Image My Life in Film

by Marianne Ruuth

  I learned quickly, and already in Summer Interlude [1950] the shape of the personal message was much clearer as I managed to hold it at arm’s length.

  Summer Interlude has a long history. Its origin, I see now, lies in a rather touching love affair that I had one summer when my family resided on Ornö Island. I was sixteen years old and, as usual, was stuck with extra studies during my summer vacation and could only occasionally participate in activities with people my own age. Besides, I did not dress as they did; I was skinny, had acne, and stammered whenever I broke my silence and looked up from reading Nietzsche.

  It was a fantastic life of laziness and self-indulgence in a pristine, sensuous landscape. But as I said, I was rather lonely. On the far end of this so-called Paradise Island, toward the bay, there lived a girl who was also alone. A timid love grew between us, as often happens when two young lonely people seek each other out. She lived with her parents in a large, strangely unfinished house. Her mother was a somewhat faded yet rare beauty. Her father had suffered a stroke and sat immobile in the large music room or on the terrace facing the sea. Important ladies and gentlemen came for visits to see and admire the exotic rose garden. Actually, it was a little like stepping straight into one of Chekhov’s short stories.

  Our love died when autumn came, but it served as the basis for a short story that I wrote the summer after my exams. When I went to Svensk Filmindustri to work as a script slave, I retrieved it and fleshed it out into a movie script. It was entangled in itself and filled with flashbacks, which I couldn’t find my way out of. I wrote several versions, but nothing fell into place. Then Herbert Grevenius came to my aid. He chiseled away all the superfluous episodes and pulled out the original story. Thanks to his efforts, I finally got the screenplay approved for production.

  We filmed it in Stockholm’s outer archipelago. The landscape had a special mixture of tempered countryside and wilderness, which played an important part in the differenttime schemes, in the luminescence of summer and in the autumnal twilight. A touch of genuine tenderness is achieved through Maj-Britt Nilsson’s performance. The camera catches her with an affection that is easy to comprehend. She embraced the girl’s story and lifted it higher with her brilliant mixture of playfulness and seriousness. The filming became one of my happy experiences.

  But harsher times were ahead. The film crisis, promising a total standstill in motion picture production, was fast approaching, and Svensk Filmindustri was in a hurry to produce the spy thriller This Can’t Happen Here (also known as High Tension in the United States) with Signe Hasso, imported from Hollywood. I agreed to direct it for financial reasons and practically went straight from one shoot into another. Summer Interlude was put aside. It was This Can’t Happen Here that counted.

  For me the whole thing was torturous, a good example of how bad you can feel when you must do something you do not want to do. It was not the assignment per se that was making me sick. Later, during the time when movie production was shut down, I put together a series of commercials for the soap Bris (Breeze), and I had a lot of fun challenging stereotypes of the commercial genre by playing around with the genre itself and making miniature films in the spirit of Georges Méliès. Originally, I accepted the Bris commercials in order to save the lives of myself and my families. But that was really secondary. The primary reason I wanted to make the commercials was that I was given free rein with money and could do exactly what I wanted with the product’s message. Anyhow, I have always found it difficult to feel resentment when industry comes rushing toward culture, check in hand. My whole cinematic career has been sponsored by private capital. I have never been able to live on my beautiful eyes alone! As an employer, capitalism is brutally honest and rather generous — when it deems it beneficial. Never do you doubt your day-to-day value — a useful experience which will toughen you.

  Summer Interlude: Maj-Britt Nilsson with Stig Olin and Annalisa Ericson in the dressing room mirrors.

  This Can’t Happen Here, as I said before, was complete torture from beginning to end.

  I was not at all averse to making a detective story or a thriller; that was not the reason for my discomfort. Neither was Signe Hasso the reason. She had been hailed as an international star who Svensk Filmindustri, with incredible naïiveté, hoped would make the film a raging success all over the world. Therefore we filmed This Can’t Happen Here in two languages: Swedish and English. Signe Hasso, a talented and warm person, unfortunately felt poorly during the entire filming. We were never sure from one day to the next whether she would be euphoric or depressed on the set. It was one difficulty, of course, but not the deciding factor.

  A creative paralysis hit me after only four days of shooting.

  That was exactly when I met the exiled Baltic actors who were going to participate. The encounter was a shock. Suddenly I realized which film we ought to be making. Among these exiled actors I discovered such a richness of lives and experiences that the unevenly developed intrigue in This Can’t Happen Here seemed almost obscene. Before the end of the first week, I demanded to see Svensk Filmindustri’s chief executive, Carl Anders Dymling, and pleaded with him to cancel the project. But our train was running its course and could not be stopped.

  At about this point I had a violent attack of influenza, and from that arose sinus trouble that raged almost comically and tormented me throughout the rest of the filming. My very soul resisted this film, hiding in the deepest darkness of my sinus and nasal passages.

  The Bris (Breeze) soap commercials: “Miniature films in the spirit of Georges Méliès,” here with a three-dimensional film-within-a-film.

  This Can’t Happen Here: the obscene intrigue (Signe Hasso and Ulf Palme). Exiled Baltic actors. A seemingly idyllic interlude with Signe Hasso and Alf Kjellin.

  Few of my films do I feel ashamed of or detest for various reasons. This Can’t Happen Here was the first one; I completed it accompanied by violent inner opposition. The other is The Touch. Both mark the very bottom for me.

  My punishment did not fail to come from the outside as well. This Can’t Happen Here opened in the fall of 1950 and was regarded as a fiasco, a well-deserved failure, in the eyes of both the critics and the public. During that time Summer Interlude lay there, waiting. It would not be released until a year later.

  My reputation as a movie director had the chance to be saved if I made another film. With this in mind, I decided to make She Danced One Summer for Sweden’s Folkbiografer. For some reason this picture’s production was exempted from the general motion picture moratorium. But at the last minute, the head of production, Karl Kilbom, got cold feet. He wanted to see a “beautiful” film, not some “neurotic vulgarity such as, for example, Thirst.” I was fired from the project. However, the determining screen test with Ulla Jacobsson (who rose to international stardom after the film) had already been made.

  Instead my next film was Secrets of Women (Waiting Women), and we were given a head start the day after the production ban was lifted. The idea for the film came from my wife at the time, Gun Hagberg. Before we met, she had married into a large family with a big summer place on the Danish island of Jylland. Gun told me how one evening the women of the clan remained sitting at the table after the evening meal and how they began to really talk to each other. With great openness they spoke of their marriages and their loves. I thought this an excellent framework for a film consisting of three stories.

  My financial situation after the production standstill forced me to sign a second-rate (to put it mildly) contract with Svensk Filmindustri. I was painfully aware that I had to come up with a successful film. In other words, a comedy seemed an absolute necessity.

  Such a comedy was manifested in the third episode of the film: Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand in the elevator. For the first time, I heard an audience laugh at something I had created. Eva and Gunnar had experience in comedy and knew exactly the many ways to skin a cat. That this little comedy routine in the narrow space of the elevator was fun
ny is completely thanks to them.

  The second episode is more interesting to me. For a long time I had considered making a movie without dialogue. In the 1930s, a Czech movie director, Gustav Machaty, made two films — Ecstasy and Nocturno — which were both visual narratives, practically without dialogue. I saw Ecstasy when I was eighteen years old, and it deeply affected me. This was partly a natural reaction because, for once, one was allowed to see a nude woman on screen, but more important, because the movie told nearly everything through images alone.

  I recognized in Machaty’s technique something from my childhood. I had once built a miniature movie theater out of cardboard. It had a few rows of seats in front, an orchestra pit, curtains, and a proscenium. I made tiny balconies for the sides. On a sign outside I wrote Röda Kvarn (Red Mill), the name of a popular movie theater in Stockholm.

  For film, I drew comic strips on long pieces of paper, which I then pulled through a container fastened behind the cutout square that was my “silver screen.” I made up stories and placed text cards between the pictures but limited myself rather consciously to as few text interruptions as possible. I soon discovered that it was possible to tell stories without text, exactly as in Ecstasy.

  Waiting Women: the five women. The three episodes: Jarl Kulle and Anita Björk. Maj-Britt Nilsson. Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand.

  While preparing Waiting Women, I regularly met with the writer Per Anders Fogelström. He was working on a story about a girl and a boy who run away from home together and live in the wilderness of the archipelago before returning to civilization. Together we wrote a screenplay. We delivered it to Svensk Filmindustri along with detailed “directions for use.” My intention was to make a low-budget film under a relaxed schedule, far from the soundstages and with the smallest crew possible. Monika (Summer with Monika) was given the green light to be the second film on my slave contract. Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg took a screen test on one of the sets for Waiting Women. Again, I went directly from finishing one film to starting another.

  I have never made a less complicated film than Summer with Monika. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom. And the public success was considerable.

  It was immensely gratifying to bring out a natural talent such as Harriet Andersson and watch how she behaved in front of the camera. She had acted in the theater and in variety shows and had played small parts in light comedy films such as Mrs. Andersson’s Kalle and The Beef and the Banana. She had also been given, after some hesitation, the ingénue role in Gustaf Molander’s Defiance. When I went to make Summer with Monika, the skepticism was thick in the executive production offices. I asked Gustaf Molander about using Harriet. He looked at me and winked. “If you believe you can get something out of her, I suppose it would be nice.” Only later did I grasp the amiable but improper insinuation in my older colleague’s remark.

  Harriet Andersson is one of cinema’s geniuses. You meet only a few of these rare, shimmering individuals on your travels along the twisting road of the movie industry jungle.

  Summer with Monika: before and after. Lars Ekborg, Harriet Andersson.

  Here is an example of her talent: The summer has ended. Harry is not at home; Monika goes on a date with a guy named Lelle. At the coffee shop he drops a coin into the jukebox. With the swing music resounding, the camera turns to Harriet. She shifts her glance from her partner straight into the lens. Here is suddenly established, for the first time in the history of film, shameless, direct contact with the viewer.

  “She shifts her glance from her partner straight into the lens.” Harriet Andersson.

  SHAME (THE SHAME) PREMIERED ONSeptember 29, 1968. The following day I made this entry in my workbook:

  I’m sitting on Faro Island, waiting. Just as I wished, I am totally isolated, and it feels rather good. Liv is in Sorrento at the festival. Yesterday, the film opened both in Stockholm and in Sorrento. I’m sitting here waiting for the reviews. I’m going to take the ferry at noon to Visby and buy the morning and evening papers at the same time.

  It feels good to do this alone. It is good not to have to show my face. Because I am tormented. It’s an incessant ache tinged with fear. I don’t know anything yet. Nobody has said anything. But intuitively I feel very depressed. Because I do believe that the reviews will be lukewarm when they aren’t clearly disparaging. And this time, especially, it will be difficult not to be affected by the criticism. Of course everyone would like to enjoy critical and public success all the time. But it has been a long time now for me. I have a feeling that I am being pushed aside. Things are quiet and very polite around me. It’s hard to breathe. How am I to go on?

  Finally, I couldn’t wait any longer. I called the main office of Svensk Filmindustri and asked to speak to the head of Public Relations. He was out on a coffee break. Instead, I spoke to his secretary:

  Oh, yes, she had not read the reviews yet, no. They were good, though, five stars in the evening paper Expressen, but nothing to quote, no. Yes, Liv was good, of course, though we know how they write.

  By this time I had a fever of 104 degrees and put down the receiver. My heart was beating as if it wanted to jump out of my mouth from shame, exhaustion, and a sense of ennui. All due to my desperation and hysteria. No, I am not particularly happy.

  Both passages show two things: 1) the agony of a movie director awaiting his reviews, and 2) his belief that he had made a good film.

  When I see Shame today, I find that it can be divided into two parts. The first half, which is about the events of the war, is bad. The second half, which is about the effects of war, is good. The first half is much worse than I had imagined; the second much better than I had remembered.

  There are bits and pieces of the first half that are all right. The movie begins well. The couple’s situation and background are effectively established. The good part of the film starts with the moment the war is over and the pain of the aftermath sets in. It begins in a potato field, where Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow move in oppressing silence.

  One might say that the authenticity of the second half is disturbed by an overblown scheme involving a wad of paper money that changes hands several times. This scheme reflects an influence from American dramaturgy of the 1950s.

  For a long time before making this film I had carried around the notion of trying to focus on the “little war,” the war that exists on the periphery where there is total confusion, and nobody knows what is actually going on. If I had been more patient when writing the script, I would hav depicted this “little war” in a better way. I did not have that patience.

  To tell the truth, I was exorbitantly proud of this film. I also felt I had made a contribution to the current social debate (the Vietnam war). I convinced myself that Shame was well made. I had suffered under the same delusion after finishing A Ship Bound for India. And the same thing would happen to me again later when making The Serpent’s Egg.

  To make a war film is to depict violence committed toward both groups and individuals. In American film, the depiction of violence has a long tradition. In Japan, it has developed into a masterful ritual, matchlessly choreographed.

  When I made Shame, I felt an intense desire to expose the violence of war without restraint. But my intentions and wishes were greater than my abilities. I did not understand that a modern portrayer of war needs a totally different fortitude and professional precision than what I could provide.

  Once the outer violence stops and the inner violence begins, Shame becomes a good film. When society can no longer function, the main characters lose their frame of reference. Their social relations cease. The people crumble. The weak man becomes ruthless. The woman, who had been the stronger, falls apart. Everything slips away into a dream play that ends on board the refugee boat. Everything is shown in pictures, as in a nightmare. In a nightmare, I felt at home. In the reality of war, I was lost.

  Shame: “The first half is much worse than I had imagined.”

&nbs
p; (During the whole screenwriting period, the story was called Dreams of Shame.)

  In other words, we are talking about a poorly constructed manuscript. The first half of the film is really nothing more than an endlessly drawn-out prologue that ought to have been over and done with in ten minutes. What happens later could have been built upon, fleshed out, and developed as much as was needed.

  I didn’t ever see that. I didn’t see it when I wrote the screenplay; I didn’t see it when I shot the film; I didn’t see it when I edited it. During that time I lived with the idea that Shame was self-evident and emotionally logical all the way through.

  That during the course of working one does not see anything wrong with the mechanics of the script is probably due to a self-protective reflex that functions throughout a long and complicated procedure. This defensive mechanism quiets the critical superego. With your self-critical inner voice hollering in your ear, shooting a film would probably become much too heavy and painful to bear.

  “The good part of the film starts the moment the war is over and the pain of the aftermath sets in.” With Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, and Liv Ullmann.

  THE PASSION OF ANNA (A PASSION) WAS MADEon Fårö Island during the fall of 1968 and carries traces of the winds that were blowing in those days both in the real world and in the world of film. In some respects, therefore, it looks very dated. In other ways it is powerful and shows a break with accepted film practices. I look at it with mixed feelings.

  On a superficial level it’s obvious to see, the hair and fashion styles of the actresses link the film to that time period. The difference between a dated film and a timeless one apparently is measured by the length of the skirts, and it cuts me to the quick when I see Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, two grown women, appearing in the childish, extreme miniskirts of the time. I seem to remember putting up a weak resistance, but, when confronted with the power of two women, I unfortunately gave in. That misfortune was not noticeable then but revealed itself later, like writing in invisible ink.