Image My Life in Film Read online

  We begin to rehearse Peer Gynt after Twelfth Night; if my health were not so poor, it would be a great deal of fun. The whole troupe is in fine fettle and Max [von Sydow] will be magnificent, one can already see that. Mornings are the worst; I never wake up later than four-thirty — then my guts begin churning. At the same time my old anxieties begin, laying things waste like a blowtorch. Exactly what those anxieties are I can’t say. Perhaps I’m simply afraid of not being good enough. On Sundays and Tuesdays (the days when we don’t rehearse), I feel a lot better.

  And so on. The letter was never mailed. I guess I told myself that I was whining and that my whining was meaningless. I am not overly patient with either my own or other people’s whining. The distinct advantage, as well as the disadvantage, of being the director is that you have nobody to blame but yourself. Almost everyone else has something or someone to blame. Not so with directors. They possess the unfathomable possibility of forging their own realities or fates or lives or whatever you want to call it. I have often found solace in that thought, bitter solace, and some vexation.

  On closer consideration, and having taken yet another step into the dusky room of Wild Strawberries, within the camaraderie and the collective effort I find a negative chaos of human relations. The separation from my third wife was still a source of great pain. It was a strange experience to love someone with whom you could absolutely not live. My life with Bibi Andersson, a life filled with kindness and creativity, was beginning to crumble; why, I don’t remember. I was feuding bitterly with my parents. I couldn’t talk to my father and didn’t even want to. Mother and I tried time and again for a temporary reconciliation, but there were too many skeletons in our closets, too many poisonous misunderstandings. We were making the effort, since we so wanted peace between us, but we kept failing.

  I imagine that one of the most impelling forces behind Wild Strawberries could be found in that situation. I tried to put myself in my father’s place and sought explanations for the bitter quarrels with my mother. I was quite sure I had been an unwanted child, growing out of a cold womb, one whose birth resulted in a crisis, both physical and psychological. Later, my mother’s diary verified this notion of mine: faced with this wretched, almost dying child, she had feelings that were decidedly ambivalent.

  “… a calamitous final examination in school, the wife who fornicates in public.”

  In the course of some insignificant media event, I explained that only later had I discovered what the name of the leading character — Isak Borg — really meant. Like most statements made to the media, this is the kind of untruth that fits into the series of more or less clever evasions that create an interview. Isak Borg equals me. I B equals Ice and Borg (the Swedish word for fortress). Simple and facile. I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through. I was then thirty-seven, cut off from all human relations. It was I who had done the cutting off, presumably as an act of self-affirmation. I was a loner, a failure, I mean a complete failure. Though successful. And clever. And orderly. And disciplined.

  I was looking for my father and my mother, but I could not find them. In the final scene of Wild Strawberries there is a strong element of nostalgia and desire: Sara takes Isak Borg by the hand and leads him to a sunlit clearing in the forest. On the other side he can see his parents. They wave to him.

  One thread goes through the story in multiple variations: shortcomings, poverty, emptiness, and the absence of grace. I didn’t know then, and even today I don’t know fully, how through Wild Strawberries I was pleading with my parents: see me, understand me, and — if possible — forgive me.

  In that earlier book I mentioned, Bergman on Bergman, I relate in some detail an early morning trip by car to the city of Uppsala. How, following a sudden impulse, I wanted to visit my grandmother’s house at Trädgårdsgatan. How I had stood outside the kitchen door and, for a magical moment, experienced the possibility of plunging back into my childhood. That’s a lie. The truth is that I am forever living in my childhood, wandering through darkening apartments, strolling through quiet Uppsala streets, standing in front of the summer cottage and listening to the enormous double-trunk birch tree. I move with dizzying speed. Actually I am living permanently in my dream, from which I make brief forays into reality.

  “Victor Sjöström was an excellent storyteller.”

  In Wild Strawberries I move effortlessly and rather spontaneously between different planes — time-space, dream-reality. I cannot remember that the movement itself caused me any technical difficulties, this movement which later — in Face to Face — gave me such insurmountable problems. The dreams were mainly authentic: the hearse that overturns with the coffin bursting open, a calamitous final examination in school, the wife who fornicates in public (a scene which had already appeared in The Naked Night (Sawdust and Tinsel).

  The driving force in Wild Strawberries is, therefore, a desperate attempt to justify myself to mythologically oversized parents who have turned away, an attempt that was doomed to failure. It wasn’t until many years later that my mother and father were transformed into human beings of normal proportions, and the infantile, bitter hatred was dissolved and disappeared. Then we were able to meet in a mood of affection and mutual understanding.

  I had thus managed to forget why I made Wild Strawberries, and the times when I had to talk about it, I had nothing to say. It was an enigma that was slowly becoming rather interesting, at least to me.

  Today I am convinced that if I forgot, if I erased all that, it had to do with Victor Sjöström. When we made the film, the age difference between us was considerable. Later on it was practically nonexistent.

  “On the other side he can see his parents. They wave to him.”

  From the very beginning, the artist Sjöström was overwhelming. He had made the movie that, to me, was the film of all films. I saw it for the first time when I was fifteen; to this day I see it at least once every summer, either alone or in the company of younger people. I clearly see how The Phantom Carriage has influenced my own work, right down to minute details. But that is a whole different story.

  Victor Sjöström was an excellent storyteller, funny and engaging — especially if some young, beautiful woman happened to be present. We were sitting at the very source of film history, both Swedish and American. What a pity that tape recorders were not available at the time.

  All these external facts are easy to recall. What I had not grasped until now was that Victor Sjöström took my text, made it his own, invested it with his own experiences: his pain, his misanthropy, his brutality, sorrow, fear, loneliness, coldness, warmth, harshness, and ennui. Borrowing my father’s form, he occupied my soul and made it all his own — there wasn’t even a crumb left over for me! He did this with the sovereign power and passion of a gargantuan personality. I had nothing to add, not even a sensible or irrational comment. Wild Strawberries was no longer my film; it was Victor Sjöström’s!

  It is probably worth noting that I never for a moment thought of Sjöström when I was writing the screenplay. The suggestion came from the film’s producer, Carl Anders Dymling. And as I recall, I thought long and hard before I agreed to let him have the part.

  AT FIRST I COULDN’T FIND my workbook for

  Hour of the Wolf, but then, suddenly, there it was. At times, the demons can be helpful. But you have to beware. Sometimes they will help you along to hell.

  The notes begin on December 12, 1962. The precise moment when I finished Winter Light:

  I am beginning this project in a kind of desperate enthusiasm and exhaustion. I was slated to go to Denmark to write a synopsis for a film that would have made a million. Three days and three nights of panic, with accompanying spiritual and visceral constipation. Then I gave up. There are times when self-discipline, which is a good thing, becomes self-compulsion, which is totally harmful. After having written two pages and swallowed a box of laxatives, I gave up.

  I have no memory of any of thi
s. I do remember that I once went to Denmark to write something. It is also possible that it was a synopsis based on Hjalmar Bergman’s novel The Boss, Mrs. Ingeborg, a project Ingrid Bergman was very interested in doing.*

  It felt good to go home. The tension decreased, at least temporarily. The excursions into insecurity are never very creative. One thing is clear, however. I am going to work on My Shipwrecked Ones. I will, without any obligations, find out if we really have something to say to each other or if everything is due to a misunderstanding or ultimately stems from my sole desire to be in pleasant shooting locations. Actually, the whole thing began with my longing to see the ocean. Torö (Thor’s Island), to sit on a birch log and look at the waves for all eternity. Then, too, it must have been that long white sandy beach, completely unreal and yet so practical. Flat sand and the rolling ocean waves.

  So I had better get to work. I know the following: The luxury liner went down in the middle of the masked ball near some group of deserted islands far out at sea. A number of people managed to swim to shore.

  Everything has to be insinuated; nothing must be emphasized, nothing unraveled. The elements restrained, as in the theater. No realism. Everything has to be brilliantly clean, gentle, light, very eighteenth century, unreal, surreal, the colors never realistic.

  I am on my way into some kind of comedy:

  I believe that this will inevitably become an ambiguous division between wishes and dreams. Whole series of enigmatic personalities. They enter and disappear in most surprising ways, but this much is clear: He is not master of his characters. He loses them and finds them again.

  Then I later wrote to myself:

  Patience, patience, patience, patience, patience, don’t panic, take it easy, don’t be afraid, don’t get tired, don’t immediately feel that everything is difficult. The time is long gone when you could dash off a screenplay in three days.

  But here it has begun:

  Ah yes, my dear ladies, I saw a large fish, perhaps not a fish, perhaps more of an underwater elephant or perhaps a hippopotamus and a sea serpent that were copulating! I was by the Deep Place in the hollow of the mountainside where I sat, totally relaxed.

  Then the Self becomes a bit more specific:

  I was one of the world’s most prominent entertainment artists. As such, I went on the cruise. They had signed me on for a great deal of money. A time of calm and recovery at sea seemed to me an utterly delightful fantasy. …

  But, frankly, I am reaching an age when money is no longer terribly important. I am alone now, with several marriages behind me. They have cost me a pretty penny. I have many children whom I know only superficially or not at all. My failures as a person are remarkable. Therefore, I put a lot of effort into being an excellent entertainer. I also want to mention that I am not an improvisational artist. I prepare my numbers painstakingly, almost pedantically. During my time on this island, after the shipwreck, I have jotted down several new ideas, which I hope to develop when I return to my studio.

  December 27:

  How goes my comedy? Oh yes, it has moved forward a little. Still the same old story about my Ghosts, friendly Ghosts, brutal, mean, joyous, stupid, unbelievably stupid, kind, hot, warm, cold, inane, anxious Ghosts. They are conspiring against me more and more, becoming mysterious, ambiguous, weird, and sometimes threatening. That’s how it goes. I get a pleasant Companion who gives me different suggestive angles and whimsies. Slowly he begins to change, however. Becomes threatening and cruel.

  Hour of the Wolf is seen by some as a regression after Persona. It isn’t that simple. Persona was a breakthrough, a success that gave me the courage to keep on searching along unknown paths. For several reasons that film has become a more open affair than others, more tangible: a woman who is mute, another who speaks; therefore a conflict. Hour of the Wolf on the other hand, is more vague. There is within that film a consciously formal and thematic disintegration. When I see Hour of the Wolf today, I understand that it is about a deepseated division within me, both hidden and carefully monitored, visible in both my earlier and later work: Aman, in The Magician (The Face); Ester, in The Silence; Tomas, in Face to Face; Elisabet, in Persona; Ismael, in Fanny and Alexander. To me, Hour of the Wolf is important since it is an attempt to encircle a hard-to-locate set of problems and get inside them. I dared take a few steps, but I didn’t go the whole way.

  Had I failed with Persona, I would never have dared to make Hour of the Wolf Hour of the Wolf is not a regression but an unsteady step in the right direction.

  In an etching by Axel Fridell, one can see a group of grotesque cannibals ready to assault a little girl. They are all waiting for a candle in a darkening room to flicker out. A frail old man attempts to protect her. A real cannibal, dressed in a clown’s outfit, is waiting in the shadow for the candle to burn down. Everywhere in the increasing darkness, one glimpses frightening figures.

  Suggested final scene: I hang myself from a beam in the ceiling, something I have actually thought of doing for some time in order to become friends with my Ghosts. They are waiting for me, right beneath my feet. There will be a festive supper — after the suicide. The double doors are thrown open. Accompanied by music (a pavane) I step inside, on the lady’s arm, and proceed to the extravagantly set table.

  The Self has a mistress. She lives on the mainland but takes care of my household during the summer. She is tall and silent and serene. Together we sail across to the island; together we walk through the house; together we eat supper. During the dinner I hand her the housekeeping allowance. Suddenly she bursts out laughing. She has lost a tooth. The gap shows when she laughs, which embarrasses her. I don’t want to pretend that she is beautiful, but I like her company and we have lived together for five summers.

  Winter Light represents, if you will, a moral victory and a departure. I have always been embarrassed by my need to please. My love for the audience has been rather complicated, with strong elements of my fear of not being liked. In my artistic self-solace has also been included a wish to give solace to my audience. Wait a minute! It isn’t as bad as all that! My fear of losing some kind of power over people … my legitimate fear of losing my livelihood. The only thing is, sometimes one feels a compelling need to shoot blanks, to leave all the ingratiating stuff behind. At the risk of being forced into double compromises at some later date (the film industry is not especially considerate of its anarchists), it sometimes feels liberating to stand up and, without a gesture of apology or amiability, display an agonizingly human situation. The punishment would certainly be swift and sure. I still have the painful memory of the reception of Sawdust and Tinsel, my first attempt in that genre.

  The departure is also one of theme. With Winter Light I dismiss the religious debate and render an account of the result. Perhaps it is of less importance to the viewers than to me. The film is the tombstone over a traumatic conflict, which ran like an inflamed nerve throughout my conscious life. The images of God are shattered without my perception of Man as the bearer of a holy purpose being obliterated. The surgery has finally been completed.

  “The Cannibals” are waiting: Axel Fridell’s etching (“The Old Curiosity Shop”/Little Dorrit) and a scene from Hour of the Wolf.

  These notes were written in 1962, sometime during the Christmas season. Then I heard nothing from my cannibals of Hour of the Wolf for almost two years.

  When the Royal Dramatic Theater closed for the season on June 15, 1964, I realized I was completely exhausted. By then The Silence had opened and the people from whom my wife Käbi and I used to rent a house on Ornö Island did not want us anymore. They were of the opinion that nice tenants should not make obscene films. We had looked forward to a summer on the island — Käbi had worked very hard as well — to our arrival at that quiet, isolated place, which you can only reach by boat. Now we would have to remain in Djursholm the whole summer, and that was not a pleasant prospect. It was a horribly hot summer, and I settled into the guest room, which faced north and was somewha
t cooler.

  Ivar Lo-Johansson speaks about “the milkmaids’ white whip.” The white whip for those who manage theaters is to be forever reading plays. If we put on twenty-two plays during a season, that represents perhaps 10 percent of what the theater’s managing director reads. To liberate myself from the various projects that endlessly filled my mind and from any thoughts about the upcoming theater season, I set about writing a screenplay, surrounding myself with music and silence, which awakened mutual aggressions between Käbi and me, since she was practicing on the grand piano in the living room. It developed into a sophisticated, acoustic terrorism. Sometimes I drove to Dalarö, where I sat on a cliff, gasping, looking out over the bay.

  From the episode with Johan (Max von Sydow) and the small demon (Mikael Rundquist) in Hour of the Wolf.

  In that mood the writing of The Cannibals began:

  Like a dispirited angleworm, I pull myself out of the easy chair and go over to my worktable to try and write. I feel awkward and find the work repugnant. The table shivers and shakes with every damn letter I write. I have to change tables. Perhaps it would be better to stay in my easy chair, with a pillow on my lap. It’s better, but it still isn’t good. My pen is no damn good either. But the room is reasonably cool. I think I’ll stay in the guest room after all. A summary: The story is about Alma. She is twenty-eight years old and has no children.

  That’s how the story about The Cannibals begins. I have turned the perspective around, so that all is seen from Alma’s point of view.