BOOKS

Cries and whispers

David Caute

IMAGES: MY LIFE IN FILM by Ingmar Bergman Bloomsbury, f20, pp. 442 The first Bergman film I saw was Virgin Spring. I emerged with knotted stomach and have never dared to view it again. Bergman retired from film-making ten years ago but during his prolific heyday one ran slowly to the next feast, uncertain whether it was to be the playful elegance of Smiles of a Summer Night (where the Russian-roulette pistol is loaded with soot), the joyous idyll of The Magic Flute, the full coffin-load of Fate in The Seventh Seal, or the rivetting boredom of The Silence. One crept into the cinema braced to fend off the corpses, ghosts, Dr Deaths and demon- ic chess players which have hissed at Bergman (he insists) throughout his life. Would bride and groom commit suicide at the wedding? Would a dead woman rise from her coffin to give birth to her own mother? Violent slashes of Nordic seascape and dark Protestant soulscape would unfailingly turn angelic faces into gargoyles, and all the while there was that mournful-melodious Swedish soundtrack fluting into the ear, those little circles over the o's and dots over the a's — as if even when foolishly happy Swedes are morally compelled to sound close to death's door.

Now for the cast. The lights go down. Enter Max von Sydow on a donkey.

— It's that tall chap again, the one with the ash-white hair, the cavernous cheeks and the accusing gaze. What mediaeval miseries has he got in store for us this time? You finally get to feel that he's not so much playing a role, a part, as being invaded by it.

Close-up of a woman. She doesn't look too happy.

— Wasn't she in the last one? And the one before that? Is she Harriet Andersson or Bibi Andersson?

Bibi. You can tell by her nose. And she's blonde.

Which came first?

Harriet. Then Bibi. Then Harriet kept coming back.

So which is Liv Ullmann? The one with the lips?

Yes. Bibi introduced Liv to Ingmar. They're all very fond of each other, they love to perform together in Ingmar's films. It's a perfect understanding they have. Swedish women are very grown-up, very Scandinavian Social Democrat, about art and love.

Did he marry them all?

His five wives and eight children are another story — except for Liv's daughter by him. Five of the children were born before he was 30. When he got to 60, in 1978, all eight gathered for his birthday, although he'd heard that some of the older 7 have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot' (from the filming of The Magic Flute) ones were being unsympathetic and leftist about his famous income tax difficulties. He owned a Swiss film company and a Swedish one by that time and, he'd been signing documents he never looked at and couldn't conceivably have understood if he had.

Bergman is one of those artists whose golden bricks are baked out of semen and shit, and he's never more vivid than when describing his lifelong bowel problems or how he fouled a Paris taxi after suffering an attack at the top of the Eiffel Tower on a day when the lifts had broken down. The magician of the magic lantern is a highly gifted prose writer who can never quite explain how he became an image-maker of extraordinary power, one of the foremost practitioners of the century's primary art- form, film. He can explain the psychic provenance of his films, he can talk about techniques, editing, photography, light, furious rows with technicians, all the usual stuff, but the genius who emerges after the lights go down has to be seen on the screen.

Beware Bergman on Bergman on Bergman. In recent years he has been conducting his own autopsy non-stop and with the publication of Images there are disturbing confirmations of the recycling. Extensive passages from his recent memoir, The Magic Lantern, are reprinted and many biographical episodes are repeated. In Images Bergman sets out to re-explore his films. The text is based on vast interviews with Lasse Bergstrom, who self-effacingly purged his own questions, boiled it all down, then submitted it to the master for revision. By contrast to the disciplined and evocative time-cutting technique of The Magic Lantern, this book leaves the reader constantly groping for the filmography to get his chronology straight. There is no index. However, the numerous photographs are gorgeous and beautifully chosen — a reminder of the cunning, provocative sensuality of the films.

Bergman begins Images somewhat portentously — his natural, nasty, self- mutilating wit is slow to make its entrance:

Watching 40 years of my work over the span of one year turned out to be unexpectedly upsetting, at times unbearable. I suddenly realised that my movies had been conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, my guts. A nameless desire gave them birth.

With the help of old notes and workbooks, he sought out 'the blurred X-rays of my soul.' My soul' twice in eight lines is an ill omen. Even so, he settles in to the X- raying of each film, often in terms of that now-familiar nightmare, childhood:

Most of our upbringing was based on such concepts as sin, confession, punishment, for- giveness, and grace . . . punishment was something self-evident . . . My brother got the worst of it. Mother used to sit by his bed, bathing his back where Father's carpet beater had loosened his skin and streaked his back with bloody weals.

Then you had to kiss Father's hand. Far into his adult life Bergman's relationship with each of his parents remained unhappy, tortured: they haunt his films.

The driving force in Wild Strawberries is, therefore, a desperate attempt to justify

myself to mythologically oversized parents who have turned away . . .

Bergman reports that as a boy he was an exhibitionist, fantasist and liar (promising qualities in a future artist). He was also a daydreamer but, he notes, 'a daydreamer is not an artist except in his dreams. It was obvious that cinematography would have to become my means of expression.' In a tire- less frenzy Bergman fed his camera with 'dreams . . . fantasies, insane outbursts, neuroses, cramped faith and pure, unadulterated lies.' His macabre youthful experiences were made-to-measure; few of us experienced the privilege of being shut in a mortuary at the age of ten, and left to examine the naked corpse of a pretty young woman. The boy was plucking up courage to touch her pudenda: 'Then I saw that she was watching me from under her half- lowered eyelids.'

Bergman's ability to pour out films like a painter at his easel, whenever he felt like it, which was most of the time, has awed and baffled British and American directors hobbled by the demands of the money men. His early patron was a man he now mocks, Carl Anders Dymling, head of Svensk Filmindustri (where Ingmar first worked as 'the lowliest manuscript slave'). Dymling abandoned his arrogant, manic, abusive protégé from time to time — who wouldn't? — but fought to persuade the Svensk Board to sanction Summer with Monika, despite its eroticism and nude bathing scene. As Peter Cowie has written in his Ingmar Bergman:

He trusted Bergman when the chips were down and at a time when Bergman was by no means accepted as a national institution.

Dymling later described Bergman as

very short-tempered, sometimes quite ruth- less in pursuit of his own goals, suspicious, stubborn, capricious, most unpredictable.

Bergman would agree. But in Images he strikes back:

It had become a standing ritual for the head accountant, Juberg, at the start of every one of my films, to step into the executive office with his accounting ledgers and show what serious losses my latest movies had inflicted upon the company.

But then came Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), a prize-winner at Cannes and 'an unexpected colossal success both in Sweden and in other countries.' The studio began to behave 'not unlike an old maid who suddenly finds herself being courted by the most exotic suitors'. The 'old maid' was Dymling, whom Bergman found at Cannes, 'overexcited and out of control,' selling the film 'dirt cheap to any horse trader who happened to show up.' Bergman immediately presented him with the screenplay of The Seventh Seal (which he'd already rejected) and gave him a now- or-never ultimatum. This film clinched Bergman's international reputation but he cannot forgive Dymling for having been the principal 'yes' or 'no' figure in his early career. Normally Bergman is generous about friends and collaborators; punishing judgments are softened or balanced with a beguiling mea culpa.

Whom does Bergman admire among the major directors? Tarkovsky certainly, 'one of the greatest of all time'. Likewise he professes a 'limitless' admiration for Felli- ni. Now comes the sting:

But I also feel that Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and Fellini began to make Fellini films. Yet Kurosawa has never made a Kurosawa film.

As for Bawd., he 'always made Bufiuel films.' Bergman then asks himself whether Bergman had begun to make Bergman films. The answer is hesitant: 'I find that Autumn Sonata is an annoying example.' Most of us could find a few others.