“The Snakeskin” was written in direct connection with the work on Persona. This can be illustrated by a note from April 29 in the workbook:
Persona: Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson).
I will attempt to keep the following commands:
Breakfast at half past seven with the other patients.
Thereafter immediately get up and take a morning walk.
No newspapers or magazines during the aforementioned time.
No contact with the theater.
Refuse to receive letters, telegrams, or telephone calls.
Visits to home allowed during the evening.
I feel that the final battle is fast approaching. I must not postpone it further. I must arrive at some form of clarity. Otherwise Bergman will definitely go to hell.
It is clear from this passage that the crisis runs deep. I laid down for myself the same commandments when, later, I was trying to get back on my feet following the whole affair about my taxes.* Punctiliousness then became my way of surviving.
From this crisis, Persona was born and grew:
With Sven Nykvist.
So she has been an actress — one may give her that? Then she fell silent. Nothing remarkable about that.
I’ll have to start with a scene in which the doctor tells nurse Alma what has taken place. That first scene is all-important. The patient and the person caring for her grow close together, like nerves and flesh. The only thing is, she refuses to speak. In fact, she doesn’t want to lie.
This is one of the first notes in my workbook, dated April 12. Something else is also written there, something I did not act upon but which still has to do with Persona, especially with the title. “When nurse Alma’s fiancé visits her, she hears for the first time how he speaks. She notes how he touches her. She becomes frightened, since she sees that he behaves as if he were acting a part.”
When you bleed, you feel bad, and then you don’t act.
It was an extremely difficult period of my life. I had a feeling that a threat was hanging over my head:
Could one make this into an inner happening? I mean, suggest that it is a composition for different voices in the same soul’s concerto grosso? Anyhow, the time and space factors must be of secondary significance. One second must be able to stretch itself out over a long period of time and contain a handful of lines strewn without any apparent connection.
This problem is evident in the completed film. The actors move in and out of rooms without transfer distances. Whenever suitable, an occurrence is prolonged or shortened. The conception of time is suspended.
Then a note follows that goes far back into my childhood:
I imagine a white, washed-out strip of film. It runs through the projector and gradually there are words on the sound tape (which perhaps runs beside the film strip itself). Gradually the precise word I’m looking for comes into focus. Then a face you can barely make out dissolves in all that whiteness. That’s Alma’s face. Mrs. Vogler’s face.
When I was a boy, there was a toy store where you could buy used film. It cost five ore [about one penny] a yard. I put thirty or forty yards of the film into a strong soda solution and let the pieces soak for half an hour. The emulsion dissolved and the layer of images disappeared. The strips of film became white, innocent, transparent. Pictureless.
With different colored india inks I could now draw new pictures. When Norman McLaren’s directly drawn films appeared after the war, it was no news to me. The strip of film that rushes through the projector and explodes in pictures and brief sequences was something I had carried around with me for a long time.
Throughout most of the month of May I still had attacks of fever:
All this weird fever and all these solitary reflections. I have never had it so good, and so bad. I believe that if I really tried, I might perhaps attain something unique, something I had been unable to reach earlier. A transformation of the themes. Something simply happens and without anyone asking how it happens.
Alma is learning to know herself. Through Mrs. Vogler, nurse Alma is off in search of herself.
Alma tells a long, totally banal story about her life and her great love for a married man, about her abortion and about Karl Henrik whom she really doesn’t love, and who was a disappointment in bed. Then she drinks some wine, lets herself go, starts crying, and sobs in Mrs. Vogler’s arms.
Mrs. Vogler is full of sympathy. The scene goes on from morning to noon, from evening to night, and on to morning. And Alma is becoming increasingly attached to Mrs. Vogler.
I think it’s a good thing that at this point different documents exist, for instance, the letter from Mrs. Vogler to Dr. Lindkvist. Which is filled with light-hearted banter but also contains, on a humorous note, a funny but harsh portrait of nurse Alma’s character.
I pretend that I’m an adult. I am constantly astonished that people take me seriously. I say: I want this and I would like that. … They listen respectfully to my points of view, and often they do what I tell them. Or even praise me for being right. As for me, I never think that all these people are children who act at being adults. The only difference is that they have forgotten or never think about the fact that they are actually children.
My parents spoke of piety, of love, and of humility. I have really tried hard. But as long as there was a God in my world, I couldn’t even get close to my goals. My humility was not humble enough. My love remained nonetheless far less than the love of Christ or of the saints or even my own mother’s love. And my piety was forever poisoned by grave doubts. Now that God is gone, I feel that all this is mine; piety toward life, humility before my meaningless fate, and love for the other children who are afraid, who are ill, who are cruel.
From the filming of Persona: Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, and Sven Nykvist.
The following was written on Ornö in May. I am getting close to the gist and core of both Persona and “The Snake-skin”:
Mrs. Vogler desires the truth. She has looked for it everywhere, and sometimes she seems to have found something to hold on to, something lasting, but then suddenly the ground has given way under her feet. The truth had dissolved and disappeared or had, in the worst case, turned into a lie.
My art cannot melt, transform, or forget: the boy in the photo with his hands in the air or the man who set himself on fire to bear witness to his faith.
I am unable to grasp the large catastrophes. They leave my heart untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of greed — a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into something indifferent, meaningless. The question is whether art has any possibility of surviving except as an alternative to other leisure activities: these inflections, these circus tricks, all this nonsense, this puffed-up self-satisfaction. If in spite of this I continue my work as an artist, I will no longer do it as an escape or as an adult game but in the full awareness that I am working within an accepted convention that, on a few rare occasions, can give me and my fellow beings a few seconds of solace or reflection. The main task of my profession is, when all is said and done, to support me, and, as long as nobody seriously questions this fact, I shall continue, by a pure survival instinct, to keep working.
The outer world intrudes on Elisabet Vogler in her sickroom.
“Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.”
Here, in the diary of Mrs. Vogler, lies the foundation of Persona. These were new thoughts to me. I had never foreseen that my activities had a direct relation to society or to the world. The Magician — with another silent Vogler in the center — is a playful approach to the question, nothing more.
On t
he final pages in the workbook appears the decisive variation:
After the major confrontation, it is evening, then night. When Alma falls asleep or is on the verge of falling asleep, it is as if someone were moving in the room, as if the fog had entered and made her numb, as if some cosmic anxiety had overwhelmed her, and she drags herself out of bed to vomit, but can’t, and she goes back to bed. Then she sees that the door to Mrs. Vogler’s bedroom is partly open. She enters and finds Mrs. Vogler unconscious or seemingly dead. She is frightened and grabs the telephone, but there is no dial tone. She returns to the dead woman, glancing slyly at her, and suddenly they exchange personalities. This way, exactly how I don’t know, she experiences, with a fragmentary sharpness, the condition of the other woman’s soul, to the point of absurdity. She meets Mrs. Vogler, who now is Alma and who speaks with her voice. They sit across from each other, they speak to each other with inflections of voice and gestures, they insult, they torment, they hurt one another, they laugh and play. It is a mirror scene.
The confrontation is a monologue that has been doubled. The monologue comes, so to speak, from two directions, first from Elisabet Vogler, then from nurse Alma.
Sven Nykvist and I had originally planned a conventional type of lighting on Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson. But it didn’t work. We then agreed to keep half of their faces in complete darkness — there wouldn’t even be any leveling light.
From there on it was a natural evolution, in the final part of the monologue, to combine the two illuminated halves of their faces, to let them float together to become one face.
In most people one side of the face is more attractive than the other, their so-called good side. The half-illuminated images of Liv’s and Bibi’s faces that we combined into one showed their respective bad sides.
When I received the double-copied film from the laboratory, I asked Liv and Bibi to come to the editing room.
Bibi exclaims in surprise: “But Liv, you look so strange!” And Liv says: “No, it’s you, Bibi, you look very strange!” Spontaneously they denied their own less-than-good facial half.
The screenplay for Persona does not look like a regular scenario.
When you write a scenario, you are anticipating the technical challenges as well. You are, so to speak, writing the score. Then all you have to do is put the music on the stands and let the orchestra play.
I cannot arrive at the soundstage or the exterior location and assume that “things will fall into place one way or another.” You cannot improvise on an improvisation. I dare to improvise only if I know that I will be able to go back to a carefully constructed plan. I cannot trust that inspiration will strike when I get to the set.
“From there on it was a natural evolution, in the final part of the monologue, to combine the two illuminated halves of their faces, to let them float together to become one face.”
When you read the script of Persona, it may look like an improvisation, but it is painstakingly planned. Nonetheless I have never shot as many retakes during the making of any other film. When I say retakes I do not mean repeated takes of the same scene the same day. I mean retakes that are a consequence of my seeing the previous day’s rushes and not being satisfied with what I saw.
We began filming in Stockholm and got off to a bad start.
But, slowly and squeakingly, we cranked it out. Suddenly I enjoyed saying: “No, let’s do it better, let’s do it this way or that, and here we could do it a bit differently.” Nobody ever became upset. Half the battle is won when nobody starts feeling guilty. The movie also naturally profited from the strong personal feelings that emerged during the filming. It was in short a happy set. In spite of the grueling work, I had a feeling that I was working with complete freedom both with the camera and with my collaborators, who followed my every twist and turn.
When I returned to the Royal Dramatic Theater in the fall, it was like going back to the slave galley. What a difference between the meaningless, stressful administrative work at the theater and the freedom I had experienced filming Persona! At some time or other, I said that Persona saved my life — that is no exaggeration. If I had not found the strength to make that film, I would probably have been all washed up. One significant point: for the first time I did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success. The gospel according to which one must be comprehensible at all costs, one that had been dinned into me ever since I worked as the lowliest manuscript slave at Svensk Filmindustri, could finally go to hell (which is where it belongs!).
Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.
I WRITE IN The Magic Lantern:
Face to Face was intended as a film about dreams and reality. The dreams were to become tangible reality. Reality would dissolve and become dream. I have occasionally managed to move unhindered between dream and reality: Wild Strawberries, Persona, The Silence, Cries and Whispers. This time it was more difficult. My intentions required an inspiration which failed me. The dream sequences became synthetic, the reality blurred. There are a few solid scenes here and there, and Liv Ullmann struggled like a lioness. Her strength and talent held the film together. But even she could not save the culmination, the primal scream, which amounted to an enthusiastic but ill-digested fruit of my reading. Artistic license sneered through the thinly woven fabric.
But the case of Face to Face is more complicated than that. In The Magic Lantern, I dismiss it briefly and lightly. Earlier on I simply dismissed it or declared it an idiot. That in itself is slightly suspicious.
Now I see it like this: From the beginning and up to the main character’s attempted suicide, Face to Face is perfectly acceptable. The story is clearly told, though rather compressed. There are no real weaknesses in the material itself. If the second part had maintained the same level as the first, the film would have been saved.
My workbook, dated April 13, 1974:
So now I have completed The Merry Widow. It was with great relief that I dismissed the troublesome lady (Streisand). I have also said good-bye to the film about Jesus. Too long, too many togas, too many quotations. What I long for now is to walk along my own path. At the theater I always follow others’ paths; when it comes to my films I want to be myself.
This is a feeling that grows stronger and stronger. As is the desire to force my way into the secrets beyond the walls of reality. To find a maximum expression with a minimum of external gestures. And yet, on this subject I have to say something that I must tell myself is extremely important: I do not want to follow beaten paths. I still maintain that in the context of that technique Cries and Whispers goes as far as one can go.
I also write that I look forward to the filming of The Magic Flute, which is imminent. “Let’s see if I feel the same way in July”
Technically speaking, there is the pleasant notion of constructing a single, strange room in the studio at Dämba and thus, through varying transformations of the human beings who are moving within it, depict the past. And there is also the secret person behind the tapestry in the other room. The person who affects what happens as well as what does not happen. The one who is there and yet is not!
That thought had haunted me for a long time: Behind the wall or the tapestry would be a powerful, hermaphroditic creature, controlling whatever was happening in the magic room.
At that time the small soundstage at Damba, where we had filmed Scenes from a Marriage, still existed. It was pleasant and practical. We lived and worked on Fårö Island. The process of minimizing, of simplifying, has always been stimulating to me. So I imagined that we would shape the film within the very limited confines of the soundstage.
After that, nothing is written in my workbook until July 1:
So now the filming of The Magic Flute is finished. It has been a remarkable period of my life. This joy, this proximity to the music
every day! All the affection and tenderness I encountered.
It was almost so that I did not notice how heavy and complicated it had become: except for the fact that I kept getting colds, yes, it has become a real neurosis. It has cast a shadow over my existence, and there were times when I thought I wasn’t completely sane.
Back at Fåöro I began cautiously to outline Face to Face:
She has sent the children abroad. The husband is on a business trip. The house they live in is being remodeled. So she moves into her parents’ apartment on Strandvägen, beyond the Djurgårds Bridge, near the Oscar Church. She thinks she’ll be here for some time and get a lot of work done. Our heroine is especially looking forward to being by herself in the summer city and to thinking about herself and her own work without distraction.
The danger of not feeling loved, the fear that comes with the insight that one is not loved, the pain in not being loved, the attempt to forget that one is not loved.
Then some time goes by. This is written more or less in mid-August:
What if one turned the picture upside down? The dreams are reality, the reality of the days’ events the unreal: the silence of a summer day in the streets around Karla Square. Sunday, with its desolate ringing of church bells, the twilight hours, filled with morbid longings, slightly feverish. And then the light in the large, empty apartment.
Here it begins to come together:
Seven dreams with small islands of reality! The distance between body and soul, the body being something alien. Keeping body and emotions separate. The dream of humility, the erotic dream, the melancholy dream, the horror dream, the funny dream, the annihilation dream, the dream of the mother.
Then I suddenly imagine the whole thing as a masquerade. On September 25 I write:
Image My Life in Film Page 4