, and the camera shoul
d move. And the teachers were right. But Bergman would put the camera on Liv Ullmann’s face or Bibi Andersson’s face and leave it there and it wouldn’t budge and time passed and more time and an odd and wonderful thing unique to his brilliance would happen. One would get sucked into the character and one was not bored but thrilled.
Bergman, for all his quirks and philosophic and religious obsessions, was a born spinner of tales who couldn’t help being entertaining even when all on his mind was dramatizing the ideas of Nietzsche or Kierkegaard. I used to have long phone conversations with him. He would arrange them from the island he lived on. I never accepted his invitations to visit because the plane travel bothered me, and I didn’t relish flying on a small aircraft to some speck near Russia for what I envisioned as a lunch of yogurt. We always discussed movies, and of course I let him do most of the talking because I felt privileged hearing his thoughts and ideas. He screened movies for himself every day and never tired of watching them. All kinds, silents and talkies. To go to sleep he’d watch a tape of the kind of movie that didn’t make him think and would relax his anxiety, sometimes a James Bond film.
Like all great film stylists, such as Fellini, Antonioni and Buñuel, for example, Bergman has had his critics. But allowing for occasional lapses all these artists’ movies have resonated deeply with millions all over the world. Indeed, the people who know film best, the ones who make them — directors, writers, actors, cinematographers, editors — hold Bergman’s work in perhaps the greatest awe.
Because I sang his praises so enthusiastically over the decades, when he died many newspapers and magazines called me for comments or interviews. As if I had anything of real value to add to the grim news besides once again simply extolling his greatness. How had he influenced me, they asked? He couldn’t have influenced me, I said, he was a genius and I am not a genius and genius cannot be learned or its magic passed on.
When Bergman emerged in the New York art houses as a great filmmaker, I was a young comedy writer and nightclub comic. Can one’s work be influenced by Groucho Marx and Ingmar Bergman? But I did manage to absorb one thing from him, a thing not dependent on genius or even talent but something that can actually be learned and developed. I am talking about what is often very loosely called a work ethic but is really plain discipline.
I learned from his example to try to turn out the best work I’m capable of at that given moment, never giving in to the foolish world of hits and flops or succumbing to playing the glitzy role of the film director, but making a movie and moving on to the next one. Bergman made about sixty films in his lifetime, I have made thirty-eight. At least if I can’t rise to his quality maybe I can approach his quantity.
WOODY ALLEN
Dreams Dreamers
IN AVAILABLE PHOTOS from the time, the four of us are neatly combed and smiling politely at one another. We are deeply involved in a book project to be called Bergman on Bergman. The idea was for three young journalists, armed to the teeth with detailed knowledge, to question me about my movies. The year was 1968, and I had just finished Shame.
As I leaf through that book today, I find it to be hypocritical. Hypocritical? That’s right, hypocritical. My young interviewers were the bearers of the only true political conviction. They also knew that I had been left behind by the times, demeaned and scorned by the new aesthetics of the younger generation. And yet, I could never claim there was any lack of courtesy or attentiveness on their part. What I did not realize during our sessions was that they were little by little reconstructing a dinosaur piece by piece with the kind assistance of the Monster himself. In that book, I appear less than candid, always on my guard, and quite fearful. Even questions that are only slightly provocative are given short shrift. I take pains to give answers that might arouse sympathy. I plead for an understanding that, in any case, is impossible.
One of the three, Stig Björkman, is something of an exception. Since he was a talented movie director himself, we were able to speak in concrete terms on the basis of our respective professional backgrounds. Björkman was also responsible for what is good in the book: the rich and varied selection, and exquisite montage, of pictures.
I am not saying this curious project failed through any fault of my interviewers. I had been looking forward to our encounters with childish vanity and excitement. I had imagined that I was going to open up and reveal myself in these pages, taking a well-deserved pride in my life’s work. When, too late, I became aware that they were aiming for something quite different, I became unnatural and, as I said, both fearful and worried.
As it turned out, Shame (The Shame in Great Britain) was to be followed by many more years and many more films, until I decided in 1983 to “hang up” my camera. By then I was able to view my work as a whole and began to realize that I did not mind talking about my past. People were showing genuine interest in my films, not just to be polite or in order to attack me; since I had retired, I was guaranteed harmless.
Now and then my friend Lasse Bergström and I spoke about doing a new Bergman on Bergman book — one that would be more truthful, more objective. Bergström would ask the questions, and I would talk, and that would be the only similarity to the earlier book. We kept encouraging each other to do it, and all of a sudden we found ourselves going ahead with it.
What I had not been able to anticipate was that this act of looking back would, at times, turn into a murderous and painful business. Murderous and painful give a rather violent impression, but those are the best words I can find for it.
For some reason that had never occurred to me before, I have always avoided rescreening my old movies. Whenever I have had to do so or done so out of curiosity, I have been, without exception and no matter which film it was, nervous and upset, and have felt like going out to take a leak, like running to the toilet. I have been overwhelmed with anxiety, felt like crying, been afraid, unhappy, nostalgic, sentimental, and so on. Owing to this unfortunate conjunction of tumultuous feelings, I have, understandably, tended to avoid my movies. Still, I have felt kindly toward them, even the bad ones: I know that I did my best at the time and that each was in its own way truly interesting. (Listen and you will hear how interesting it was at the time!) So I set out to stroll for a while down the pleasantly lighted corridors of memory.
Wild Strawberries: “Victor Sjöström’s face, his eyes …”
It therefore became necessary to look at my films again, and I thought: All that happened a long time ago. Now I’ll be able to handle the emotional challenge. I’ll be able to eliminate some of my works immediately. Let Lasse Bergström look at them by himself. After all, he’s a film critic. He’s seen his share of good and bad without becoming hardened.
Watching forty years of my work over the span of one year turned out to be unexpectedly upsetting, at times unbearable. I suddenly realized that my movies had mostly been conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, in my guts. A nameless desire gave them birth. Another desire, which can perhaps be called “the joy of the craftsman,” brought them that further step where they were displayed to the world.
I would therefore have to account for their sources, their roots and origins, and remove from their files the blurred X rays of my soul. This process would be plausible with the help of my notes and workbooks, as well as those of others; of memories recalled, newspaper articles, and especially with this seventy-year-old man’s perceptive, astute, and comprehensive overview of, and objective relations to, a whole host of painful and half-suppressed experiences.
“The dreams were mainly authentic: the hearse that overturns with the coffin bursting open …”
I was going to return to my films and enter their landscapes. It was a hell of a walk.
Wild Strawberries is a good example. With Wild Strawberries as a point of departure, I can show how treacherous and tricky my “now-experience” can be. Lasse Bergström and I saw the movie one afternoon in my movie theater on Fårö (Sheep Island). It w
as an excellent print, and I was deeply moved by Victor Sjöström’s face, his eyes, his mouth, the frail nape of his neck with its thinning hair, his hesitant, searching voice. Yes, it was profoundly affecting! The next day we talked about the movie for hours. I reminisced about Victor Sjöström, recalling our mutual difficulties and shortcomings, but also our moments of contact and triumph.
I should add, in this connection, that my workbook for the Wild Strawberries screenplay has been lost. (I never save anything, out of superstition. Others have saved things for me.)
When later we read through the transcript of our taped conversations, we discovered that I had not said anything the least bit relevant about the way the film had been made. When I tried to recall the work process, it had totally disappeared. I only remembered — and dimly at that — that I had written the script at the Karolinska Hospital where I had been admitted for general observation and treatment. My friend Sture Helander was chief physician there, and I was given the opportunity to attend his lectures, which dealt with something as new and unusual as psychosomatic troubles. My room was small, and a writing desk had been fitted into it with some difficulty. The window faced north, and from it I could see for miles and miles.
My work year had been rather hectic; during the summer of 1956, we had made The Seventh Seal. Then I had directed three plays at the City Theater in Malmö: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Erik XIV, and Peer Gynt, the last of which premiered on March 8, 1957.
After that I spent almost two months in the hospital. The filming of Wild Strawberries began during the first part of July and finished on August 27, whereupon I returned immediately to Malmö to begin rehearsals of The Misanthrope.
I have only vague memories of that winter of 1956. And if I even try to take a few steps into that confusion, it hurts. A few fragments of a letter emerge suddenly from a lot of other letters of a very different kind. It was written by me as a New Year’s greeting and addressed to my friend Helander.