TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0361> <title> 1960s: The Screen:I Am A Conjurer:Ingmar Bergman </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1960s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> TIME Magazine March 14, 1960 The Screen: "I Am A Conjurer" </hdr> <body> "Wound in eye, blood in mouth, fingers off, neck broken. He calls you down, he calls you forth, beyond the dead, the living, the living dead."--The Magician A demon is haunting the movie world. It looks, as many have remarked, like a brilliantly personable werewolf. The figure is tall, bony and shambling. The green eyes burn with strange intensity in a high, narrow skull. The teeth are long and peculiarly pointed. The smile is a little twisted, evoking for the nightmare-prone the grimace of a hanged man. The demon is in effect an immensely creative spirit which has seized for its habitation the son of a Spanish parson, and for its instrument the motion-picture camera. In 16 years of labor this spirit has driven Sweden's Ernst Ingmar Bergman to produce an enormous canon of cinema, comprising 22 feature films and at least four other scripts, that merges into a single vast and violent masterpiece, a work of volcanic profundity and sometimes tumid pretentiousness, of snorting pornography, sly comedy and ripe ironic wisdom--a sort of serial Faust. What is more, Bergman's work is all Bergman, and few film directors can make a similar claim. He creates his own pictures from the first line of the script to the last snip of the cutting shears, working with concentrated fury; in spring he customarily collapses in a Stockholm hospital, nurses an imaginary ulcer, and dictates two screen plays in about six weeks. Apart from his film work, Bergman has established himself as the top director of the Swedish stage by a long chalk, was recently named manager of Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater. He also finds time to direct dozens of plays for Swedish radio and television--and to live a private life that most men would consider a career in itself. Says a Hollywood admirer: "Bergman is Sweden's Zanuck, Kazan, Tennessee Williams and Playhouse 90 rolled into one." Visions at the Box Office. In the last four years the films of Ingmar Bergman (pronounced Bear' ih mahn), almost unknown outside Sweden before 1956, have captured an impressive amount of screentime in more than a dozen countries. One after another--Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Brink of Life, The Magician--they have carried off top prizes at the big film festivals and set the turnstiles twirling on the commercial circuits as no Scandinavian film has done since Garbo was a girl. And last week Stockholm was looking aghast at the latest product of Bergman's imagination, a religious horror picture called The Virgin Spring that contains the "most terrible rape and murder scenes ever seen in a film." A Stockholm critic called it "Bergman's best." The U.S. was touched by Bergmania late in 1958, when The Seventh Seal was released by Janus Films. Skeptics tried to write off Bergman's work as Norse opera for the intellectuals, but a few months later the smash success of Wild Strawberries made the U.S. aware that there was much more to Bergman than that. This winter as many as five Bergman films have been running at once in Manhattan. Next week another, a lustily ironic comedy of morals called A Lesson in Love, is scheduled to open. Week after that, The Magician is booked into the big Fox West Coast chain; in late March it will ride the circuits from coast to coast. And among the art-house exhibitors Bergman is acknowledged as "The Big Swede" who pulled the foreign-film business out of a substantial slump. "It's incredible," says a sociologist. "As though the visions of Zosimos had hit the bestseller list. (Zosimos of Panopolis was an alchemist and Gnostic of the 3rd century who suffered some remarkable visions from which he developed the arcane principle: "Nature applied to nature transforms nature.") Bunyan of Show Business. At 41, Ingmar Bergman is scarcely ready to be counted among the profounder prophets. A lot of celluloid must run through the camera before he can even be discussed as the cinematic Strindberg that the Bergmanites insist he is. Nevertheless, Bergman is unquestionably one of the most forceful and fascinatingly original artists who now confront the U.S. in any medium. It seems easy to explain the influences that shaped him: the formal agonies of the medieval morality play, the psychotic tensions of classic Swedish drama, the nightmares of German expressionism (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Jean Cocteau's "invisible cinema," in which the eye is wrenched so violently from one image to another that the spectator stops seeing what is physically there and starts seeing what is not. Yet Bergman has traveled far from his sources--and just as far from such contemporary tendencies as the Neo-realist movement of social protest in post-war Italy and the New Wave of romanticism in France. He has created an unmistakable style of his own, a form of what he calls picture thinking about "the reality beyond reality." He is not easy on his audiences, but he is more spectacularly entertaining, over a greater range, than any moviemaker now at work. In Waiting Women, for instance, Bergman develops what may be the most charming seduction scene ever captured by a camera: a sequence in which boy meets girl through a closed door. In A Lesson in Love he stages a barroom brawl that is probably the funniest thing of its kind since the confetti scene in Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. In The Magician, he masterfully mingles horror and hilarity when a corpse rises up to haunt the stubborn rationalist who is dissecting it. The Bergman boom fits into the cultural context of the times. He is a voice crying in the midst of prosperity that man cannot live by prosperity alone. Turning from the troubled scene around him--"I have no social conscience," he has said--Bergman has focused his lens on the interior landscape, and his work emerges as an allegory on the progress of the soul--his own, and by inference the soul of modern man. He is a Bunyan in show business, a religious artist whose glimpses of the dark heart of man are without equal in the history of cinema. At the same time he is a shrewd entertainer who admits he will stop at nothing to keep his audience awake. In three of his pictures, he has shown a Shakespearean fascination with the life of the strolling player, the poor mountebank who, "like and angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high Heaven as make the angels weep." Clearly he sees himself as such an ape. Says Bergman: "I perform conjuring tricks with a conjuring apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any performer in history would have given anything to use it. I am really a conjurer, and in my work I am guilty of deceit." The Two Faces. The contemplative and the jackanapes are two faces of a deeply separated nature. In Bergman's case, moreover, the split is a thing of more than psychological interest. Since he insists that he himself is the principal subject matter of his movies, the split in his character is a key not only to his life but to his work. Many Swedes, wrote Playwright Hjalmar Soderberg, are torn between "the desire of the flesh and the eternal loneliness of the soul," between short, delirious summers and interminable bitter winters of deep-country solitude. But Bergman's sense of inner division is so strong that once (or so he claims) he walked into a room, saw a standing figure, realized that the figure was himself, his Doppelgaenger. Even the two sides of his face seem startlingly unrelated. The right side looks strangely dead, the left side vividly alive. And he can see much better with his left eye, hear more keenly with his left ear. On the one hand he has had a maniacal temper; in his furies he rips phones off the walls, and once in a TV station he hurled a chair though a glass control booth. Bergman can be stuffily bourgeois, particularly in business, and wildly bohemian, especially with women. His steamy affairs have long been the talk of Scandinavia, and has been married four times. (Bergman's domestic milestones: Married at 25 to Dancer Else Fisher, divorced after two years, one daughter; married at 27 to Stage Director Ellen Bergman [no kin], divorced after five years, two sons, two daughters; married at 32 to Journalist Gun Grut, divorced after nine years, one son; married at 41 to Pianist Kaebi Laretei, his present wife.) Few women ever really recover from the Bergman experience, and his ex-wives have not remarried. ("Too tired," explains one.) But they remain his friends, as do his former mistresses, many of them movie actresses. The Icebergman. Yet the burning lover, both Bergman and his women agree, has a heart of ice. "The Icebergman," some have called him, and he himself has often confessed that he cannot really feel. About women he once mused: "All of them impress me. I would like to kill a couple of them, or maybe let them kill me." An author who knows him well believes that "there is no tenderness or consideration in the man. Sometimes you feel as if inside him there is no one at home." At home, inside Bergman, is a morbid population of major and minor terrors. He has unusually keen hearing and claims the slightest sound disturbs him. Not long ago, when a painter was making sketches of him, Bergman stuffed wool in his ears; he could not bear the sound of squeaking charcoal. He is equally sensitive to emotional dissonance: "I cannot work if I have a single enemy on the set." He nourishes imaginary illnesses but is horrified of real ones; he gets furious if someone with a cold comes near him. He feels "The Great Fear" whenever he leaves Sweden, and has spent less than six months of his life outside the country. He sleeps badly and has frequent fantasies of death. Theatrical though some of their terrors are--flummery from the conjurer's bag of tricks--the people who know Bergman best are convinced that the core of his torment is genuine. "He is pursued by God," says a friend. And God is pursued by Bergman. "I want knowledge," one of his characters declares in The Seventh Seal. "Not faith, but knowledge! I want God to stretch his hand toward me, to uncover his face, to speak to me." The Confession Couch. A strange child was father to this strange man. Second son of an ambitious Evangelical Lutheran parson who eventually became chaplain to Sweden's royal family, Ernst Ingmar Bergman grew up in a home filled with cold constraint and deep unhappiness. His father and mother, a friend relates, were "sealed in iron caskets" of duty, he to the church, she to the household. The had little to do with each other and considered it "sinful to fuss over the children." Father held frequent court on the "confession couch," where he heard the children recite their sins. Little Ingmar soon developed a stammer and a chronic stomach-ache, retreated into a life of fantasy. Only in the last few years has be been reconciled with his parents. "I survived," he says with a shrug. "And they gave me something to break." They also gave him, as a French critic has pointed out, "the themes of his future work: God and the Devil, Life and Death, the drama of the couple and the tragic solitude of beings." At nine, Ingmar got a magic lantern as a present ("I can still smell the exquisite odor of the hot metal"), and in it his fantasies came to focus. A year later he got a primitive film projector and soon after that a puppet theater. The demon took over. With a burst of energy, Ingmar began to build dolls and scenery. Soon he produced a full-length drama by Strindberg; he handled the puppets and spoke all the parts himself, from memory. Bohemian Superman. In his teens Ingmar attended a private school in Stockholm, where the boys considered him somewhat peculiar. "So he read Nietzsche," a friend recalls, "and considered himself that he was a superman." While at Stockholm University, he ran a youth club theater, and in 1940, just after the German invasion of Norway, his production of Macbeth--with angry, anti-Nazi overtones and Bergman himself in the role of Duncan--made a minor sensation. In 1941, over papa's furious objections, Bergman quit college, holed up in the Gamla Stan (the old section of Stockholm), pounded out play scripts, slept on backstage mats, slouched around town in baggy slacks, a turtleneck sweater and a three days' growth of protest. Bergman's mood at the time is suggested by his sense of humor. One of his "comedy" ideas: on a hot summer day, a clergyman goes to a striptease parlor and finds that he is the only customer; in gratitude the stripper goes to his church next Sunday and finds that she is the only worshipper; after a love affair, the clergyman, overcome with guilt, castrated himself. "This is comedy?" asked a horrified friend. Reluctantly, Bergman gave up the joke, produced his play as a tragedy, Murder in Barjaerna. In those days, an impressionable older woman recalls, his "derisive laughter seemed to originate in the darkest corners of Hell." It was impressionable women who first understood that Bergman was something special, and made him understand it, too. Bergman signed on as an assistant at the Royal Opera House, broke into the legitimate theater as a director, eventually staged everything from The Merry Widow to Faust. In 1944 he submitted his first script to Svensk Filminsdustri, the biggest of Sweden's main film companies. Shot by Alf Sjoberg, Sweden's top director at the time, Torment became an international hit, "The Bergman Renaissance" had begun. The Tapeworm. It could not have happened in a more unlikely place. Built while films were still silent, Stockholm's SF studio was partly "soundproofed" until last year by old Oriental rugs hung up on the walls. And Bergman's glorious close-ups are achieved with an ancient horror of a camera that has to be smothered with rugs and pillows to stifle its mechanical groans. New equipment is out of the question. Few Swedish films make money, even though most of them cost less than $200,000, the industry lives on government subsidies and profits from distributing U.S. films. "There is no Swedish film industry," says one moviemaker. "There is only Ingmar Bergman." Fortunately, Bergman is prolific. He gets most of his ideas for movies while making movies. He sees the idea suddenly, "a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious," and "this thread I wind up carefully." When not in a mood for dictating, he sits in an easy chair and writes with a broad-nibbed pen on yellow paper. When a scenario is finished, Bergman submits it to Carl Anders Dymling, SF's courtly and cultured boss. Sometimes Bergman rewrites a script three times before both are satisfied. But once the script is set, Dymling steps aside: he refuses to set foot on the set while Bergman is shooting. Then Bergman grimly pulls on the sailor's watch cap he wears in the studio and starts to shoot his film: "A tapeworm 2,500 meters long that sucks the life and spirit out of me. It is dreadfully exacting work. When I am filming, I am ill." Cinema Stock Company. Technically, Bergman is a master of his trade. He drifts about the studio with a faraway gaze in his eyes. "He looks like a snake charmer, a conjurer"--but he sees everything. He drives his technicians hard, demands and gets unquestioning loyalty from his actors. Most of them are prominent players on the Swedish stage; yet year after year they take parts in Bergman's pictures, even though it means giving up summer vacations, even though the parts are sometimes small and the pay unexciting. Together, these players form a unit unique in the history of film; a cinema stock company trained by one director and dedicated to his purposes, beyond question the finest collection of cinemactors assembled under one roof. Among the principals: Gunnar Bjornstrand, a skinny, thin-lipped, cold-eyed man who portrays the intellectual icicles Bergman loves to dissolve; Eva Dahlbeck, a bright-eyed, matronly blonde who is far and away the finest comedienne in the troupe; Max von Sydow, a tall, gaunt, rugged actor who generally personifies Bergman's spiritual search and sufferings; Harriet Andersson, a full-lipped Eve, the much-nibbled apple of the Bergman hero's eye; Bibi Andersson, the company's cleverest and most appealing ingenue. Kill, If Necessary. Bergman scorns "The Method" of coddling the actor's ego, instead, he hardboils it. Once the day's work has begun, no performer may leave the set, not even to make a phone call. Not the slightest deviation from the script is permitted. Bjornstrand once begged Bergman to rewrite a line. "I can't interpret it," he protested. Bergman replied coldly, "It's your job to interpret it." No stand-ins are used, even when the action is dangerous. Moreover, Bergman permits no lengthy psychoanalytic discussions of motive; usually, he feels, they "overinflate" a performance. On set or location, Bergman works swiftly and surely, plans and almost always manages to shoot three minutes of finished film every day. He runs four rehearsals for each scene, shoots three takes (as against dozens sometimes done in Hollywood), uses up about 20,000 feet of film for a 7,000-foot picture. (For Ben-Hur, which ran 19,000 feet, Hollywood's William Wyler exposed 1,250,000 feet of celluloid.) When a picture is finished, Bergman cuts it ruthlessly, taking his motto from William Faulkner: "Kill all your darlings!" When they are all dead, Bergman collapses in a savage depression that he cannot shake until he starts writing his next script. "For me," Bergman has said seriously, "there is only one loyalty: to the film on which I am working. I may lie if it is a beautiful lie, prostitute my talent if it will further my cause, steal if there is no other way out. I could also kill my friends or anyone else if it would help my art." Maze of Mirrors. What emerges from Bergman's personal and passionate process of creation bears small resemblance to the Hollywood product. Often Bergman's images are sudden, vivid, enigmatic. His camera makes a running and usually ironic comment on the action. He tells his story in subtle cadences of closeups ("What interests me is the face."), letting his camera move surely, sensitively with the flow of feeling and expression. There is a kind of stillness sometimes even in violence, a magic even in the commonplace. Confined to his budget by black-and-white film, he exploits the expressive possibilities of light perhaps more fully than any director alive. And he uses sound--and silence--with the skill and sensitivity of a composer. With subtle verve and dazzling control, he can alternate dreamy love with Gothic horror or wonderfully bawdy hilarity. He is equally at home with Wildean wit and low Shakespearean vaudeville. Like a gadfly, Bergman buzzes about his favorite target: the normal, healthy, inadequate male. ("Grown men are so rare," one of his women says sweetly to her husband, "that we pick the child who suits us.") Along with these vital virtues come promiscuous defects. Bergman's work is often pretentious, obscure, and riddled with private references. He has the courage to use cliches, and often they work beautifully--witness the white-faced, black-cloaked figure of Death in The Seventh Seal. But at other times, particularly in his comedies, the cliches are the devices of a back-country Ernst Lubitsch; in A Lesson in Love, the last- minute sappily symbolic entrance of a small boy dressed as cupid is pure Kitsch. Furthermore, the spectator is too frequently caught in a maze of mirrors, a ricochet of flashbacks. Bergman likes to wander away from his audience into a child's garden of vices where he plays "biting little games" of innuendo and digs "poisonously squirming worms of associations." Often he wanders even farther, down into weird sea valleys of sick imagination where all human values are dissolved into primordial symbols and only a psychiatrist can adequately follow. Yet Bergman's films can be seen as a fascinating psychological record of his struggle to rise out of these cold depths of isolation to the warm world of human feeling. From Hate to Hope. The struggle begins in Bergman's first script, where it is expressed as a young man's attempt to escape the influence of a cold and evil old man. He fails. In Bergman's early films the evil old man is gradually transformed into an evil mother (Illicit Interlude), who tells her son he will never be able to live his life. He drowns. Then dramatically in The Naked Night, one of Bergman's most powerful films, the hero, after a moral and physical ordeal, kills a bear. One Jungian analyst, after seeing the film, pointed out that the bear is the traditional totem of the evil mother in myths and fairy tales. Whether or not this far-out interpretation is correct, Bergman's pictures suddenly brighten. He makes three comedies (A Lesson in Love, Dreams, Smiles of a Summer Night), in which his first worth-while women appear and begin to educate their demoralized and dependent men. The education obviously succeeds, for in The Seventh Seal, Bergman's first heroic hero appears, a knight who delays implacable Death long enough to accomplish "one single meaningful action." He preserves the lives of Mia and Jof (Mary and Joseph) and their infant son, who will one day "perform the one impossible trick" of making a ball stand still in the air, i.e., he will transcend nature. The Seventh Seal marks the great divide in Bergman's life and work. With it death and desperation fall away, life and hope appear. From Mind to Faith. Warmed and inspired by this imitation of divinity, Bergman in Wild Strawberries began a determined search for God within himself. In the person of this principal character, an old physician (played by Viktor Sjostrom) who has lived the life of the mind but personifies the death of the heart. Bergman (as he has described it) weighs his whole life and finds it wanting in love. But at the finish, the old scientist returns to the bosom of his family and there finds the love and meaning he had lost. With love, life can begin, and in Brink of Life, Bergman watches three pregnant women as they attempt to achieve birth (in the context, birth may symbolize an attempted rebirth in the spiritual sense). But nothing is born, and in The Magician, Bergman examines the reason for the failure--lack of faith. His magician-hero, made up to resemble Christ, has supernatural powers, but he listens to rational objections, doubts himself, loses his powers. But in the last reel of the film, after long suffering in obscurity, the magician is "called at last" to perform in the presence of the King. And in the latest picture, The Virgin Spring, God makes his first miraculous intervention in the world of Ingmar Bergman. On the spot where the beautiful virgin is brutally done to death, a spring bubbles forth from the dry land. And Bergman cries out, with the voice of the girl's father: "Here I will build unto Thee a church...I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live." Dangers of Happiness. The development described in Bergman's work seems to have been realized in his life. Since the completion of The Virgin Spring, friends have noticed a new mellowness in the man. An intimate who has peeked at his diaries reports that they used to be filled "with a very funny kind of logic in which he could wear many different masks and be a new man for every person he met. They reminded me of Kafka." But recently the note of logical unreality has disappeared, and the diaries are now filled mostly with clearheaded, matter-of-fact notes about people to be seen and work to be done. Bergman and his pianist-wife, Kaebi (pronounced Cabby), live with two servants in a big old frame house in a Stockholm suburb, Bergman is up at 7:30. At 9:15 a studio chauffeur delivers him to SF, at 5 takes him home. After supper he sets up the next day's work, goes early to bed. The Bergmans rarely entertain--too much trouble. He coolly observes: "We have to administer our gifts." Bergman likes his wife to wear light makeup. "I don't want her to look like a movie actress," he says. To some of Bergman's friends, the suburban idyl looks too good to last. One of them skeptically recalls a line from a Bergman script: "Happiness is a thick, paralyzing pastry settling down on one's everyday life.." But so far happiness has not stifled Bergman's creative inspiration. Last week most of the next film, a comedy called The Devil's Eye, was in the can, and he was hard at work on the script of another picture. And it will take him a dozen years, he expects, to make all the other movies he has in his mind. He will probably make most of them in Sweden. "I have spent 15 years forging my instrument," he says, "and now I have become a part of it. All the legs of the millepede are working at last. Why should I leave?" The Existentialist. Hollywood is trying hard to persuade him. Harry Belafonte recently offered him the chance to make a movie with Belafonte in the role of Aleksander Pushkin, the octoroon who was Russia's greatest poet. Bergman declined with thanks (said he: "Pushkin was a genius, Belafonte is not"). And a Hollywood producer has reportedly offered him twelve times the modest annual income (about $22,000) he realizes from all four of his careers if he will make a picture with a big Hollywood star. Bergman has "indicated interest" in making a screen version of The Fall, by Albert Camus. In whatever he does, Ingmar Bergman will continue with all the force of his extraordinary talent "to express the current dilemma. God's in his heaven, says Bergman, all's wrong with the world. Man needs a God much closer to home, a God within himself. "If God is not there, life is an outrageous terror" ruled by fate, which has "no answers, merely appointments." Nevertheless, "nobody can live with Death before his eyes, and the knowledge of the nothingness of all things." Life must have a meaning. But the search for meaning ends in empty words and an empty heart. In the last ditch of despair, Bergman finds the courage to be. Life, he cries, is the meaning of life. "Step by step you go into the darkness. The movement itself is the only truth...The most dangerous ways are the only passable ones." It is an existentialist statement, and Bergman is a passionate existentialist, but more in Christian Kierjkegaard's than in Atheist Sartre's sense. "Man's essence," wrote Sartre, "is his existence." Man's essence, says Bergman, is God's existence. "Somehow life goes on. I believe in life, in this life, a life after death, all kinds of life...And death is a part of life." </body> </article> </text>