Image My Life in Film

by Marianne Ruuth

  If all this ends up being nothing but a game, delineated during a solemn study of one’s reflection in a mirror, with a lot of uncalled-for vanity on the one hand, and a vague interest on the other, then it is meaningless. It is perfectly possible that it’s meaningless anyway.

  It is safe to say that it’s no longer a comedy.

  Exhaustion does not mean that you simplify but that you complicate; you sink your teeth into something and do too much. Every spare battery is connected and the revolutions are accelerated; the critical judgment is weakened; and the wrong decisions are made, since you are unable to make the right ones.

  In Hour of the Wolf there is no trace of that exhaustion. And yet the film was made during the strenuous period when I was head of the Royal Dramatic Theater. The dialogue is crisp, a trifle too literary but not overly so.

  For a moment I want to go back to the erotic theme; I am referring to a scene I think is well executed, namely, when Johan kills the little demon who has bitten him.

  There is only one error: the demon should have been naked! And to take it one step farther: Johan should have been naked as well.

  I was vaguely aware of this error while we were filming that scene, but I didn’t have the strength or the courage to suggest it to Max von Sydow, the actor who played Johan. Had both actors been nude, the scene would have been brutally clear. When the demon clings to Johan’s back, trying to bite him, he is crushed against the mountainside with orgasmic force.

  Then: Why is Lindhorst* putting makeup on Johan before Johan goes to the love tryst with Veronica Vogler? From the beginning it is clear to us that their passion is a passion without emotion, an erotic obsession. We understand that in the very first scene. Later Alma reads from Johan’s diary, from which one understands that his liaison with Veronica was a disaster.

  Lindhorst’s makeup transforms Johan into a mixture of clown and woman, and then he dresses him in a silk gown, which makes him even more feminine. The white clowns have a multiple, ambiguous symbolism: they are beautiful, cruel, dangerous, balancing on the border between death and destructive sexuality.

  The demons in Hour of the Wolf. Gertrud Fridh with Max von Sydow. Ulf Johanson in the foreground. Naima Wifstrand. Ingrid Thulin as Veronica Vogler with Johan (Max von Sydow) in makeup.

  The pregnant Alma represents that which is living, precisely as Johan describes it: “If I patiently sketched you day after day …”

  There is no doubt that the demons, in a joking, decisive, and terrible manner, are separating Johan from Alma.

  When Johan and Alma walk home from the castle in the windy dawn, she says: “No, I’m not going to run away from you, however afraid I may be. And one thing more: They want to separate us. They want to keep you to themselves, but if I’m with you, it will be much more difficult. They are not going to make me run away from you, however hard they try. I’ll stay, I will. I’ll stay as long as I …”

  Then the fatal weapon is put between them, and Johan makes his choice. He chooses the dream of the demons instead of the palpable reality of Alma. Here I was setting forth on a problematic path that can ultimately be reached only through poetry or music.

  There is no doubt that my upbringing was a fertile ground for the demons of neurosis.

  I tried to clarify this point in The Magic Lantern.

  Most of our upbringing was based on such concepts as sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness, and grace, concrete factors in relationships between children and parents, between God and ourselves. There was an innate logic in all this, which we accepted and thought we understood.

  So punishment was something self-evident, never questioned. It could be swift and simple, a slap in the face or a smack on the bottom, but could also be utterly sophisticated, refined through generations.

  Major crimes reaped exemplary punishment: starting the moment the crime was discovered. The criminal confessed to a lower authority, that is, to the maids or Mother or one of the innumerable female relations living at our parsonage on various occasions.

  The immediate consequence of confessing was that you were frozen out. No one spoke or replied to you. As far as I can make out, the idea was to make the criminal long for punishment and forgiveness. After dinner and coffee, the parties were summoned to Father’s room, where interrogation and confessions were renewed. After that, the carpet beater was brought in, and you yourself had to declare how many blows you felt you deserved. When the punishment quota had been established, a hard, green cushion was fetched, trousers and underpants pulled down, you prostrated yourself over the cushion, someone held firmly onto your neck, and the blows were administered.

  I can’t claim that it hurt all that much. The ritual and the humiliation were most painful. My brother got the worst of it. Mother used to sit by his bed, bathing his back where the carpet beater had loosened the skin and streaked his back with bloody weals.

  After the blows had been administered, you had to kiss Father’s hand, at which point forgiveness was declared and your burden of sin fell away, being replaced by deliverance and grace. Though of course you had to go to bed without supper and evening reading, the relief was nevertheless considerable.

  There was also a spontaneous kind of punishment that could be terrifying for a child who was afraid of the dark: being locked in a special closet for various lengths of time. Alma in the kitchen had told us that in that closet lived a small creature that ate the toes of naughty children. I quite clearly heard something moving in there in the dark, and my terror was total. I don’t remember what I did, probably climbed onto shelves or hung from hooks to avoid having my toes thus devoured.

  All this comes back in Fanny and Alexander. But by then I had reentered the light of day and was able to depict it without a tremor of the hand, without being personally involved.

  In Fanny and Alexander I could also do it with pleasure. In Hour of the Wolf there is neither distance nor objectivity. I simply experimented in a way that may be vital, but the spear was thrown randomly into the darkness. And the path of the spear is imprecise.

  Earlier I was quick to downgrade Hour of the Wolf, probably because it did touch on so many suppressed aspects of my personality. While Persona possesses an intense light, an uninterrupted focus, Hour of the Wolf takes place in a land of twilight and also exploits elements that are new to me — romantic irony, ghosts — elements that the film plays with. I still find it funny when the baron without any difficulty rises to the ceiling and says, “Don’t pay any attention to this; it’s only because I’m jealous.” I also feel a quiet joy when the old woman takes off her face and remarks, “Now I can hear the music better.” After which she puts her eye into her glass of sherry.

  During supper at the castle, the demons look normal, though somewhat incongruous. They stroll in the park; they converse; they put on the marionette theater performance. Everything is rather peaceful.

  With Max von Sydow and Naima Wifstrand in the nighttime forest of Hour of the Wolf.

  But they are living the life of the doomed, in unbearable torment, eternally entangled in one another. They bite each other and eat each other’s souls.

  Their suffering is eased for a brief period: when The Magic Flute is performed in the small marionette theater. The music brings momentary peace and solace.

  The camera moves over everyone’s face. The rhythm of the text is a code: Pa-mi-na means Love. Does Love still live? Pamina lebet noch; Love still lives. The camera on Liv [Ullman]: a double declaration of love. At that time Liv was carrying our daughter, Linn. Linn was born the very day we filmed Tamino’s entrance into the palace court.

  Johan appears, transformed into a weirdly androgynous creature, and Veronica lies naked and allegedly dead on an autopsy table. He touches her in an endless gesture. She awakens, laughs, and begins to kiss him with small bites. The demons, who have been waiting for this moment, greatly appreciate the scene. One glimpses them in the background; they are sitting and lying on top of one another; a few have climbed up
to the window and the ceiling. Then Johan says, “I thank you, the mirror is shattered, but what do the fragments reflect?”

  I could not give an answer. Exactly the same words are said by Peter in From the Life of the Marionettes. When in his dream he discovers his wife lying murdered, he says, “The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?”

  I still don’t have a good answer.

  “Their suffering is eased for a brief period: when The Magic Flute is performed in the small marionette theater.”

  I BELIEVE THAT

  Persona is to a great degree connected to my activities as head of the Royal Dramatic Theater. That experience was like a blowtorch, forcing a kind of accelerated ripening and maturing. It clarified and solidified my relation to my profession in a brutal and unequivocal manner.

  I had just finished The Silence, which lived on its own strength and vitality. The fact that immediately afterward I began shooting All These Women (Now About These Women) was a mark of my loyalty to the studio, Svensk Filmindustri. It was also further proof of my deplorable inability to hit the brakes when I ought to.

  I was named managing director of the Royal Dramatic Theater at Christmas 1962. I should have immediately informed Svensk Filmindustri that we would have to shelve all film plans for the moment. But unfortunately, I felt it wasn’t reasonable or possible to postpone making a film that had been so long in preparation.

  With my death-defying optimism and incomprehensible love of work, I informed both the minister of education, who had presented me with the offer to head the national theater, and myself: That’s fine. I can handle this.

  On January 1, 1963, I became the newly appointed head of a theater in an advanced state of disintegration. There was no repertoire, no contracts with the actors for the upcoming season. Organization and administration were sadly lacking. The reconstruction of the theater building itself, which had moved forward in fits and starts, had been stopped altogether owing to lack of money. I found myself in an insoluble and incomprehensibly chaotic situation.

  I soon found out that my duties were not limited to raising the artistic pulse and seeing to it that people came to the performances. It was a question of reorganizing the whole company from the bottom up.

  No question: the work captivated me. The first year was strangely enjoyable. We had a great deal of luck. The red lights, proclaiming sold-out performances, were switched on, and the attendance figures soared. I was even able to cover the losses of the two superfiascos with which the season ended. The next year, during the same week in June, I opened Harry Martinson’s Three Knives from Wei at the theater and premiered the film All These Women.

  I returned to the Royal Dramatic Theater in the fall of 1964, and that year had two solid successes. I directed Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler with Gertrud Fridh, and Molière’s Don Juan. But the opposition had grown both inside and outside the theater. Toward the end of the season, the theater ensemble undertook a horrible trip to the inauguration of a new theater in the city of Örebros. People died or fell seriously ill. I myself had a fever of 102, despite which I went on the trip, ending up with double pneumonia and acute penicillin poisoning.

  I was exhausted, but I tried to manage the theater anyway. Finally, in April, I was admitted to Sophiahemmet, the royal hospital, for proper care. And I began to write Persona, mainly to keep my hand in the creative process.

  By that time, The Cannibals project had been canceled. Both Svensk Filmindustri and I saw how unrealistic it would be to try to direct such a major production during the summer. That meant there was a hole in the planned production for the year; one film was missing.

  That’s when I said, “Let’s not give up hope. I’ll try to make a movie after all. Possibly nothing will come out of it, but at least we can give it a try!”

  Thus it was that in April of 1965 I began to take some notes, in the aftermath of my mishandled pneumonia, but this writing was also a result of the stink bomb attacks to which I had been subjected in the executive office of the theater. I was beginning to ask myself: Why am I doing this? Why do I care so much? Is the role of the theater finished? Has the mission of the art been taken over by other forces?

  I had good reasons for thinking such thoughts.

  It was not a case of developing an aversion to my professional life. Although I am a neurotic person, my relation to my profession has always been astonishingly non-neurotic. I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful. At the same time they have still managed to keep on tormenting and embarrassing me in my private life. The owner of the flea circus, as you might be aware, has a habit of letting his artists suck his blood.

  So I was convalescing at Sophiahemmet. Slowly I began to realize that my activities as director of Sweden’s national theater were hindering my creativity. I had driven all my engines at top speed, and the engines had shaken the old body till it fell apart. So now it was necessary for me to write something that would dissipate the feeling of emptiness, of going nowhere. My emotional state was expressed quite clearly in an essay I wrote when I received the Dutch Erasmus Prize. I entitled it “The Snakeskin” and published it as a preface to Persona:

  Artistic creativity in me has always manifested itself as hunger. With quiet satisfaction I have acknowledged this need, but I have never in my whole conscious life asked myself where this hunger has come from and why it kept demanding satisfaction. During these last few years, as the hunger begins to abate, I feel a certain urgency to seek out the very reason for my activity.

  “I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot” (from the filming of The Magic Flute).

  A very early childhood memory is my strong need to show off whatever I have accomplished; skill in drawing, the art of hitting a ball against a wall, my first strokes when I learned how to swim.

  I remember that I had a strong desire to draw the adults’ attention to these manifestations of my presence in the world. I felt that my fellow beings never paid enough attention to me. When reality no longer was enough, I began to fantasize, to regale my contemporaries with wild stories about my secret exploits. Those were embarrassing lies, which without fail broke into pieces against the surrounding world’s sober skepticism. Finally I pulled out of the fellowship and kept my dream world to myself. A contact-seeking and fantasy-obsessed child had been rather quickly transformed into a wounded and sly daydreamer.

  But a daydreamer is not an artist except in his dreams.

  It was obvious that cinematography would have to become my means of expression. There I made myself understood through the language that I lacked, through music I had not mastered, and through painting which left me cold. Suddenly I had an opportunity to communicate with the world around me in a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.

  With all the pent-up hunger of the child I was, I threw myself at my chosen medium and for twenty years I have tirelessly, and in a kind of frenzy, supplied dreams, sense experiences, fantasies, insane outbursts, neuroses, cramped faith, and pure unadulterated lies. My hunger has endlessly renewed itself. Money, fame, and success have been surprising, but basically indifferent, consequences of my rampage. Having said that, I am in no way downgrading or negating what I have possibly accomplished. Art as self-satisfaction obviously has its value, especially to the artist.

  So if I want to be completely honest, art (not just the art of the cinema) is for me unimportant.

  Literature, painting, music, film, and theater give birth to and feed upon themselves. New mutations, new combinations occur and are destroyed; viewed from the outside the movement seems feverishly vital, nourished by the artists’ unbridled eagerness to project to themselves and to a more and more distracted audience a world that has ceased to ask what they think. There are a few isolated places where the artists are punished, the arts themselves are considered risky and deservin
g of being suffocated or guided. Generally speaking, however, art is free, shameless, irresponsible, and as I said: its constant movement is intense, almost feverish; it resembles, in my opinion, a snake’s skin full of ants. The snake is long since dead, emptied, deprived of its poison, but the skin moves, full of bustling life.

  I hope and believe that others have a more balanced and allegedly objective opinion. If I raise all these tedious matters and if despite all I’ve said I claim I still want to create art, there is a very simple reason (putting aside all the purely material motivations).

  The reason is curiosity. A limitless, never satisfied, ever renewed, unbearable curiosity, drives me forward, never leaves me in peace; it has completely replaced my hunger for contact and fellowship of earlier times.

  I feel like a prisoner who, after a long detention, suddenly stumbles out into the hurly-burly of life. I am in the grip of an uncontrollable curiosity. I note, I observe, I look everywhere; everything is unreal, fantastic, frightening, or ridiculous. I catch a speck of dust floating in the air; maybe it’s the germ of a film — what does it matter? It doesn’t matter, but I find it interesting, therefore I insist that it is a film. I come and go with this object that belongs to me, and I care for it with joy or sorrow. I push and am pushed by other ants; we are doing a colossal piece of work. The snakeskin moves. This, and only this, is my truth. I don’t ask that it be true for anybody else, and as solace for eternity it’s obviously rather slim pickings, but as a foundation for artistic activity for a few more years it is in fact enough, at least for me.

  To be an artist for one’s own sake is not always pleasant. But it has one enormous advantage: the artist shares his condition with every other living being who also exists solely for his own sake. When all is said and done, we doubtless constitute a fairly large brotherhood, which thus exists within a selfish community on our warm and dirty earth, beneath a cold and empty sky.