Ingmar Bergman Interviews Himself

Summer with Monika (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Summer with Monika, directed by Ingmar Bergman, has always inspired devoted admirers. In The 400 Blows, François Truffaut thought a press shot of Monika (Harriet Andersson) deserving of theft by his alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) (1959). Near the end of the 1950s, Jean-Luc Godard wrote numerous laudatory pieces about it. Recently, experts such as Alain Bergala and Antoine de Baecque have hailed it as a seminal achievement in the evolution of modern cinema. 

Bergman recalled it fondly throughout his life. He had a personal stake: when he fell in love with the film's lead, abandoning his wife and children for her.

Summer with Monika continues to be a film of extraordinary vibrancy and vigour – tempered with a sad, even painful perspective. We can see more clearly now how the dream of youthful passion carried out by Monika and Harry (Lars Ekborg) in their temporary rejection of a dreary Swedish society is constantly contradicted by the practical realities of money, ageing, inevitable disillusionment, and everyday mundanity. 

One of the film's continuing appeals is its portrayal of protracted island idyll in which the social world never completely disappears – but where the young lovers manage to escape far and deep enough into nature to live out their shared dream for a valuable time. 

This is what Godard responded to in 1958 when he claimed that Bergman's camera "seeks just one thing: to grasp the present moment at its most fugitive and delve deeply into it in order to endow it with the quality of eternity." Naturally, once Monika becomes pregnant, the reality-principle kicks in: marriage, work, and the event of childbirth.

For commentators both past and present, Andersson as Monika embodied the New Woman in 1950s and early 1960s European cinema. 

Laura Hubner's perceptive essay in the Criterion booklet draws a connection between the Italian neo-realism that the film recalls (in its often squalid detail) and the French Nouvelle Vague that the film anticipated in so many ways – most notably, in the withering look into camera that Monika/Andersson performs, which Doinel/Léaud recreates in the final shot of The 400 Blows.

When Godard lauded the film, he made another set of connections: Bergman retained, rather anachronistically, "devices dear to avant-gardists of the 1930s" (such as Louis Delluc, Dimitri Kirsanoff, and Jean Epstein), ranging from double exposures and water reflections to backlighting and montages devoted to the surrounding environment (city or island). And it is in these depopulated montages that Summer with Monika stakes a claim to a legacy much more recent than the Nouvelle Vague: here is the germ of contemporary contemplative cinema.

This self-interview by Ingmar Bergman first appeared in Filmnyheter, a publicity magazine issued by the Swedish production company Svensk Filmindustri, to coincide with the opening of Summer with Monika. It was translated by Birgitta Steene, author of several books on Ingmar Bergman.

What was it like making Monika?

I didn’t make Monika. [Source novel author and coscreenwriter Per Anders] Fogelström bred her in me and then, like an elephant, I was pregnant for three years, and last summer she was born with a big ballyhoo. Today, she is a beautiful and naughty child. I hope she will cause an emotional uproar and all sorts of reactions. I shall challenge any indifferent person to a duel!

A wild paternal love, indeed!

For most people, a film is a short-lived product, like soap, matches, or polished false teeth. But not for the film director. He lives with his opus (like the devil, he does) until opening night, when he unwillingly surrenders it to the public.

Does it have to be like that?

For me it does. A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.

There are also sensible directors.

Of course, sir. I have heard of several such individuals who are both wise and reasonable and who also behave almost like decent people, even when making a film.

And you despise them?

I don’t envy them. They have a tougher time than those of us who have lost or have never owned a pair of decency’s long underwear or the gold-rimmed glasses of critical reason or the rustling starched shirt of wise afterthought.

Poor film, poor actors, poor etc.!

Not at all. If you look carefully, you’ll see a little thing sticking out of my head.

Do you mean, sir, the tip on your beret?

Beret! What you, sir, call the tip on my beret is not a tip on a beret but a radar. With this radar, I make my movies, and it has never been inferior to the aforementioned underwear, glasses, or starched shirt.

A few strandings . . . in foggy waters . . . treacherous hidden rocks. Hmm!

Remember that technique improves over the years. Also, radar has its childhood diseases. But let’s talk about Monika!

From what I’ve heard, it includes the obligatory Swedish nude swimming.

I haven’t heard that nude swimming has become obligatory in Swedish filmmaking. But I think it should be.

Aha!

In a country where the climate seldom gives you an opportunity for anything but a tub bath, ice bath, or Finnish sauna—except possibly once or twice a year—we ought to be given, through the cinema, the illusion of some idyllic region where well-shaped young girls splash about as God created them, without getting goose bumps all the way down to their toes.

And so, Mr. Bergman, the nude swimming in your film has not provoked the production management?

Dr. Dymling [Carl Anders Dymling, Bergman’s producer at Svensk Filmindustri] has not raised any objections to those scenes. Per Anders Fogelström has found them to be in the spirit of his book. We actually thought it was fun to make them (except perhaps Harriet Andersson, who was freezing cold the whole time and had to be sawed or thawed loose, but who sacrificed herself for art).

So do you want to say anything with this film?

If we have to bore the readers with the so-called message of a film, then let’s make it brief. In four words and in Fogelströmian . . .

?

Get out! But return!

Mr. Bergman, you seem to believe that film and literature shouldn’t have anything to do with each other. But Monika is a novel! Isn’t it?

Now, if I feel like being inconsistent, that’s my own business and not meant to annoy people. In this case, the novel was actually a film synopsis long before it became a novel. Besides, Fogelström has been an understanding, loyal, and in all respects great colleague. He may not write with an ambition to achieve immortality, but whoever says anything depreciative about Fogelström [a popular writer] I’ll challenge to a du—

Any beautiful moment from the shooting of the film?

As always, one forgets the hard work and remembers the fun. In this case, the skerries. We—

Make it short!

One morning at six o’clock, we were on our way to location, the engine of our little boat, the Viola of Ornö, thumping across the still waters. The horizon at sea fused with the sky, the islets stood like floating octopuses in all that soft white. Up above, the fiery button of the sun was burning. It was warm and unusually still; there wasn’t even a swell, not a ripple. It was like eternity itself. It was like being in eternity. The smell of the sea, the quivering in the hull, the murmur around the stem, and the high silence—the summer of eternity.

And then what happened?

Nothing. That was it.

Ingmar Bergman: The Strength of Surrender

From the Life of the Marionettes (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

From The Life of the Marionettes is a semi-sequel to Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage, which had been released seven years previously, with a new cast (Robert Atzorn and Christine Buchegger) replacing Jan Malmjso and Bibi Andersson. Bergman drew on his cinematic and theatrical expertise (as a playwright as well as a director) to create a visual and narrative tour-de-force that equaled his finest experimental work of the 1960s.

Made during his enforced exile in Germany while facing tax accusations in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman's From the Life of the Marionettes is a devastating depiction of a marriage in crisis and a complicated psychological examination of a murder,  Peter, a businessman, fantasises about murdering his wife, Katarina, until a prostitute becomes his substitute victim. After the crime, Peter and Katarina's doctor and others try to explain what happened. This intriguing picture, which jumps back and forth in time, swings fluidly between seduction and repulsion, and the German ensemble is outstanding.

From the Life of the Marionettes is Bergman's only German film. Conceived in Sweden and written during a time of personal crisis, Bergman had been working in the German theatre and had started to feel comfortable about making a film in his non-native language. 

Writing on the genesis of the film in Images, My Life In Film, Bergman notes: 

“During my second year in Munich (in 1977), I had begun writing a story I called Love with No Lovers. It was heavy and formally fragmented, and it mirrored an upheaval that clearly had something to do with my exile. The setting was Munich, and it dealt, as did my silent movie dream, with a large amount of film segments that had been abandoned by the director.[...]

Nobody in Sweden wanted to invest a penny in Love with No Lovers, even though I was willing to put my own money into it. I spoke with Horst Wendlandt, who was the German coproducer of The Serpent's Egg, but he had been burned by that experience. Dino De Laurentiis declined as well, and it was soon evident that this large, expensive project would not get off the ground. That was all there was to it. I had been around and knew that the more expensive your projects were, the greate the possibility of refusal.

I buried the project without bitterness and didn't think about it further. Later, in order to foster and strengthen the ensemble at the Residenz Theater, I thought it might help if we made a television play together. So I carved the story about Peter and Katarina out of the buried Love with no lovers.

There are a few scenes left from the original script, but, by and large, From the Life of the Marionettes is fresh.

The film is based on concrete observations and memories surrounding a theme that had haunted me for a long time: how two human beings who are insolubly and painfully united in love at the same time tryp to rip themselves free of their shakle.

The main characters of From the Life of the Marionettes, Peter and Katarina, appeared previously in Scenes from a Marriage, in which they acted as counterpoints to Johan and Marianne in the first episode.”

The following article by S. Masukor describes Bergman’s examination of the modern male psyche in Marionettes in relation to Bergman’s earlier Hour of the Wolf.

The shocking murder of a woman opens Ingmar Bergman’s From the Life of the Marionettes (1980) and frames its plot, which explores an unceasingly gruesome vision of male brutality. Peter (Robert Atzorn), a bored middle-class man, simultaneously displaces and fulfills his vivid fantasies of killing his wife, Katarina (Christine Buchegger), by murdering a sex worker, also called Katarina (Rita Russek), and then violating her corpse. Twelve years earlier, Bergman had anticipated this killing in Hour of the Wolf (1968), another film that culminates in male violence. During a sleepless night, Johan (Max von Sydow) confesses to his wife, Alma (Liv Ullmann), his murder of a young boy. By the end of the film, Johan has shot Alma in a rage and disappeared, abandoning her and her unborn child.

The men in these films are similarly consumed by desire for domination and fear of losing control: both express their anxieties about masculine identity in violence; both are deeply homophobic but possibly gay and incapable of being close to women who are stronger and more open to life than they are. Yet by the time he made From the Life of the Marionettes, while in self-imposed exile in Munich, Bergman seems to have refined his notion of how these anxieties are weaponized: the confused, formless anger that propels Johan to madness in Hour of the Wolf has in Peter become directed and focused, his targeting of women made explicit. While each film is formally masterful—Bergman’s staging is impeccable, and Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer on both, uses light dynamically to create striking shots—their visual beauty does not mask the aggression and brutality enacted by their male protagonists.

So how are we to watch these films—in particular, how are women to watch such unrelenting examples of male anger and entitlement, and what can we draw from the portrayals of the women who incur this wrath? In her 1996 essay collection Reel to Real, the feminist theorist bell hooks, addressing dominance in heterosexual relationships, observes that “there are moments when submission is a gesture of agency and power, [and] a distinction has to be made between conscious surrender, an act of choice, and the submission of someone who is victimized and without choice.” For hooks, love is something that can fortify the person who loves, regardless of whether it is reciprocated. Throughout From the Life of the Marionettes and Hour of the Wolf are moments of such conscious and complete love, offered at some point by each of the three women; the two wives, Katarina and Alma, at least, gain strength from them. As the men disintegrate both mentally and physically—hunching into their clothes, their faces twisted into expressions of pain—the women, independent and engaged with the world in ways their husbands are not, do not diminish.

The key idea under investigation in From the Life of the Marionettes, adapted for German television from a longer script called Love with No Lovers, is the intertwining of passion and contempt—a theme that turns up time and again in Bergman’s work—which makes it difficult for either party in a relationship to break free. Through a series of vignettes, we observe the unraveling marriage of Peter and Katarina Egermann in the days leading up to Peter’s brutal murder and rape of the other Katarina. The Egermanns were first introduced as peripheral characters (played by Jan Malmsjö and Bibi Andersson) in Scenes from a Marriage, representing an alternative trajectory—they are unhappy but stay together—to that of the series’ central couple, Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson). Like Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage, Katarina Egermann is a more modern woman than the female characters in Bergman’s earlier films. Described disparagingly by the sleazy psychiatrist Mogens Jensen (Martin Benrath) as a “career woman”—a perspective that does not stop him from trying to sleep with her—Katarina represents an independence that thwarts Peter’s idea of what a wife should be. But while Peter harbors fantasies of murdering his spouse and at one point kicks her roughly in the face after he has been talked out of a suicide attempt, Katarina remains simultaneously autonomous and open to their relationship. Bergman here gives his female protagonist a fuller humanity and a better aptitude for life than he does her male counterpart—something that had been increasingly the case since the early days of his career. Unlike Hour of the Wolf’s Alma, who is partially reliant on Johan for her livelihood and becomes independent only after he disappears, Katarina does not need Peter, and continues to thrive once he is gone.

Yet this freedom is granted only to the married Katarina. Her sex-worker double, who offers one of Marionettes’ most startling images of conscious empathy, is denied any form of renewal. The scene between Peter and this Katarina is shown twice: the first image of the film—shot in color, as is the final scene—is of her shoulder. Then we see her open, curious face and her finger tracing the outline of Peter’s face—a Bergman motif. The first time the scene occurs, it is a generous, tender image that is then disrupted by Peter’s sudden violence. But the second time it plays out, just before the end of the film (and now, like the rest of the movie, in black and white), it becomes clear how radical this gesture is. By now, we know that she has felt unsettled by him. “Something about you is strange,” she says. “One of the girls wanted to stay here and keep an eye on things. Maybe it was stupid of me to send her away.” Despite this, she chooses to be empathetic. The fact that the film plays out conservatively and kills her off, in the long-standing cinematic tradition of punishing prostitutes, does not diminish the symbolic power of her action: it is not because she has chosen compassion that Katarina is murdered but because the system in which she is caught offers no escape. As Peter repeats throughout the film: “All ways are barred.”

Like From the Life of the Marionettes, Hour of the Wolf portrays the spiral into madness of its male protagonist, which cannot be halted by his wife’s compassion and generosity. The moody, secretive Johan, a successful painter going through a bad patch, and his good-hearted wife, Alma, have been spending the summer on a remote island. (A similar location, the island Fårö-, would soon serve as the setting for Shame and The Passion of Anna, two other films from the late sixties featuring Ullmann and von Sydow as tortured couples—and the scenes that bookend it, in which the present-day Alma gives a documentary-style report directly to the camera on the events of the plot, prefigure similarly self-referential moments in those films.) The pair’s time on the island ought to be a pleasant one, but Johan is haunted by dark visions that fracture his sanity.

Hour of the Wolf is constructed in such a way that the audience can never be sure which actions are part of the material world and which take place within Johan’s visions. His murder of the boy, for example, could be read as a vision or as a memory, an indeterminacy effected by the image itself. The struggle between child and man is presented with a tangible vividness and attention to detail, yet it is shot in the overexposed, high-contrast cinematography that marks many of Johan’s hallucinations. When the couple visit the castle of their neighbor, the Baron von Merkens (Josephson), for a dinner party, von Merkens’s ghoulish guests chatter chaotically at Johan, their faces contorted under a hard, unforgiving light. Johan begins to break under the pressure, but Alma remains strong. As she and Johan walk back across the moonlit island, she tells him, “I’m not going to run away, no matter what they try,” even though she’s sure something terrible is about to happen. “I’ll stay,” she says, “I will. I’ll stay.” Although ultimately the power of her love is not enough to save him, like Katarina Egermann in Marionettes, she accepts that fact and moves on. Without Johan, there are no ghosts, and Alma is free to live with her soon-to-be-born child.

Addressing the hallucinatory figures who haunt him into madness near the end of Hour of the Wolf, Johan says, “The mirror has been shattered. But what do the shards reflect?” In Images, Bergman draws a connection between this identity crisis and the one sufferred by Peter in From the Life of the Marionettes. But the films offer no indication that these men can succeed in reassembling their broken psyches. Rather, it is the female characters here who have been able to make—in their fierce holding on to their capacities to love, within and against the structures of a patriarchy that is unrelentingly abusive—radical gestures of will and resilience. The men in these films have lost their senses of self, but the women have learned that, to return to hooks, “to love is to endure.”

– S. Masukor: Hour of the Wolf and From the Life of the Marionettes: The Strength of Surrender

Article here

Bergman: On Writing, Demons and Childhood Secrets

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman's swan song Fanny and Alexander was a sumptuous epic of the bourgeois family. At once charming, unsettling and colourful, it challenges the director's reputation as a gloomy, doom merchant, and makes a wonderful introduction to the great director. However, it also was conceived as Bergman’s last film, in which Bergman made peace with his demons and looks back, through the eyes of children, on the great themes of his early masterpieces.

It is the story two siblings who are raised in a dysfunctional environment. Alexander struggles against his stepfather's coldness  and in certain places, the film is as dark and as terrifying as anything you encounter in Cries and Whispers or Through a Glass Darkly. By the time the film reaches its finale Fanny and Alexander feels like his most mature, insightful, and well-realized film. 

Bergman was notorious throughout his early career of facing the consequences of a world without God, only to conclude that everyone is God, and that humanity builds God in their own image, for better or worse. It is significant to note that the God that appears in the closing moments of Fanny and Alexander is shown to be a cheap dummy, whose puppet-master sets it in motion. 

Bergman gives central focus to a boy grieving over his father's death, the source of the hate and anger that he turns outwards onto the universe. Then he is implicitly his own director; a boy who manipulates the world of theatre, its characters, puppets, to make sense of the meaningless of the universe. 

Bergman's own youth provides the contrast between the two worlds of Fanny and Alexander, the vibrant theatrical family and the severe order of the bishop's residence. On the one hand, his youth was distinguished by 'good humour, plays, songs, music, and poetry reading'; on the other hand, it was defined by 'austerity, moralising, denial, rigidity, and violence'. 

The film's autobiographical elements, characters based on family members, the Ekdahl residence being a replica of Bergman's grandmother's Uppsala residence, and the likeness between Alexander and the young Bergman is undeniable, along with his interests in the puppet theatre and the magical lantern. 

Fanny and Alexander is often viewed as a distillation of Bergman's career, and it indeed has clear echoes from his earlier works: a concern with religion, family, the role of the artist. In addition, Fanny and Alexander takes place in a theatrical setting, with several allusions to dramatists dear to Bergman. Fanny and Alexander is a film infused with a love of the theatre. It is no surprise that in his final film, then, and despite his considerable accomplishments as a filmmaker, Bergman places the world of the theatre at the heart of the story.

Jörn Donner was Managing Director of the Swedish Film Institute between 1978 and 1982 during which he produced Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982). In 1984 the movie won a total of four Academy Awards including the award for best foreign language film. The following dialogue is taken from an interview Donner conducted with Bergman in Stockholm during three days in November, 1997. Aged 79 at the time, Bergman reflects on his writing method, his childhood and the ‘demon of suspicion’. 

Ingmar Bergman: When I am going to sleep at night, I can walk through my grandmother's apartment, room by room, and remember everything in the most minute detail, where different things were, what they looked like, what colour they were. I can also remember the light, winter light or summer light, through the windows, the pictures on the walls. The apartment was furnished before the turn of the century and contained a huge number of things. That was the bourgeois style of the day, not a millimetre was to remain uncovered; there had to be things everywhere. It's really strange. My grandmother died when I was twelve and I haven't been there since I was about perhaps ten or eleven. But I remember it in detail. The things there in the apartment, they still have a magical content and significance to me. I made a lot of use of that in Fanny and Alexander. If any conclusions are to be drawn from that, Jörn, then it may well be that in that way, the whole of my creativity is really tremendously childish, all based on my childhood. In less than a second, I can take myself back into my childhood. I think everything I've done in general, anything of any value, has its roots there. 

Or dialectically, it is a dialogue with childhood...

Jörn Donner: Quite often, you’ve been considerably more experimental in films than in the theatre.

Ingmar Bergman: Films demand their form, and staged plays theirs. I’ve never simply decided that now I shall experiment, but everything has just been given the form I’ve thought it ought to have. I’m not at all interested in whether I’m experimenting or not.

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: But is it some kind of intuition? Who the hell would be crazy enough to write a script such as Cries and Whispers?

Ingmar Bergman: [laughter] It’s like this: it was necessary to write it in that way, or Persona, or the one I’ve just written, Faithless. They’ve found their form simply because it was necessary to write them in that way – to do them in that way.

Jörn Donner: You didn’t think about the drama...

Ingmar Bergman: No, in general I wasn’t thinking about anything.

Jörn Donner: That’s not what I meant. But to go back in time, to Sawdust and Tinsel or Prison. Didn’t you think them out either?

Ingmar Bergman: No, I didn’t. Well, not Sawdust and Tinsel, but Prison – I suppose that was the first time I wrote my own script. I was quite crazy with delight and had to get everything that I had been walking around and thinking about into it. Without my really making any effort, it became... peculiar.

Jörn Donner: I suppose you don’t want to say you’re an intuitive writer.

Ingmar Bergman: But wasn’t it you who said that when you begin writing, you don’t know how it will turn out?

Jörn Donner: That’s right, of course, yes.

Cries and Whispers (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman: It’s just intuition, and it’s the same when I start writing, I have a kind of basic scene, a beginning. I usually say that in Cries and Whispers I went on for very long, and had a scene with four women in white in a red room.

Jörn Donner: And that was all, generally speaking.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it was only that. And then I started thinking about why they were there and what they said to each other, that kind of thing. It was mysterious. It kept coming back again and again, and I couldn’t get that scene to come out right.

Jörn Donner: A kind of dream image.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, you know what it’s like. Then you begin winding in a long thread that appears from somewhere or other, and the thread can suddenly snap. That’s the end of that, but then all of a sudden, it’s a whole ball.

Jörn Donner: Have threads often snapped for you?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, lots of times.

Jörn Donner: But not the kind of threads you’ve spent weeks working on, or in manuscript form.

Ingmar Bergman: No, not once I’ve started writing. By then I’ve already done my working books. In them, I’ve written endless things, masses of stuff, but once I’ve started on the script, then I know what I’m doing.

Prison (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: What are your working books about?

Ingmar Bergman: Absolutely everything.

Jörn Donner: So the script grows out of the working book?

Ingmar Bergman: Exactly. Well, it’s unfinished, completely. Keeping working books is fun.

Jörn Donner: Have you always done that?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, always. At first, I didn’t really have the time. But when I did have the time, yes. Often when I was younger and had to earn money for all my wives and children, then I had to begin on the script, so to speak, bang, directly, I mean. But now I can lie on the sofa and play about with my thoughts and have fun with them, looking at images, doing research and so on. All that’s great fun. My working books are also quite illegible to anyone else but me. But then the actual writing begins out of these notebooks.

Jörn Donner: And it goes quickly?

Ingmar Bergman: Relatively quickly because it’s so boring. It’s hellishly boring, just like when you do a theatre performance and sit there sketching out the scenes, how the actors are to move and stand, when they’re to say what, and all that – hellishly dreary. When I’m writing the script, I write a certain number of pages a day.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

 Jörn Donner: Would you consider writing in any other way but by hand?

Ingmar Bergman: No, never.

Jörn Donner: Why not?

Ingmar Bergman: I can’t type. [laughter] I’ve tried.

Jörn Donner: Is it a physical thing?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it’s a physical thing, profoundly unsatisfactory. I use a sort of notepad to write on. They existed when I was employed as a slave scriptwriter at Svensk Filmindustri in 1942. You were given a kind of lined yellow notepad. Then you had to write by hand and with a broad-nibbed fountain pen. Since then, I’ve always written on that yellow paper and those notepads.

Jörn Donner: Where do you get them?

Ingmar Bergman: About twenty or so years ago it turned out that they weren’t making them anymore, so I had them make eight-hundred pads especially for me. And I’ve still got a few left. I think they’ll just about last me out.

Jörn Donner: I should damned well think so.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman: I write with a ballpoint pen nowadays, but not just any old damned pen. It has to be a very special ballpoint with a very fat tip. It’s the actual writing, although my handwriting is so difficult to read, that gives me pleasure. I like writing by hand. It is very satisfying. In that I always write on the same kind of pad, I know how much I’ve written, you see. And I never write for more than three hours. When the three hours are up, even if I’m in the middle of a scene or wherever the hell I am, I stop working. I stop for the day. Because it’s so boring. But the working book is fun. That’s the actual creative process. Writing the script is just the arranging process.

Jörn Donner: Do you think you have some sort of ritualistic superstition about these notepads and pens, where you work, and those three hours, or is it just a routine?

Ingmar Bergman: No, it’s a ritual. I have very precise rituals. Get up early and eat breakfast, go for a walk, don’t read the paper, don’t talk on the telephone with anyone. Sit down at the desk. My desk has to be tidy, nothing lying about in a mess on it. I am maniacally pedantic when it comes to what it has to look like if I’m to be able to sit working at it. Then when I’ve been writing for about three quarters of an hour, I take a break. I’ve usually got a backache by then, so I walk all through my house, or go and look at the sea, or something like that for a quarter of an hour. Writing scripts is a ‘compulsory exercise’.

Jörn Donner: A kind of battle? Against...

Ingmar Bergman: Against disorder, sloppiness, lack of discipline.

Jörn Donner: You never lacked that.

Ingmar Bergman: Well, no, I’ve never lacked discipline, but if I had, things would have really fallen apart, I assure you. Because I’m constantly battling against my lack of discipline. You just can’t be undisciplined in my profession, you just can’t. That’s why I’ve become so frightfully pedantic, so trying to so many people.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: There’s a strange contrast between two things: in both your films and your autobiography you describe your demons with a capital D, while on the other hand in all the pictures of you at work in the theatre and on films, you always seem to be in a good mood.

Ingmar Bergman: I think it’s part of a director’s duty to be in a good mood at work. To create a kind of cheerful atmosphere around the actual exercising of the profession. In the workroom, too.

Jörn Donner: A sense of comfort?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, and security. It’s terribly important. When I was young, I didn’t understand that at all, and took it all with me into my working life, my hangovers and troubles with women, all my shortcomings and stupidities. I dragged them with me into the studio or on stage and raced around like a demon creating hideously unpleasant and uncomfortable situations.
But there’s also something called the educational outburst, that you sometimes have to make use of. These are enormously premeditated attacks of rage. And they are a precision bombing, because that is what’s needed. Things mustn’t be lovely and cozy in a studio, or on stage. And the people we work with, they’re so often tremendously ambitious, so tremendously sensitive, that although we’re playing a game, although it looks like fun – we’re joking and telling funny stories and we relax and so on – they still feel it’s a matter of life and death. And when I say life and death, I actually mean just that.

Jörn Donner: Is it also a matter of keeping up a certain tempo?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, to a tremendous degree. For instance, when you start in the film studio, at nine in the morning, then you start at nine in the morning. The first scene is to be shot at ten. Somehow you have to start punctually. A day shouldn’t start with endless discussion. To me, chatter is largely an abomination, because then there are one or two people, perhaps more involved, while a whole lot of others are standing around, even more in the theatre – should be outside of rehearsals and outside the studio.

Persona (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: How have you managed to create a distance between what you yourself call your demons and a film studio or a theatre?

Ingmar Bergman: My demons... well, they’ve somehow got to be harnessed. They have to be there, because I suffer from, for instance – how shall I put it – the demon of suspicion. I am an immensely suspicious person.

Jörn Donner: And a hypochondriac, too, perhaps?

Ingmar Bergman: Let’s not keep on counting my demons, for Christ’s sake, but I think they ought to be present. They have to stand at attention, on parade, so that I can convey to the actors how suspicion functions and how hypochondria functions, in gestures, tone of voice or in movements. Obviously the demons have to be brought into it. It would be tremendously risky not to have them with you, but they have to be kept very much under control.

You see, as long as I’m inside the studio, or in the theatre, then that’s a universe controlled by me. Then the demons are also under control. Everything’s under control. But the moment all the lights go off and the camera stops, and I leave by the stage door, or the rehearsal is over, then I no longer have control over the demons. Then it is no longer my universe, so to speak, but the often unpredictable universe that I try to control, but which has constantly bedevilled my efforts...

- Extracted from ‘Jörn Donner: Demons And Childhood Secrets: An Interview’. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate. Originally published in Grand Street 17, no. 2 (Fall 1998).

Ingmar Bergman: Dialogue on Film

Cries and Whispers (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman held a seminar with the Fellows of the Center for Advanced Film Studies on October 31, 1975 in which he openly discussed his approach to writing, his preparations for shooting and his relations with his company of actors while filming. 

He had recently completed the masterly ‘Cries and Whispers’ – set in a manor house at the turn of the century where a spinster (Harriet Andersson) is dying, attended by her two sisters and devoted servant. 

Superbly photographed by Sven Nykvist in an elemental style with scarlet backgrounds which give a tremendous force to the anguish of the characters. Bergman was later to comment that ‘all my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay, I say that I have thought of the colour red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half-bird, half-fish. But inside the dragon everything was red.’ 

The film is lustrous and hypnotic with the power of a dream. Light breaks in occasionally from beyond illuminating the characters and their dark lives until the final breakthrough into the exhilarating openness of the world outside.

The following interview is one of Bergman’s most revealing on the manner and process of his artistic work.

Please tell us how you work with actors.

BERGMAN: It can be a very complicated question, and it can be a very simple question. If you want to know exactly how I work together with my actors I can tell you in one minute: I just use my intuition. My only instrument in my profession is my intuition. When I work at the theatre or in the studio with my actors I just feel; I don’t know how to handle the situation, how to collaborate with the artists, with the actors. One thing is very important to me: that an actor is always a creative human being, and what your intuition has to find out is how to make free – do you understand what I mean? – to make free the power, the creative power in the actor or the actress.

I can’t explain how it works. It has nothing to do with magic; it has a lot to do with experience. But I think when I work together with the actors I try to be like a radar – I try to be wide open – because we have to create something together. I give them some stimulations and suggestions and they give me a lot of stimulations and suggestions, and if this fantastic wave of giving and taking is cut off for any reason I have to feel it and I have to look for the reason – good heavens, what has happened? – and I know if we try to work with those waves cut off it is terrifying; it is the hardest, toughest job that exists, both for me and the actors. Some directors work under aggression: the director is aggressive and the actors are aggressive, and they get marvelous results. But to me it is impossible. I have to be in contact, in touch with my actors the whole time. Because what we first of all create when we start a work together is an atmosphere of security around us. And it’s not only me who creates that atmosphere; we are together to create it.

But you know, all those situations, all those decisions, all those very difficult decisions, you have to make hundreds of them every day – I never think. It’s never an intellectual process, it’s just intuition. Afterward you can think it over – What was this? What was that? You can think over every step you have made.

Do you write in the same way?

BERGMAN: Yes, yes, yes. The best time in the writing, I think, is the time when I have no ideas about how to do it. I can lie down on the sofa and I can look into the fire and I can go to the seaside and I can just sit down and do nothing. I just play the game, you know, and it’s wonderful and I make some notes and I can go on for a year. Then, when I have made the plan, the difficult job starts: I have to sit down on my ass every morning at ten o’clock and write the screenplay. And then something very, very strange happens: often the personalities in my scripts don’t want the same thing I want. If I try to force them to do what I want them to do, it will always be an artistic catastrophe. But if I let them free to do what they want and what they tell me, it’s OK.

So I think that is the only way to handle it, because all intellectual decisions must come afterward. You have seen Cries and Whispers, yes? For half a year, I went around and I just had a picture inside about three women walking around in a red room in white clothes and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t understand these damned women – I tried to throw it away, I tried to write it down, I tried to find out what they said to each other, because they whispered. And suddenly it came out that they were watching another woman who was dying in the next room, and then it started. But it took about a year. It always starts with a picture with some kind of tension in it, and then slowly it comes up.

In your films you often confuse reality and dreams, and I wonder if you feel that they are of equal importance.

BERGMAN: You know, you can’t find in any other art, and you can’t create a situation that is so close to dreaming as cinematography when it is at its best. Think only of the time gap: you can make things as long as you want, exactly as in a dream; you can make things as short as you want, exactly as in a dream. As a director, a creator of the picture, you are like a dreamer: you can make what you want, you can construct everything. I think that is one of the most fascinating things that exists.

I think also the reception for the audience of a picture is very, very hypnotic. You sit there in a completely dark room, anonymous, and you look at a lightened spot in front of you and you don’t move. You sit and you don’t move and your eyes are concentrated on that white spot on the wall. That is some sort of magic. I think it’s also magic that two times every frame comes and stands still for twenty-four parts of a second and then it darkens two times; a half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn’t that fascinating? That is magic. It’s quite different when you watch the television: you sit at home, you have light around you, you have people you know around you, the telephone is ringing, you can go out and have a cup of coffee, the children are making noise, I don’t know what – but it is absolutely another situation.

We are in the position to work with the most fascinating medium that exists in the world because like music we go straight to the feeling – not over the intellect – we go straight to the feeling, as in music. Afterward we can start to work with our intellect. If the picture is good, if the suggestions from the creator of the picture are strong enough, they’ll give you thoughts afterward; you’ll start to think; they are intellectually stimulating.

After you have written a script, do you continue to develop the characters during the shooting?

BERGMAN: No. You know, I have always worked with trained actors; I have never worked with amateurs. An amateur can be himself always and you can put him in situations that give the situation a third dimension, as Vittorio De Sica did inThe Bicycle Thief [a 1947 classic of Italian “neorealism"], but if you work with trained actors you must know exactly what you are going to do with the parts. We make all the discussions before and then we work in the studio, giving each other suggestions. But the whole time we must have in mind what we meant. And it’s very dangerous to go away and suddenly start to improvise. You can improvise, of course, in the studio, but if you improvise you have to be very prepared, because to improvise on an improvisation is always shit. If you are very prepared and know how to do it, you can go back if your improvisation suddenly one day fades away, which it does. Of course it does. Inspiration, enthusiasm, everything like that is beautiful, but I don’t like it. When we are in the studio we have to be very strict.

What is your relation to the camera? Do you feel you have to overcome the technical limitations of the camera?

BERGMAN: If intuition is our mental instrument, the camera is our physical instrument. I think the camera is erotic. It is the most exciting little machine that exists. To me, just to work together with my cameraman, Sven Nykvist, to see a human face with the camera and with a zoom to come closer, to see the scene, to see the face changing, it’s the most fascinating thing that exists. The choreography of the actors in relation to the camera is very important. If the actor feels that he is in a good position, in a logical position, he can be with his back to the camera; it doesn’t matter. The camera has to be the best friend of the actors, and the actors have to be secure with our handling of the camera. They must feel that we are taking care of them.

Are there many young directors here? Very good. We who are directors must never forget that we are behind the camera and the actor is in front of the camera; he is nude, his soul is nude. If he has confidence in us, we have enormous responsibility. We have something fantastic: we have somebody in our hands and we can destroy him or we can help him in his creative job. To be behind the camera is never difficult, but to be in front of the camera is always a challenge, a difficulty, to be there with your face and your body and all the limitations you have in your soul and all the limitations you feel of your face and your movements, I don’t know what. What is strange is that we must not lie to the actors; we have to be absolutely true to them. Better actors like the truth more.

When is the moment you stage the movement or position of camera? When I read the screenplays you write, they always say only what the actors are saying, a bit like a play. When is the moment you state, “The camera will be here"?

BERGMAN: The evening before. When I come home in the evening I just sit down with the script and I read the next day’s schedule very carefully. Then I make up my mind about it and I just note the choreography of the actors and the camera. And then in the early morning when I meet Sven – you know, we have worked so many years together – we just very shortly, in five minutes, go through the scene, and I tell him about my ideas for different positions of the camera and the different positions of the actors and the atmosphere of the whole scene. Then we can go on the whole day; it is not necessary to have any discussions. He is a marvelous man. He is very silent and very shy. He is nice. And suddenly everything is there – without any complications – and I can look in the camera and everything I wanted is there.

Do you rehearse with the actors on the set before you plan your shots?

BERGMAN: No, never. That is a very good question. Because if you rehearse with trained actors they go from the mood of intuition to what they are trained to, to stage acting every evening. It’s very difficult. If you go on rehearsing with the actors too much, more than just to learn their lessons, and if you rehearse with them several days, some new process in the actors’ minds starts. An intellectual process, I think, and that process can be very good, but it’s very dangerous for filming because you have something in his eyes suddenly, some sort of “Now I do that“ and "I do that" and “I do that." He’s conscious of what he’s doing. He has to do it intuitively.

Just before you start filming, when you get to the set, you said you know as little about the film as the actors do.

BERGMAN: But remember, I have written the script. I have lived with this script perhaps for one or two years. The preparation for the next day, in details, I wait with it as long as possible. Of course, when I made The Magic Flute [his film of Mozart’s opera] we had to prepare everything before.

You use women as your main characters quite a lot, and I was wondering how you relate to them, how you identify with them? Your male characters aren’t very much in the foreground.

BERGMAN: I like more to work with women. I have many good friends who are actors and I like tremendously to work together with them, but in filmmaking it’s a job for good nerves and I think the women have much better nerves than men have. It’s so. I think the problems very often are the common problems. They are not, on the first hand, women; they are human beings. And God forgive me, but I have the feeling that the prima donnas always are male. I think it has to do with our whole social life and the male part and the female part that they have to play, and it’s very difficult to be an actor; it’s not so difficult to be an actress in our society.

Would you just talk a little more about what you say to an actor? Do you do exercises with them?

BERGMAN: No, no, no, no. Good heavens, no. I say nothing. I promise.

Do you tell them the message of the film?

BERGMAN: No, good heavens, no. No, no, no, no. I don’t know anything about messages or symbols or things like that. Sometimes when I have the message everything goes wrong. So we don’t talk about those things. We just talk professionally: “Be careful. Be slower. Don’t be in a hurry. Listen." You know, the most important of all is the ear – the ear for the director and the ear for the actors. Listen to each other. Very often when I see a scene I just close my eyes and listen, because if it sounds right it also looks right. It’s very strange.

Now we have only a minute to conclude this, to me, wonderful meeting, but I wanted just to add something. Perhaps it sounds like an old uncle, but I am, so it doesn’t matter. May I give you an advice?

Yes, please.

BERGMAN: It is a relief to me to know that if I have an intention, if I have a passion and an obsession, if I want to tell somebody something and if I want to touch somebody, the film helps me. But if I have nothing to say and I just want to make a film, I don’t make the film. It’s so stimulating, the craftsmanship of filmmaking is so terribly stimulating, dangerous, and obsessing, so you can be very tempted...but if you have nothing to come with, try to be honest with yourself and don’t make the picture. If you have something to come with, if you have emotion and passion, a picture in your head, a tension – even if you aren’t very technical – the strange thing is that having worked on the script and having worked with the camera for days and days, suddenly when you have cut it together, the thing you wanted to tell is there.

I have a very good example, Antonioni’s L’Avventura (Italy, 1960). The picture is a mess – he had no idea where to put the camera; he had no money; the actors went away; I think he had enormous problems the whole time – but he wanted to tell us something about the loneliness of the human being, and I can see this picture time after time and I don’t know what touches me most: how he succeeds without knowing how to do it or what he wants to say. That is very important; that is the most important of all. You have to have something to come with, to give other people.

Picturemaking is some sort of responsibility, that is what I think.

– Originally published in American Film, January-February 1976

Ingmar Bergman: On Art and War

Shame (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

‘Ingmar Bergman’s simple, masterly vision of normal war and what it does to survivors. Set a tiny step into the future, the film has the inevitability of a common dream. Liv Ullmann is superb in the demanding central role – one that calls for emotional involvements with her husband (Max von Sydow) and her lover (Gunnar Björnstrand). One of Bergman’s greatest films, this is one of the least known.’

                                                                                                                      – Pauline Kael




‘Bergman’s magisterial confrontation with war, set in a characteristically ambivalent decor, either a peaceful farm somewhere in Sweden or a landscape from Goya secreting intimations of disaster. Here live a man and wife, indifferent to the war until it arrives on their doorstep to strip their lives to the bone. Presenting war with shattering power as a blindly destructive force, Bergman uses it brilliantly as a background to the real pain: the way the couple are forced to look at each other, and to realise that the only honest feeling they have about their relationship is shame. It ends with one of the cinema’s most awesomely apocalyptic visions: not the cheeriest of films, but a masterpiece.’

                                                                                                        – Tom Milne, Time Out


‘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....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....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.’

                                                                       – Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film

One of Bergman’s most underrated works, Shame has however been highly praised by critics as one of Bergman’s most significant films and is noted for its resonance with contemporary political events, in particular the Vietnam war.

Bergman’s film is rooted in his extraordinary sequence of 1960s chamber dramas, albeit in a different form and cloaked in a more political aspect. Following the modernist experiments of Persona and Hour of the Wolf; Shame is a more subdued “realist” work. And while Shame does focus on a central pairing, Bergman this time employs a larger cast of characters in the story.

Shame is something of a summation of Bergman’s career. His celebrated partnership with cameraman Sven Nykvist, editor Ulla Ryghe, his established ensemble of actors, are all on display here and fundamental to the film’s success. Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann give key, masterly performances in the lead roles, while Gunnar Björnstrand is present in a superbly restrained performance.

Prior to the sudden intrusion of armed violence into the film, we are witness to a more intimate domestic catastrophe, the marital problems between Eva and Jan. The detailed early scenes of a marriage under strain are skilfully managed mixing buried conflict with affection and frustration, as we simply observe a couple going about their daily business seeing how they interact at any given time.

When the external world of military conflict intrudes into this couple’s seething domestic life Bergman switches to more handheld camera, zoom and jump effects to accentuate the realism of war as it breaks through into the more formal chamber drama. This is accentuated by the film’s bold use of sound, mixing war speeches with general war noise and the lack of a traditional film score. 

Shame is a genuinely political work engaging with issues  of occupation, violence and complicity in a typically “Bergmanesque” way, as Bergman the director finds moral complexity and crisis amidst the rubble of social collapse.

The film reaches a crescendo of cruelty and murder, carefully predicated, yet devastating in all its inevitability and foreboding. The final images, in which Jan and Eva await likely death in a fishing boat surrounded by a tide of corpses are amongst the most searing in Bergman’s entire oeuvre. 

Shame takes Bergman’s relentless preoccupation with personal relations, privilege and art, into a wartime sphere of survival and occupation, crossing the personal and the worldly, where the reality of pervasive violence can no longer be kept at a distance.

‘The Shame’ is Ingmar Bergman’s 30th film – a film in which improvisation has played a major part. ‘But improvisation must be prepared for,’ says Bergman.

A November noon; a small room in the Svensk Filmindustri studios. Ingmar Bergman, ensconced in a beautiful, baroque armchair, talks. He is interviewed by Take One’s Swedish correspondent, Lars-Olof Löthwall.

Q: During production of ‘The Shame’, you made certain minor alterations from time to time. Previously, the manuscript has been Holy Scripture to you, isn’t that so?

A: No, actually I worked in this way with Persona. With Persona, I had ample time, I had an ensemble of virtually two characters, and it cost nothing to begin experimenting, to try improvising.

But the basis for all improvisation must be preparation. If I haven’t prepared, I can’t improvise. If I’ve made careful preparations I can always improvise. Then I know I have something to fall back on. What I detest is formlessness. That terrifies me. It is seldom that mere formlessness in a work of art conveys anything vivid. More often it gives an impression of effort. But a combination of improvisation and planning – that’s good.

Q: You shot quite lengthy sequences in ‘The Shame’ which you didn’t at first think were suitable.

A: I’ve always done so, that has been my practice for the last ten to fifteen years. You see, one has to begin somewhere in a film; when you do, you’re likely to be far out from the centre of eventual interest, you find yourself disoriented. No matter how well you prepare, you don’t really know how a film’s going to look when you’ve finished it. Above all, you’re not sure of the tone, and that’s tremendously important...for which reason I always have a margin of at least a week for retakes, usually at the tail end of the production...

When we begin a film, the actors know as little about it as I do. Usually I overwork them, as well as myself, in the first week. I’m looking for something. All the time, in this first medley of images I’m in search of some strong, key expression. Now, if you try forcing this into existence by an effort of will, your work of art will be dead and thin.

Q: When you’ve written your manuscript and it’s ready for you to start shooting, it’s pretty well set up as a visual continuity. Do you work in such a way with your imagination that you can then – if one may express this in a banal way – close your eyes and see the film as a sequence of pictures?

A: No. Well, bits and pieces of it, yes. But it would be intolerable, for me and for those working with me, if, at every moment, I were to try and shape the film by force, if I insisted on a sequence of detailed, preconceived pictures to illustrate the conception I had as I envisioned or wrote the script.

When I write I must try to capture something in words which for all useful purposes, you might say, can’t be expressed in words. Later it is necessary to translate the words again so that in quite another context they’ll come alive. To be sure, so long as I have a firm grasp on my point of departure, there will always be an inner relationship between the original vision I had and the completed, materialized picture-sequence.

While that original conception must always be in the background, I must not let it become too dictatorial, since, for one thing, I must be prepared to modify it when I switch from writing to directing. For another, my actors, too, have a right – to say nothing of an obligation – to draw straws, to choose among alternatives. The whole process is essentially creative. You write down a melodic line and after that, with the orchestra, you work out the instrumentation.

Q: In an interview you said that if you once lost your feeling for play you’d be finished. But in ‘The Shame’ you’re actually very close to the intense centre, you have got something deep inside, in a grip...

A: But that’s a game, too. I believe that every seriously intended work of art must contain an element of play. If we believe otherwise, we commit ourselves to a colossal exaggeration. I believe that in this feeling of a game we can find a stimulating sense of shaping a universe, shaping people, shaping situations: we experience the passion of holding up a mirror and finding out what that mirror reflects...

Look at the great ones, like Churchill, Picasso, Stravinsky. Picasso and Stravinsky, both, have the eyes of a child, they have ‘humour lines’; they suggest some kind of secret feeling for the game.

Q: Games and games! Your script girl claims that when you did ‘The Silence’ and Ingrid Thulin was supposed to be dying, alone in a hotel bed, she spiced up the situation by doing a cha-cha before taking the scene!

A: Certainly; I’ve often noticed this: if you’re concentrating on a serious story, a deeply serious, perhaps tragic situation, a desperately painful involvement, you have a bursting need for jumping off into the opposite – into a lively clowning mood.

Perhaps because the moment of pain which was the nucleus of your creation is now far behind you, experienced long before you wrote it down, and even further away from the production of the film. Each and every artist who creates does so by building on his own painful experience, on a moment of agony which does not necessarily exist at the time of his performance. Of this we are reminded – sometimes with a secret smile – behind the mask we are assuming. This doesn’t mean that the experience will then seem less genuine. On the contrary.

Q: You have often mentioned the moment of pain which is the kernel of a film’s inspiration. Can you trace ‘The Shame’ back to such a moment?

A: No. That’s a long and tangled thread. It’s an experience of humiliation. A long, painful experience of man’s humiliation.

For some time, since the first moment of recognition, I have wondered how I would have sustained the experience of a concentration camp, of being forced into such a damnable position. How noble would I have been?

At the bottom of everything there lies this abomination to which man is exposed, the world over: they club his head in, they scream at him, they assault him, they terrorize him.

The older I get the more ghastly it seems to me. And the harder it is for me to live with in my conscience.

This is what we’re attempting, modestly, in The Shame: to show how humiliation, the rape of human dignity, can lead to the loss of humanity on the part of those subjected to it.

Q: You must despise films that glorify war, that interpret war as a manly adventure...

A: I think they are swinish.

Q: You have said that working with actors involves talk. In getting responses from them, isn’t it largely a matter of confidence, or what?

A: There is nothing more mysterious in it than that they have confidence in my ear and that I have confidence in their ‘inner hearing.’

Q: The rumour that you threw a chair through the window, and such-like, has never accurately been established...

A: I did so. That happens when one is afraid. The more insecure you are, the angrier you get. Or the more afraid. And fear is transformed into anger.

You can’t just stay being afraid.

I used to be very dependent on people’s opinion of me: I was tyrannically vulnerable to criticism and was unhappy for days if anyone said anything wounding to me or about me. Today I don’t care about anything except the life I have with friends and the work I have to do. This is all that’s important to me.

I have no need of power.

I have no need to be influential.

I have no need to be a participant in, or a shaper of, Swedish cultural life.

I have no desire to justify myself before criticism.

I have no need at all to be aggressive. I hate that.

I want to look around at the world, above all to read books and fill the gaps in my education which are a result of the uninterrupted work I have pursued since my student days.

Q: Do you experience the times when you don’t work as empty?

A: Not at all. Once I did, but only for short periods. I never had any free time. Spare time is something I experience as an unbelievable delight! To have a good book in my hands and actually immerse myself in it...

I have often thought that I should devote myself to Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. I mean methodically. Actually stay with it. That takes time and patience. I have two kinds of spare time: one kind is only fugitive – attendant on my getting up in the morning and going to bed at night, eating and perhaps taking a walk. The other kind is methodical spare time, when I take a certain time every day to sit down and do something I believe is interesting. But it must be done at a specified time or the day just flies away.

Q: You like working by schedule?

A: I love to.

Q: You have said that it is more important for the public to feel than to understand.

A: To feel is primary, to understand is secondary. First feel, experience – and then understand. Self-evidently, the main thing for the public is to have an experience. Later they can bring intellectual processes to bear. That’s always a pleasure. And eventually the intellectual process, itself, may elicit a new feeling.

When the audience misunderstands a film...The Silence, for example – it became a great success because people went to see it not for the film’s sake, but to see certain parts of it.

By now, The Silence is as innocent as a kindergarten infant by comparison with the films made since. It’s no fun to make pornography when everyone else is making it...

Q: How do you see your future as a film-maker shaping up?

A: I know I’ll stay with it; if I make my films cheaply enough I can stay with it as long as I have reasons for making films. Nobody, however indirectly, can prevent me. For one reason: I no longer have occasion to be afraid. Of critics, for example: before now they were either sawing off the branch I sat on, or making it stronger for me. I depended on them for my livelihood...There were few moments in my life when I wasn’t gambling with my existence.

If Smiles of a Summer Night hadn’t been an international success I would have been virtually finished. I had just had The Seventh Seal refused, in manuscript. When Smiles of a Summer Night became a success, after its showing at Cannes, I drove to Cannes to see Carl-Anders Dymling and laid that script on the table and told him: ‘Now or never.’ Then he accepted it.

Q: You have said that among films by others you have especially liked were ‘Lady With a Dog’, ‘Umberto D.’, ‘Rashomon’. Have you added to that list?

A: Yes, with Fellini’s II Bidone (The Swindler). I have a great admiration for Fellini. I feel a sort of brotherly contact with him, I don’t know why exactly. We have written brief, confused letters to each other many times. It’s amusing...I like him because he is himself, he is who he is and what he is. His temperament is something I have a feeling for, though it’s quite different from my own; but I understand it so damn well and I admire it, colossally.

He is said to be enchanted by my films. That experience is mutual.

Q: How many times can you see a film? You have a private collection of 200 films.

A: How many times depends on how much I like them. I have seen Les Vacances de M. Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday) countless times.

I sit and wait for the parts I enjoy. These can be whole sequences, great moments or just details.

Q: You have maintained that you are self-taught, yet surely a number of directors must have had a certain influence on you?

A: I have not been subject to influences from another director’s artistic style. But influences are not specifically those that come from one’s own occupational involvement. You can be influenced by anything around you: modern photography, TV reportage, pop music – which I find fascinating.

The whole life-way influences one.

But film-makers exert the least influence over me. Because I don’t see the world the way they do. Formally, I achieve my results by going my own way.

I don’t need help from anyone else’s means of expression.

Naturally I am influenced, at large, by the new mode of film-making, by the feeling for film as film, where actually you don’t need lighting effects, for instance, and in which you can get effective results without complex equipment. By these means we can return, in a sense, to the origins of film, when it was simple: when you set up a camera in a bush. I have always found this congenial. A purely technical extension of territory attracts me.

Q: Is ‘The Shame’ to be your last black-and-white film? You have been discussing colour very much lately.

A: I don’t know. Colour is interesting. I was at home with some friends Sunday afternoon and a young girl, about 15, came to the house. She had been to the movies and seen a film which I admired personally. But she was contemptuous: It wasn’t in colour! Then I thought: this is the new thing today; this new generation finds nothing stimulating in a film unless it’s in colour.

It has been a long time since I saw a colour film which I found inspiring. Yes, I was very impressed by the colour in Agnes Varda’s Happiness. There I felt the colour was deeply sensual.

Colour is best when it isn’t colour. That may sound banal, but it’s a fact.

Q: Music is finished, you said.

A: In The Shame it has come to that point. No music any more.

Q: You have seldom made a film with a purely literary foundation; usually it’s from your own manuscript. Does this mean that you don’t think books should be filmed?

A: I think it’s hard to film books or short stories. The material is too rich, it often fences in the film. It’s hard to create from it. I don’t know. I feel no temptation to try.

Q: Films which never become films – why can’t you make novels out of them?

A: I am not a writer, I am a film-maker. I have no need to express myself with words.

Q: Yet your scripts are written with such literary pregnancy.

A: That’s for practical reasons: so that my co-workers will understand what I mean.

Once I had a literary inferiority complex. I haven’t any longer. For some time I harboured the illusion that I would write a play or a novel or a collection of short stories, or whatever. I’ve entirely given up that idea. I am completely satisfied to express myself in my films.

– An Interview With Ingmar Bergman by Lars-Olof Löthwall. Originally published in Take One 2, no. 1 (September-October 1968): 16-18