Thursday, July 30, 2009
Visits to Ingmar's Island
Bergman Island is a documentary consisting of a number of interviews with Swedish television journalist Marie Nyreröd circa 2003-04 with film and theatre director Ingmar Bergman who died two years ago today. The interviews were done at a time when Bergman had finished his final film Saraband and shortly before he closed out his apartment in Stockholm and the room that was maintained for him at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, and spent the rest of his days on the Island of Faro, where many of Bergman's films were made after 1965.
In one of the few scenes in the documentary that does not take place on Faro, he revisits the balcony of the Dramatic Theatre which he first visited in 1928. and tells how he came down with a fever and was bed ridden for several days "due to my first ever visit to a real theater." When one considers Bergman, this anecdote seems true and significant. He shared his passions, fears, and struggles in his films in a way few artists have. In the last scene of the film he reads through a list of his greatest demons that have plagued him in his life: the Demon of Disaster, the Demon of fear, the Demon of Rage, the Demon of Grudges, and the Demon of Nothingness. The last of these, which he describes as a kind block of creative is something he says he has never encountered and for that he is grateful.
Bergman Island is primarily an artist and elder taking tally and stock of his life and work. Many of the discussions are illustrated with scenes from home movies taken on production or clips of newsreels that are commented on by Bergman and Nyreröd (Fortunately, more of the production footage and 16mm home movies are being released sometime in the near future in Images from the Playground , which premiered at Cannes this past May.)
It seems fitting that Bergman participated in these long form interviews with Nyreröd, an attractive, intelligent nordic blonde. Perhaps this contributed to the relaxed and apparently candid nature of the interviews. Bergman's love life is in some ways almost as legendary as his theater and cinema career. He was married five times, and had extended relationships with his actresses Liv Ullman, Bibi Andersson, and Harriet Andersson. At one point Nyreröd asks him what it was like to be on the set with a woman he had lived with (Bibi Andersson) and another he would be with (Ullman) after the film was made. Reflectively holding an forefinger to his nose Bergman replies: "I can't say I was still young and inexperienced when I made that film. I'd been married a number of times and I had many children." Nyreröd reminds him he was 47 then. "Was I? But I usually say that I left puberty when I was 58." At another point he speaks candidly about his role as father. "I've been family lazy, you could say. It's quite simply I have never put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have."
From the end of WWII to 1955, he created ten years of films, many of them solid before the stunning international success of Smiles of a Summer Night. That success allowed him to have full creative control of his work, a privilege few film artists have ever had. I believe he was at the top of his game with his uncompromising, intense, often austere run of films from the sixties: Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence, Persona, Shame, and The Passion of Anna. These films in addition to his work of the forties, fifites, seventies and beyond, create a body of work worth dipping into for the rest of one's life.
Bergman Island certainly has a lot for anyone has a kind of nerdly passion for Bergman's work. Fans of this ilk will appreciate his story of how the chess playing between the knight and death of The Seventh Seal was inspired by a Albertus Pictor painting he saw in a chapel in Uppland he saw when his itinerant minister father preached there. Even better is that images of the painting are included. And another factoid Bergman morsel is his confession that the soundbite he made saying that the four women characters in Cries and Whispers was a lie, just something he made up to tell the press.
Bergman Island and the Peter Cowie half hour video lecture Bergman 101, which is also included on the recent Criterion DVD not only can satisfy the film buff jones of the long time admirer, but can serve as a kind of solid introduction to the man and his work to those new to Bergman.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:25 PM
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