Image My Life in Film

by Marianne Ruuth

  Naima Wifstrand — “She is two hundred years old and a witch.” The actor Johan Spegel (played by Bengt Ekerot) with Volger (Max von Sydow).

  In the cast of The Face there is an old grandmother whom Naima Wifstrand portrays with inimitable wisdom. She is two hundred years old and a witch, who can make candleholders topple over and glasses explode. She is an authentic old sorceress with roots in ancient traditions; at the same time she is the smartest one in the troupe. She sells concocted love potions and saves the money that she earns from her sorcery, planning to retire and become harmless.

  The other central character is Johan Spegel, the actor. He dies twice. Just like Agnes in Cries and Whispers, he dies but gets stuck on the way. Here, Spegel is dead and yet not dead:

  I didn’t die. But I have already begun to haunt the place. Actually I come off better as a ghost than as a human being. I have become convincing. I was never convincing as an actor.

  He is the one who immediately sees through Vogler’s disguise: “An impostor who needs to hide his real face?”

  The night before Vogler's big magic seance, Spegel and Vogler meet for the second time: “They meet behind the screen where the shadows are at their deepest, next to the drape with its pictures of stars and secret signs.” Spegel’s face is turned toward the darkness.

  I have prayed one prayer all my life. Deploy me. Make use of me. But God never realized what a strong and devoted slave I had become. So I was left unused. No, that’s a lie, too. You go step by step by step into the darkness. Movement itself is the only truth.

  This is the same Spegel who said earlier:

  I always longed for a knife. An edge that would bare my entrails. Remove my brain, my heart. Relieve me of my contents. Cut away my tongue and my sex. A sharp knife-edge to scrape out all impurity. Then the so-called spirit could rise up out of this meaningless cadaver.

  This might sound obscure, but it contains a central point. The words mirrored my longing for pure artistry. I had an idea that one day I would have the courage to be incorruptible, perhaps even leave my intentions behind.

  It stands in natural opposition to all the rest that exists in The Face: the whoring, for instance!

  I had often felt that I was involved in a continuous, rather joyous prostitution. My job was to beguile the audience. It was show business from morning till night. It was good fun, no question about it. But underneath it all prevailed a violent yearning, which I let Spegel express.

  The screenplay for The Face is dated June 4, 1958, and on June 30 we began filming. We continued throughout the summer, or until August 27, when the summer vacation was over and it was time to return to the theater.

  The Face was created in an atmosphere of high spirits despite the black components in the tale we were spinning. Most certainly this had to do with the feeling of camaraderie in our troupe of jesters, for such we were during our Malmö period. Later, when I repeated themes from The Face in The Ritual, they took on a totally different and much more rancid note.

  THE FIRST OUTLINE FOR

  The Ritual (The Rite) is a dialogue I wrote on February 27, 1967, in the middle of my work on Shame:

  “Well, Mr. Artist, please be so kind as to describe what you did and how you did it.”

  “Should I do that, Your Grace? (Laughter.) It will only result in your being horribly angry.”

  “I will not be angry.”

  “Oh yes, you will, because you are here in order to make it difficult for me and for yourself, and if you don’t let yourself be angry, you won’t have the strength to do it. You can’t stand people like us; isn’t that right? Look into my eyes, Mr. Judge. (Mildly.) That’s how things are.”

  “No, young Mr. Faggot. It is far from being that simple.”

  “I know that it’s not that simple, and therefore I will voluntarily show you what we did, my friend and I. We call it…” (Stops himself, hesitating.)

  “What do you call your escapade?”

  “We call it ‘intercessional prayer.’”

  “ ‘Intercessional prayer.’ For whom?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Judge. We had this sudden desire to celebrate a ritual, an incantation, a formula, a vanity, a cloud, the shadow of a cloud. Your Grace must have felt weakness at some time, perhaps as a child. No, we weren’t going to speak of Your Grace.”

  “Get to the point, Mister!”

  “Oh yes, my friend has created a frightful mask, which he wears in a number we do together at the theater. It is a mother-in-law number; perhaps I should mention that I myself portray the poor husband.”

  He shows a frightful mask depicting an old hag with green hair and movable eyes and a terribly twisted mouth surrounded by warts and a beard.

  “When you were caught, in other words.”

  “I was dressed in women’s clothing, calm, collected, and perfumed, and my friend was naked except for a false breast. It was, so to speak, very private, and it took place at twilight. I was standing by the window, and between my hands I held a …a … (cries quietly) a chamber vessel, a drinking vessel I’d like to say, filled with red wine. So I was standing there in the twilight, and the trees were soughing, and it was raining, I believe, but not a heavy downpour, just a mild rain. So there I was standing by the window (turns to Markus); dear Markus, stand behind me where you did stand, and let the judge see. Take the mask in your left hand and put your right hand over your heart.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “Excuse me, Your Grace, but I’m so upset, it’s so — (cries) — painful to repeat our little game, or whatever it was, here in front of you. I mean, one false intonation and everything could be lost.”

  “Hurry up, do what has to be done. I don’t have all the time in the world.”

  “Well, I beheld the dark, shiny wine deep down in the bottom of the vessel, and then I whispered, ‘Show thyself, O God.’ Then Markus raised the mask behind my shoulder so that the old hag’s face, illuminated by the meager light from the window, was reflected in the wine like this, and I whispered: ‘Thank you, O God, for letting me receive you,’ and then I bent over the reflection and drank the wine, like this. But then Markus laughed, and the solemnity disappeared, and I broke wind. He called that a really fitting closing hymn. And then we were caught in the act.”

  This is the genesis of The Ritual. Two homosexual men are standing by a window, more or less undressed, and not paying much attention, or else they would have realized that they are standing by a window. Outside the window is a park and a street, and somebody has seen them and reported them. They have been involved in a game. Markus, who is a sculptor, has created a horrid mask that depicts the nameless man’s mother-in-law, and then they are suddenly playing the ancient elevation rite, once performed by the ancient Greeks.

  The original idea, in other words, is cruder, more easily understood, and much more unpleasant than the finished film.

  I read about the elevation rite in connection with my study of the Bacchants and then spoke with Lars Levi Laestadius about a performance on the theater’s large stage of Euripides’ Bacchae with Gertrud Fridh as Dionysus and Max von Sydow as Pentheus. We began to plan and prepare for the play but still had some misgivings. Malmö City Theater really had only one mission: to get people into the theater. So we weighed the advantages against the disadvantages and canceled the project without further sentiment. The theater was fighting for its life, and this project was both too large and too small.

  In ancient Greece, theater was inextricably tied to religious rituals. The audience arrived long before sunrise. At dawn the masked priests appeared. When the sun rose over the mountains, it illuminated the center of the stage, where a small altar was erected. The blood of a sacrificial animal was collected in a large vessel. One of the priests hid behind the others. He wore a golden mask, like that of a god. When the sun had risen even higher, two priests elevated the vessel at a precise moment, so that the audience could see the godly mask reflected in the blood. An orchestra of
drums and pan flutes played, and the priests sang. After a few minutes the officiant lowered the vessel and drank the blood.

  My first thought was to film The Ritual simultaneously with Shame. The latter consisted of almost 100 percent exteriors, but we built a house for the filming that could double as a studio. On rainy days we stayed indoors and played with the camera, which is why I call The Ritual “an exercise for camera and four actors.”

  I wrote The Ritual quickly and without pretensions. For various reasons it was not filmed at the same time as Shame as I had originally planned, but I wouldn’t let go of it. I managed to interest Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand, Erik Hell, and Anders Ek in a quick production. We would rehearse for a week and then film for nine days.

  There is not much lighting in The Ritual. The film is markedly aggressive and received startled reactions, both within the television’s theater department and from the critics.

  When Tended my tenure as head of the Royal Dramatic Theater, I could barely contain a heavy fury: We had completely revitalized a theater that had been like Sleeping Beauty’s castle and had, as the Swedes say, “put the church in the middle of the village,” meaning that we had put the chief thing in the chief place. We had reorganized the house from top to bottom and had begun to play timely dramas. We offered children’s theater on the large stage there and we also rented the China Variety Theater, which was close by, where we put on plays for various schools. We toured. We kept up an accelerated production tempo, doing more than twenty plays per season. In short, we utilized the resources of the theater to the maximum degree. For this, we (I) kept being reprimanded.

  My fury had to be channeled — it broke out in The Ritual.

  More or less consciously I divided myself into three characters in the film.

  Sebastian Fischer (Anders Ek) is irresponsible, lecherous, unpredictable, infantile, emotionally disturbed, and always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but he is also creative, deeply anarchistic, epicurean, lazy, amiable, soft, and brutal.

  Hans Winkelmann (Gunnar Björnstrand), on the other hand, is orderly, strictly disciplined with a deep sense of responsibility, socially aware, good-humored, and patient.

  The woman, Thea (Ingrid Thulin), is, I believe, a half-conscious attempt to depict my own intuition. She is faceless, doesn’t recognize her maturity, submissive, and has a need to please. She has sudden impulses, speaks with God, angels, and demons, believes herself to be a saint. She tries to accomplish stigmatization, is unbearably sensitive — cannot even stand to wear clothes at times. She is neither constructive nor destructive. She is a kind of satellite dish for secret signals from extraterrestrial radio stations.

  These three characters are inextricably entwined; they cannot get away from each other and cannot function in pairs. Only in the tension between the three points of the triangle can anything be accomplished. It was an ambitious effort to divide myself and depict how I really function, what forces keep my machine going.

  Thea has sister characters from other films: Karin in Through a Glass Darkly goes through the wallpaper and speaks with a spider-god; Agnes in Cries and Whispers gets stuck on the road between life and death; Aman/Manda in The Face has an ever-shifting sexual identity. Thea also has cousins such as Ismael in Fanny and Alexander, who has to be kept in a locked room.

  The four actors in The Ritual: Anders Ek with Gunnar Björnstrand and with Ingrid Thulin. Erik Hell.

  From this trinitarian perspective, the years at the Royal Dramatic Theater were not good ones. Neither Sebastian nor Thea has any room to speak of in which to live and move. The orderly Hans Winkelmann has the floor. The other two fall silent, weaken, and withdraw.

  Through this interpretation, Thea’s attempts to account for herself become understandable:

  I pretend I am a saint or a martyr. That’s why I’m calling myself Thea. I can sit for hours at the big table in the hallway, gazing at the palms of my hands. Once a blush appeared in my left palm. But there was never any blood. I pretend I am sacrificing myself in order to save Hans or Sebastian. I pretend ecstasy and conversations with the Holy Virgin, faith and disbelief, defiance and doubt: I am a poor sinner with an insupportable burden of guilt. So then I reject my faith and forgive myself. It’s all a game. Within the game I am the same all the time, sometimes utterly tragic, sometimes boundlessly exhilarated. All marked by the same insignificant effort. It’s like incessantly running water.

  I complained to a doctor. (How many doctors I have seen!) He told me that my traveling life was harmful to my psyche. He prescribed home, husband, children. Security, order, everyday life. Facticities, he called it. He maintained that one must not screen oneself off from reality, as I had done. I asked him then if reality was the majority’s idea of the journey of life or if there could possibly be different kinds of realities, each as real as another. He answered me that one had to live the best one could. I said that I was absolutely not unhappy, and then he shrugged and wrote out a prescription.

  With Anders Ek and Gunnar Björnstrand.

  I had hoped that a sympathetic light would fall on the poor judge (Erik Hell), but I realize that I was not particularly successful.

  The judge pleads with the three artists to try to see him as a human being. But it is too late. He has committed the rape, and he is going to die. It is a condemned man who appeals to them even as the headsman’s ax is lowered.

  Today when I watch The Ritual or read the screenplay, I see how I could have made the film differently. Although it is tightly constructed and even somewhat entertaining in parts, The Ritual is hard to understand in some places, for instance, the scene with Sebastian’s outburst in front of the judge:

  I lack a declaration of faith and do not belong to any church. I have never needed any god or salvation or eternal life. I am my own god; I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will be able to scare me ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from the water out there and explode the silence with its call.

  Twelve years later Sebastian is scared out of his mind. We’ll talk about that a bit later.

  I DON’T HAVE MUCH to say about

  The Naked Night (Sawdust and Tinsel). One could insist that the film is a pandemonium — but a well-organized pandemonium. I wrote it in a small hotel on Mosebacke Square, in the same building where the South Theater is situated. The room was narrow, with a panoramic view of the city and the bay. A winding secret staircase connected the theater with the hotel. In the evenings I could hear music from the revue being performed below. At night, the actors and their strange guests partied in the hotel’s dining room. In this setting, Sawdust and Tinsel was born in less than three weeks. I remember that the demons, the demons of retrospective jealousy, were bridled and made to pull a loaded wagon; they were forced into productive activity. I wrote the film straight through from beginning to end, without stopping to think or add or fill in.

  The drama had its origin in a dream. I depicted the dream in the flashback about Frost and Alma. It’s rather easy to interpret. A few years earlier I had been madly in love. Pretending professional interest, I enticed my beloved to tell me in detail about her multifaceted erotic experiences. The peculiar excitement of a fresh jealousy over her long-past actions scratched and tore at my innards and my genitals. The most primitive rituals of shame became a permanent alloy in my jealousy. Jealousy became a kind of dynamite that nearly exploded out of me, its creator. To express it in musical terms, one could say that the main theme is the episode with Frost and Alma. There follows, within an undivided time frame, a number of thematic variations of erotics and humiliation in ever-changing combinations.

  Sawdust and Tinsel is relatively honest and shamelessly personal. Albert Johansson, the circus owner, love
s both Anne and his chaotic life in the circus. And yet, he is strongly drawn toward the bourgeois security he had in life with his now-abandoned wife. To put it briefly: he is a walking chaos of conflicting emotions. The fact that Åke Gronberg played Albert, and that the part was expressly written for him, has nothing to do with any influence from Dupont’s film Variety with Emil Jannings. It’s much simpler than that: if a scrawny director aims for a self-portrait, of course he chooses a fat actor to play himself.

  Åke Grönberg was first and foremost a comedy actor with an, allegedly, affable chubbiness. As Albert, he liberated other forces within himself. During the shooting, he was mostly wild and raging since he had moved on to what, to him, was insecure and foreign ground. When in one of his lighter moods, however, he would sing to us. Folk songs and favorite old pop tunes and obscene ditties. I loved and hated him. I imagine that he had similar feelings toward me.

  From that tension a creation sprang into existence.

  If Sawdust and Tinsel is influenced by any film, it is not Dupont’s Variety. Variety is set similarly but stands thematically in exact opposition to Sawdust and Tinsel. In Variety, Jannings kills the lover. Here, Albert transcends his jealousy and humiliations because of an irresistible need to like people.

  We were on location for quite a long time, filming outdoors in all types of weather. Gradually, we entered into a higher (strongly aromatic!) symbiosis with the circus people and the animals. Whichever way you look at it, it was a crazy time. And as I said in the beginning: I don’t have a hell of a lot to say about Sawdust and Tinsel.

  Sawdust and Tinsel: the flashback with Frost and Alma (Anders Ek and Gudrun Brost). Hasse Ekman and Harriet Andersson. åke Grönberg with Anders Ek.