Image My Life in Film

by Marianne Ruuth

  Hesitation and confusion greater than ever — or have I simply forgotten how it usually is? A lot of irrelevant viewpoints obviously mingle with my reasoning, views that I don’t even want to think about since I find them so embarrassing.

  Slowly I begin to understand that thanks to this film, and a screenplay that offers me stubborn resistance, I am trying to reach certain complications within myself. My reluctance when it comes to Face to Face probably stems, at least superficially, from the fact that I am touching on a number of my own inner conflicts without reaching or unmasking them. But at the same time I have sold out something important and have failed. Painfully, I was moving in on it. I have made a gigantic effort to bring something complicated into the light of day. It’s one thing to work on a screenplay. It takes place between yourself, your pen, your piece of paper, and a span of time. It’s an entirely different matter when you stand there in front of the whole immense machinery.

  Suddenly the film as it ought to have been emerges from my workbook:

  She sits on the floor in her grandmother’s apartment, and the statue moves in the sunshine. On the stairs she meets a large dog that bares its teeth. Then her husband arrives. He is dressed as a woman. She goes looking for a doctor. She is a psychiatrist herself and says that “she doesn’t understand this particular dream in spite of having understood everything that has happened to her over these last thirty years.” Then the old lady raises herself from her enormous, dirty bed and looks at her with her one, ailing eye. But grandmother and grandfather hug each other, and grandmother caresses grandfather’s cheeks and whispers tender words to him in spite of his not being able to utter more than a few isolated syllables.

  But behind all this, behind the drapes, a whispered conversation is carried on about what ought to be done with her sexually, perhaps a widening of her anal opening. And at the same moment She appears, the Other, who takes such things lightly and caresses her in all sorts of ways. It is unexpectedly pleasant. But now somebody arrives and asks for her help, really pleads with her, somebody in a desperate situation. She throws a tantrum, followed by an anxiety attack, because the tension is not lessening. But, in spite of everything, it’s a relief to plan and carry out that murder of Maria she has been thinking about for so long. Although afterward it will be even more difficult to find someone who will care for me and tell me not to be afraid. And if I change my clothes completely and go to a party, everybody must see and understand that I am innocent and cast their suspicions on somebody else.

  Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson in Face to Face.

  But in the room with the candelabras everybody is masked, and suddenly they begin to dance a dance she doesn’t know, a pavane.

  Somebody says that several of those who are dancing are dead and have come to honor the festivities with their presence. The tabletop is black and shiny. She leans her breasts against the top of the table and sinks slowly downward as somebody licks her whole body, especially between her legs. It doesn’t distress her but on the contrary fills her with a feeling of pleasure. She laughs, and a dark-haired girl with large red hands lies down on top of her. Beautiful music from a piano that’s out of tune. Just then the door opens, the wide, old-fashioned double door, and her husband enters, along with several policemen, and accuses her of murdering Maria. Then she speaks passionately in her own defense, sitting naked on the floor in the oblong, drafty room. The one-eyed woman raises her hand and places a finger to her lips in a commanding gesture that calls for silence.

  That’s how Face to Face should have been made.

  If I had had the experience I have today and the strength I had then, I would have translated this material into practically feasible solutions and not hesitated for a moment.

  It would have been a sacrosanct cinematographic piece of poetry.

  To me, this is not a continuation of the line from Cries and Whispers. It goes far beyond Cries and Whispers. Here, finally, all forms of storytelling are dissolved.

  Instead the daily grind of the screenplay goes on, and the story takes shape. The first half is falling nicely into place. The only thing left is the woman with the blind eye.

  October 5:

  Could lament forever and ever about pleasure and displeasure, about difficulties and adversities and about boredom, but I will not. I think that I have never been more disinclined and hesitant than I am now! Perhaps I am in touch with a sorrow that wants to appear. Where does it come from? What is it made up of? Is there anyone in the world who has it as good as I do?

  My repulsion and my unwillingness, needless to say, stem from the fact that I have betrayed my idea, and I keep jumping from one treacherous ice floe to another.

  Sunday, October 13:

  Great discouragement, which changes into determination. I feel as if, at the end of this, which is slavery, the real film is hiding. If I push and pull and bluff my way through, perhaps I will haul it out of the darkness, and then it will have been worth the trouble.

  There is no doubt that there exists a huge shout trying to find its voice. Then the question is whether I have the ability to release the shout, to set it free.

  And this, too, dated October 20:

  Will I be able to get close to the point where my own despair is hiding, where my own suicide lies in wait? I don’t know.

  This is the true birth: hold me, help me, be kind to me, hold me tight, hold me tight, why isn’t there anybody who cares about me? Why is nobody holding my head? It is far too big. Please, I am freezing, I can’t go on like this. Kill me again, I don’t want to live, it can’t be true, look how long my arms are, and emptiness is everywhere.

  The person crying out isn’t Jenny!

  On November 1, I write: “Today I finished writing the whole script for the first time. Came right through it and out on the other side.” Then I begin all over again, rereading, correcting, rewriting.

  November 24:

  Today we are going to Stockholm. So begins the second act, the one focused on the outside world; I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it with great impatience. I am going to meet with Erland [Josephson] and see what he has to say. I hope he’ll be candid. If he thinks I should abandon this project, I will. It’s pointless to throw myself into some big, expensive project when my desire is zero. I am also worried about Twelfth Night. This time I’m getting into something I have never tried before, and it feels difficult, if not impossible. I wonder if it’s not simply that my body and soul are saying “no” after a long period of intense activity; that may well be. Everything is fluid; everything is diffuse. As for me, I am filled with malaise. At the same time I am well aware that a large percentage of this malaise stems from my difficulty in getting started, my fear of people, fear that it won’t be any good, fear of life, of moving at all.

  The primal scream. Liv Ullmann.

  Then came the period when I was working on Twelfth Night at the Royal Dramatic Theater.

  March 1, 1975:

  Returned to Fårö Friday. The premiere of Twelfth Night went very well, and the reviews were for the most part tremendous. Rehearsals went exceedingly quickly. It was like a real party. Made a point of not dealing with Face to Face during this whole time except when it was absolutely necessary. I’m going to concentrate on rewriting the dreams.

  Monday, April 21:

  Today is the last day at Fårö. Tomorrow we leave for Stockholm, and the following Monday we start filming. It actually feels good, apart from my usual anguish. I even have the impression it’s going to be fun, a kind of challenge. In other words, desire. That terrible depression that followed the writing of the screenplay has disappeared altogether. It was almost like an illness. The trip to the United States was also stimulating. And good for our finances. We can look to the future with confidence.

  July 1:

  Have just returned to Fårö after having finished shooting. Actually it went terribly fast. All of a sudden we were halfway through, all of a sudden there were only five days left, and then
all of a sudden it was finished, and we all met at the Stallmästaregården Restaurant to celebrate, complete with speeches and cigars and nostalgia and confused feelings. I don’t really know how it went. With The Magic Flute, we all knew it was good. Here I know nothing. Toward the end I felt completely exhausted. Anyhow, now it’s over. Liv asked me what I thought. I said, I think it’s fine.

  When we were in the United States, Dino De Laurentiis asked me: “Are you doing anything I could have?” I heard myself answer, “I’m making a psychological thriller about the breakdown of a human being and her dreams.” “It sounds great,” he said. So we signed a contract.

  This should have been a happy period of my life. I had The Magic Flute behind me, as well as Scenes from a Marriage and Cries and Whispers. I was successful at the theater. Our little company was producing the films of other directors, and the money was flowing in. It was precisely the right time to tackle a difficult task. My artistic self-confidence was as high as it’s ever been. I could do whatever I wanted, and anyone and everyone was willing to finance my efforts.

  During the filming of Face to Face everybody was very enthusiastic, and that of course is all-important. Nobody seemed to care that I kept remaking the dreams incessantly, changing them and moving them around. I even stuck in my old Fridell etching with snow on the furniture and the little girl who stands there holding the candle that illuminates the terrible clown.

  Two short dream sequences strike me as acceptable. One is when the lady with one eye comes over to Jenny and strokes her hair. The other one, which at least is honestly thought out, is Jenny’s brief encounter with her parents after the automobile accident. From the viewpoint of direction, it’s a rather good scene. They crawl behind the Dutch-tiled stove and start to cry when Jenny hits them. But in one way the scene is poorly directed: Jenny should have remained completely calm rather than acting in the same way as her parents do. I did not understand that at the time. Still, a concrete dream atmosphere does exist at this point.

  All the rest is forced. I am roving erratically in exactly what I warn against in my foreword to the screenplay: a landscape of clichés.

  Deep inside a yellow cardboard box, I am hiding a terrible little short story. I wrote it during the 1940s. A boy is in his grandmother’s apartment; it is night, and he can’t seem to fall asleep; two tiny people emerge and run across the floor. He catches one and crushes it with his hand. It’s a little girl. The story is about childish sexuality and childish cruelty. My sister insists with emphatic stubbornness that my dark closet originated in Uppsala. It was Grandma’s special method of punishment, not that of my parents. If ever I was locked into a closet at home, it was the one where I kept my toys and the flashlight with a red-and-green light that I could use to play cinema with. So it was actually quite nice and didn’t frighten me at all.

  “Two short dream sequences strike me as acceptable.” The brief encounter with the parents. The woman with one eye and Jenny.

  To sit locked in a closet in my grandmother’s old-fashioned apartment must have been far worse. The only thing is, I have completely suppressed that memory. To me, Grandma was and remained a figure of light.

  Here I let her appear in Jenny’s primal ode, but I cannot give shape and form to my memory. The memory arises so suddenly, and is so sharply painful, that I immediately exile it back to darkness. My artistic impotence is total.

  But in the point of departure lies a truth. Grandmother could have had two faces.

  From my early childhood I remember a conversation full of hate between my maternal grandmother and my father, which I overheard from an adjacent room. They were sitting at the table, drinking tea, and suddenly Grandma spoke in a tone of voice I had never heard her use before. I remember that it frightened me: Grandma had another voice!

  That is what I dimly remembered! Jenny’s grandmother should suddenly appear in a frightening light, and then, when Jenny returns home, her grandmother is a sad little old lady.

  Dino De Laurentiis was delighted with the film, which received rave reviews in America. Perhaps it did present something new that had never been tried before. Now when I see Face to Face, I remember an old farce with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour. It’s called The Road to Morocco. They have been shipwrecked and come floating on a raft in front of a projected New York in the background. In the final scene, Bob Hope throws himself to the ground and begins to scream and foam at the mouth. The others stare at him in astonishment and ask what in the world he is doing.

  “ ’This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.’” Bob Hope with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in The Road to Morocco (Paramount).

  He immediately calms down and says, “This is how you have to do it if you want to win an Oscar.”

  When I see Face to Face and Liv Ullmann’s incredibly loyal effort on my behalf, I still can’t help thinking of The Road to Morocco.

  THE FIRST IMAGE kept coming back, over and over: the room draped all in red with women clad in white. That’s the way it is: Images obstinately resurface without my knowing what they want with me; then they disappear only to come back, looking exactly the same.

  Four women dressed in white in a big red room. They came and went, whispered to one another, and were utterly secretive. At the time my mind was on other matters, but since the images kept coming back so insistently I understood that they wanted something from me.

  I also point this out in my introduction to the published screenplay of

  Cries and Whispers:

  The scene I just described has haunted me for a full year. In the beginning, of course, I didn’t know what the women’s names were or why they came and went in the gray light of dawn in a red room. Time and time again, I rejected this image and refused to base a film (or whatever it is) on it. But the image has persisted and reluctantly I have identified it: three women who are waiting for the fourth one to die. They take turns sitting with her.

  At first my workbook is mostly about The Touch. Under the entry date July 5, 1970, I write:

  I’ve finished the screenplay, although not without a fair amount of inner resistance. I baptized it The Touch. As good a name as any other.

  Now I’m going to take time off until August 3, when we begin the preparations in earnest. I feel depressed and ill at ease. I’d be happy to drop this film.

  The Touch was supposed to make a lot of money for its author. I have probably resisted the temptation to make money more often than I have yielded to it. But there were times when I did yield completely, and I have inevitably lived to regret it.

  The intention was to shoot The Touch in both English and Swedish. In an original version that doesn’t seem to exist anymore, English was spoken by those who were English-speaking and Swedish by those who were Swedes. I believe that it just possibly was slightly less unbearable than the totally English-language version, which was made at the request of the Americans.

  The story I bungled so badly was based on something extremely personal to me: the secret life of someone who loves becomes gradually the only real life and the real life becomes an illusion.

  Bibi Andersson felt instinctively that this part did not suit her. I convinced her to do it anyhow, since I felt I needed a loyal friend in this foreign production. Besides, Bibi had a good command of English. The fact that she became pregnant after having accepted the part threw a terrible monkey wrench into what seemed, on the surface at least, a matter-of-fact, methodical production set.

  Cries and Whispers began to make its way forward during this depressing period.

  Cries and Whispers: the white-clad women in the park.

  At the same time, I was also working on an idea that was new and seductive: the motionless camera. I decided I would place the camera in one particular position in the room, and it would only be allowed to take one step forward or one step back. It would be the characters who would have to move in relation to the lens. All the camera would do was film without ever getting excited or taking
part. Behind this idea was my conviction that the more violent the action, the less the camera should participate. It should remain coldly objective even when the action was moving toward emotional highs.

  Sven Nykvist and I thought long and hard about how this camera should behave. We arrived at different solutions, but the whole thing became too complicated and we finally gave up on it.

  Very little of this experimentation can be found in Cries and Whispers. When you discover that you are working on something that translates into such enormous technical complications that it begins to have a negative effect on the result, that it becomes a hindrance rather than a source of inspiration, then it’s high time to cut your losses.

  My workbook, July 10, 1970:

  It’s good to be free; for then you can sleep and let desire and malaise follow each other without caring what happens. I’m going to become completely rusty. Only a few notations about Cries and Whispers, to see where I’m at.

  (The title is actually borrowed from a music critic who wrote in a review of a Mozart quartet that it was like “cries and whispers.”)

  Bibi Andersson with Elliott Gould in The Touch.

  I’m going to have Liv, and then there should be Ingrid [Thulin], and I would very much like to have Harriet [Andersson], too, since she belongs to this breed of enigmatic women. And then I want Mia Farrow; let’s see if that works out. It probably will; why shouldn’t it? And then some heavy, resigned femininity; is it possibly Gunnel [Lindblom]?

  July 26:

  Agnes (homage to Strindberg) is the eyes that see and the consciousness that registers. It’s a little facile, but it will do.

  There is Amalia, Aunt Amalia, seated on the toilet eating a liver pâté sandwich, who keeps up an excessively detailed monologue about her digestion, her intestines, and her stools. And she also must always have the door open. In a room, at the far end (and we hear her screams now and then), there is Beata, who is big and round and always nude and lusty and furious and not allowed to go out. In this house, in these rooms, time has ceased to exist (but in any event it’s Grandmother’s apartment).