Image My Life in Film Read online

  When we had finished filming, Harriet Andersson and I went for a vacation. I had not yet edited the material but was pleased with the work I had done. With pure delight I wrote a comedy in the tower room of the small hotel where we were staying, while Harriet was sunning on the beach below. The story was christened A Lesson in Love.

  Hard upon the heels of A Lesson in Love, I made Dreams (Journey into Autumn) for Sandrew’s Film Company. I had promised the head of the studio, Rune Waldekranz, a comedy, since Sawdust and Tinsel was a resounding fiasco. Viewed superficially, Dreams consists of two additional variations on themes from Sawdust and Tinsel. By this time Harriet and I had terminated our relationship, and we were both feeling quite sad. Our sadness weighs down the film. To be sure, there is an interesting cohesion between the two stories that lead into each other, but Dreams is severely wounded by depression and never did take off.

  Sawdust and Tinsel received mixed reviews (to put it mildly). A critic, well-respected in Stockholm, said that he ‘declined an ocular inspection of Mr. Bergman’s latest vomiting.’ This utterance is rather representative of the animosity that was coming at me from many directions. Unfortunately, I cannot claim that it left me unaffected.

  With Harriet Andersson in Dreams.‘Our sadness weighs down the film.’

  IN THE MAGIC LANTERN I wrote that the artistic failure of

  The Serpent’s Egg was due mainly to the fact that I set the film in 1920s Berlin. ‘If I had created the city of my dreams, a city that does not exist and never has, and yet manifests itself acutely with smells and loud sounds, if I had created that city, not only would I have been moving in it with total freedom and an absolute sense of belonging but also, more important, I would have brought the audience with me into an alien but secretly familiar world. In The Serpent’s Egg, however, I ventured into a Berlin that nobody recognized, not even I.’

  But now I believe the failure lies much deeper. The depiction of time and place might be debatable, but it is hard to deny the care that went into it. Sets, costumes, and casting were done by experts. If you look at The Serpent’s Egg in pure cinematographic terms, there are excellent aspects of this film and a good dramatic buildup in the unfolding of the plot. The movie does not tire for a moment; rather the opposite. It is overstimulated, as if it had taken anabolic steroids.

  But its vitality is powerful on a superficial plane; the failure is hidden underneath.

  In an early stage of the planning, I wanted to reactivate my old idea of the two trapeze artists who are stranded because the third member of their act has died. They have been left in a war-threatened city. Their accelerating decline was to be interlaced with the destruction of the city. This theme, found in both The Silence and The Ritual, is powerful enough for a third application. However, an unfortunate decision made during the planning stage of the screenplay led me astray.

  This occurred in the beginning of November 1975. During the previous summer I had read Joachim Fest’s biography of Adolf Hitler. I quoted a passage from the book in my workbook:

  “The inflation lent a grotesque quality to reality and crushed not only people’s incentive to accept the reigning order but also their feeling for permanency in general and made them accustom themselves to living in an impossible atmosphere. This was a complete breakdown of a world’s ideas, norms, and morals. The consequences were unfathomable.’

  Thus this film must take shape in the shadows and in the reality of these shadows. This is damnation, and it’s cold in hell because there is no firewood and it is November 1923 and your money is counted by weight. Everything is upside down.

  Cast of characters:

  ABEL ROSENBERG, 38. Demoted circus artist who, without knowing how it happened, has killed his brother.

  HANS VERUS, same age (or possibly slightly older — perhaps 45). Scientist conducting questionable experiments. Dubious opinions of people and their behavior.

  MANUELA BERGMANN, 35. A prostitute going downhill. Badly treated but won’t give up. Has five hundred severe wounds leaving long welts on her soul.

  “ ‘The inflation lent a grotesque quality to reality.’” Germany in 1923 is the setting for The Serpent’s Egg.

  I had not yet been hit with the harsh reality that the whole business concerning my taxes would bring. Those lines about Germany’s collapse from Fest’s book stimulated my creativity. The hard-to-maneuver balance between order and chaos had always intrigued me. In Shakespeare’s later plays lies, among other things, a similar preoccupation with this tension in the break between a world of order, with laws of ethics and social norms, and total collapse, an irresistible chaos that suddenly breaks into a regulated reality and annihilates it.

  Without knowing it, however, I already carried failure in my baggage, in my attempt to combine the theme of the two artists in the threatened city with the Vergérus motif, the voyeuristic theme.

  I had developed a voyeuristic theme in 1966 when I began writing something, not knowing what it would become:

  He begins to study human faces and reactions while their owners are confronted by experiences he controls. It begins rather innocently: He is showing movies he has shot. One day he takes pictures of a person committing suicide. Then he films a person whom he kills. He shows a woman who is the victim of brutal sexual provocation. Finally he carries out a secret plan: He goes to get a man out of a mental hospital, a man with acute amnesia or some similar disorder. Then he places a woman with him. The two begin to settle into the space that he has put at their disposal. They begin to live together and perhaps to love each other. He notes this with hate and jealousy and begins to intersect and manipulate their activities, creating suspicion and aggression between them. He breaks them down, step by step, so that they destroy each other in the end. Then he has no choice; he must study himself. He aims the camera at his own person, takes a poison that induces excruciating pain, and notes his gradual failing.

  Actually there is a whole movie here. Since then I have repeatedly come back to that very same area: in Love with No Lovers, which was never made, and in Finn Konfusenfej, for which I did not even complete the screenplay.

  But the calamity of The Serpent’s Egg is that the voyeur motif is totally incompatible with the story of the two artists. They are linked only by my imaginings of a world catastrophe and the collapse of its ideologies. To this, add the collapse of my own private world. On November 19, 1975, came the first memorandum from the tax officials accompanied by quick-as-lightning, coordinated, screaming headlines in the press.

  My workbook:

  Afternoon and evening. The fear, the anxiety, the shame. The humiliation. The rage. To have a finger pointed at you and not be able to defend yourself. To be judged in advance by a tribunal that doesn’t ask for real reasons. To be perfectly honest, in the beginning I took the whole thing much too lightly. I listened to advice and thought that those giving it surely knew best — this was after all their profession. All was in good order and was being handled in an exemplary manner by qualified people.

  But of course this is not the crucial point. The problem is that I react, childishly and self-destructively, in favor of those who accuse me. I want to agree; I want to confess; I want to be good; I want to pay for what I’ve done.

  It’s a dangerous emotion that suddenly appears out of my dark childhood fears. I feel that I have done something bad. I don’t understand what I have done, but I feel guilty. My common sense tries to reason with me, but it’s useless; the sense of shame is deeply rooted in me, and the public stigma accentuates my feeling. The weak voice of my common sense is suffocated by shrieks and sobs out of the past — from that time when no appeal was possible, when you were prejudged, as either guilty or not. Then the only thing capable of bringing you peace was punishment, remorse — even if there was nothing to be sorry for — and finally forgiveness, like a sudden grace floating in from nowhere. The voices that had been hard and accusatory suddenly became mild; the icy silence surrounding the criminal broke once the pun
ishment had been executed. Punished, purified, forgiven, no longer struggling on the outside, then reinstated, again a member, again belonging.

  That’s how I feel, the anxiety rushing around in my entrails, clawing at them; it’s as if I had a mad cat in my stomach. My cheeks are blazing from some strange fever that I haven’t experienced in forty years but of which I am now reminded with painful conspicuousness.

  The hours crawl forward. How will my life turn out after this, will I be able to go on working? Will the desire to work return after this public disgrace? In this reality, will I have the strength to continue playing my games? So this is how things stand now, and this is how it was then, I remember; I am as powerless as I was as a child, as powerless as a person thrown into a strong current that continually pulls him downward. The temptation is to resign oneself, to flee into the darkness, into the paralysis of nonaction, into hysteria. The temptation is to give up. Fifty-seven years old and seven years old, at one and the same time, in one and the same moment.

  If I at least were able to drum up real disgust for those shrewd bureaucrats who have brought me this torment. But that doesn’t work either. The fifty-seven-year-old says lamely, for God’s sake, they’re doing their job, and the seven-year-old never doubts the authority and infallibility of those meting out justice. The seven-year-old is, of course, always in the wrong. He tells that to the fifty-seven-year-old, and the fifty-seven-year-old believes him and not the voice of his common sense, that calm, factual voice that says the whole thing is a drama with roles and lines of dialogue, a small vexing scene in society’s general humiliating comedy-tragedy. Nobody cares; nobody is threatened; nobody feels anything except possibly a touch of malicious joy at someone else’s misfortune. Nobody except one from his childhood, the spiritually handicapped clown in his fifty-seventh year who trembles in the face of humiliation, shame, fear, and self-loathing. Hour after hour, day after day.

  That’s how ridiculous things are.

  If I manage to calm down and reflect, I know I can use this as material for the part of Abel Rosenberg. He must feel exactly like this. I can describe it since I know how it feels to be accused, how scary it is, how willing one becomes to receive punishment, willing to the point of longing for the punishment to begin. A tiny joy begins to spread in my whole being for a fraction of a moment. It bubbles up and makes me laugh, all by myself. That must be a good sign, after all. A tiny joy in the middle of this sea of anguish. Perhaps the fifty-seven-year-old will be able to regain mastery over the screaming, guilt-addicted child — couldn’t that be within the frame of what’s possible? Hell, imagine if it were so! Just this brief moment brings sudden appeasement.

  “Manuela Bergmann, 35. A prostitute going downhill.’ Liv Ullmann. ‘Abel Rosenberg, 38. Demoted circus artist.” David Carradine.

  Perhaps it’s possible to stay here, to remain in place, to fight my impulses, my embarrassment, and my humiliation. To stay, to not run away, to take it all and use it, to be sensible and angry in a healthy, objective way. In spite of everything, can something be done about this?

  Two days later I noted: “Oh yes, it was possible to write both yesterday and today, even though it was more an act of will than one of inspiration. It feels a little as if one act were finished.”

  In actuality, my instrument had already been knocked out of my hands. In spite of this, I played on and put together a screenplay for The Serpent’s Egg while the lawyers&“had meetings,” the problems were played down, and conversations with the tax authorities were inititated. I was calm, but the calm was deceptive.

  On January 26, 1976, the tax police came and picked me up. We had just finished editing and mixing Face to Face. Gunnel Lindblom was ready to begin Paradise Place at my company, Cinematograph, and I had set up meetings with her and Ulla Isaksson about the screenplay and casting. I had begun rehearsing Strindberg’s Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theater, and, finally, the screenplay for The Serpent’s Egg was complete.

  But everything was already wrong. The creative work had been disturbed. I imagined being able to use a situation that was not yet usable. I let the creativity rush in to help as if it were a doctor, nurse, and ambulance, all at once.

  There followed the breakdown and the breaking up of camp. Quite by chance I ended up in Germany with my German film. I had an offer from Dino De Laurentiis, who saw The Serpent’s Egg as a seductive project. I was able to negotiate a sizable director’s fee since I, for the moment, was a ‘bankable’ name with Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage, and The Magic Flute under my belt.

  I was able to function, yet I was coming undone, a treacherous balance. I felt as if I had been poisoned, and the poison became both fuel and flame. I fought against my experiences and believed that the struggle gave me strength.

  When I went to the doctor for a checkup before we started filming, I was told that my blood pressure was abnormally high. I had been walking around Munich feeling feverish and had blamed my suddenly rosy cheeks on not being used to the altitude (six hundred meters — about two thousand feet — above sea level). Until then I had had typically low blood pressure.

  I began to eat beta blockers, but that didn’t help — I just became schizophrenic.

  Today it’s easy to see that I reacted irrationally at every turn. My desire then was to make the movie as quickly as possible in order to show the world that I was able to do so. I was intrigued by The Serpent’s Egg. Everyone encouraged me, telling me that it was a good story. It became a massive, heavy shoot, but I kept convincing myself that I was making my best film ever. I was frenzied and rabid; all my inner safety reserves were rushed into action.

  I continued to hold onto the illusion that I was making a masterpiece even during the editing and mixing. At the same time that I was working on The Serpent’s Egg, I was also negotiating with the Residenz Theater about a production of Strindberg’s Dream Play. That, too, was to be on a grandiose scale: More than forty of the theater’s best actors participated in a production ultimately studded with insane errors of judgment, not the least of which occurred with the design.

  Every morning on my way to the theater, I walked past the ruins of the old Army Museum. The sight gave birth to the idea that the ruin with its cupola would be the ideal stage setting for A Dream Play, and so we built the set accordingly.

  When I arrived at the theater to inspect the finished scenery, my first impulse was to turn around, go home, and never come back. The background was gigantic; the actors looked like tiny ants. The background scenery consumed the whole play. All we had to do was to open the curtain, show the ruin, then close it again. The scenery held the spotlight; nothing else mattered; and the play failed.

  I found in an old issue of Simplicissimus from 1923 a suggestive charcoal drawing of a heavily trafficked Berlin street in wintry twilight. Though we had been scouting in Berlin and other nearby cities for suitable locations, no place could match the street in that drawing. To top it off, it was magically named Bergmannstrasse. Through tough negotiating I managed to talk the producer into building the whole street scene complete with streetcar tracks, backyards, crossing alleys, and domed portals on the lot of Bavaria Studios. The cost was astronomical, but I was giddy with feverish enthusiasm.

  The Bergmannstrasse came out of the same madness as A Dream Play did, caused by my high blood pressure and hypertension.

  Warning bells were ringing, but I refused to hear them. My wife Ingrid and I went to the United States to find an actor for the male lead, Abel Rosenberg. First, I asked Dustin Hoffman if he would play Abel. He studied the script and offered a thoroughly intelligent interpretation, but when push came to shove he admitted that he didn’t feel he was right for the part and withdrew, assuring me that it would have been fun to work together.

  Bergmannstrasse on Bavaria Studios’ lot, day and night.

  Then I met Robert Redford in Beverly Hills. He was friendly and positive but informed me that he could not see himself playing a Jewish circus performer
.

  I had great respect for both Redford and Hoffman, but unfortunately, I did not see it as a warning sign that both of them pulled away.

  Next I turned to Peter Falk, whom I considered a very fine actor. He was positive about the part; but for very different reasons, not the least of which were contractual, finally he, too, fell by the wayside.

  Even in this thorny dilemma, Dino De Laurentiis was utterly loyal and did not give up. In an emergency meeting he came up with another actor, Richard Harris.

  Once more all warning signals stopped flashing in my head; I was consumed with bringing The Serpent’s Egg to fruition.

  Richard Harris was soaking in a huge water tank on Malta where he was finishing a film [Orca] about a crazy sea captain and his love story involving a giant whale. Dino De Laurentiis had had the water tank specially constructed for the filming, and Harris spent most of his time fully immersed. From there came his message that he would enjoy playing the part and working with me.

  Filming was postponed for three weeks. I returned to Munich to keep production going by conducting various screen tests, but everybody was already in position. Bavaria Studios had set the ball rolling long before, and the enormously costly sets were built and in place. From morning until night Sven Nykvist and I screen-tested costumes, furniture, and masks. Enthusiasm was high, and Bavaria itself offered some diversions while we waited for Richard Harris to emerge from his bath.

  “How about Richard Harris”With Dino De Laurentiis.

  In time he did, unfortunately the same evening I was due in Frankfurt to attend a formal ceremony to receive the Goethe Prize.

  I made an agreement with my coordinator Harold Nebenzahl (an efficient misanthrope who spoke twelve languages) that he should meet Harris at the Munich airport and have him register at the Hilton, where my wife and I were also staying. Then we could meet for lunch the following day when I returned from Frankfurt.