Another Modern Master Passes...
Dear Fellow Workers! We’re now going to make a film which, in a way, is about an attempted suicide. Actually it deals (“as usual” I was about to say!) with Life, Love and Death. The reason is that nothing in fact is more important. To occupy oneself with. To Think of. To worry over. To be happy about. And so on. If some honest person were to ask me honestly just why I have written this film, I, to be honest, could not give a clear-cut answer, I think that for some time now I have been living with an anxiety which had had no tangible cause. It has been like having toothache, without the conscientious dentist having been able to find anything wrong with the tooth or with the person as a whole. After having given my anxiety various labels, each less convincing than the other, I decided to begin investigating more methodically. Another person’s vicissitudes came to my aid; I found similarities between her experiences and my own, with the difference that her situation was more obvious and more explicit, and much more painful. In this way the chief character in our film began to take shape: a well-adjusted, capable and disciplined person, a highly qualified professional woman with a career, comfortably married to a gifted colleague and surrounded by what is called “the good things of life.” It is this admirable character’s shockingly quick breakdown and agonizing rebirth that I have tried to describe. I have also, on the basis of the material at my disposal, shown the causes of the disaster as well as the possibilities available to this woman in the future. For my own part I have benefitted greatly by this process. The torment, formerly diffuse, has acquired name and address. In this way it has been deprived of its nimbus and alarm. If this opus can be of similar use to someone else, the effort is not in vain. To recognize a distant or close acquaintance with a malicious or pitying smile is of course not so bad either, and can give rise to strengthening comparisons, in which one’s own excellence can be measured by someone else’s wretchedness. Nor in fact is there any harm in simply letting oneself be entertained for a couple of hours. Good-looking and talented actors, who in a credible manner portray sad, dramatic or amusing situations are almost always entertaining, however painful the complications happen to be. On the other hand, ennui or indifference affect the film’s originator in a terrible way, and it is only fair in that case that he should be put to shame, publicly mocked and the victim of thumping financial reprisals. What more shall I say? Oh yes, as you can see from the mere bulk of this book, it will be a pretty long film, several kilometres by the time it’s finished. I’ve tried in vain to condense it, but each thing has its size and I have learned to be cautious about interfering in my characters’ actions and conversations and steering them. During rehearsal we always find points that turn out to be over-clear or unnecessary. The film is divided into two sections and each section into two acts. The first part is almost pedantically realistic, tangible. The second part is elusive, intangible: the “dreams” are more real than the reality. In this connection let me add a somewhat bizarre comment. I am extremely suspicious of dreams, apparitions and visions, both in literature and in films and plays. Perhaps it’s because mental excesses of this sort smack too much of being “arranged.” So when, despite my reluctance and suspicion, I go to depict a series of dreams, which moreover are not my own, I like to think of these dreams as an extension of reality. This is therefore a series of real events which strike the leading character during an important moment of her life. Here something remarkable occurs. Although Jenny is a psychiatrist she has never taken the extended reality seriously. Despite her wide knowledge she is, to a pretty great extent, mentally illiterate (a common ailment with psychiatrists; one could almost call it an occupational disease). Jenny has always been firmly convinced that a cheese is a cheese, a table is a table and, not least, that a human being is a human being. This last conviction is one of the things she is forced to modify in rather a painful way when she realizes in a flash that she is a conglomeration of other people and of the whole world. Frankly, I don’t know whether she will be able to bear her realization. In that case there remains only one fairly poor alternative: she reverts to what, for the sake of simplicity and security, is called Jenny Isaksson, a stifling, static combination of mapped-out qualities and patterns of behaviour. If, on the other hand, she accepts her new knowledge, she lets herself be drawn farther in towards the centre of her universe, guided by the light of intuition, a voyage of discovery which at the same time opens her up to the other people in an endless design. There is a consequential alternative: the endlessness may become unbearable, the mechanism breaks down under the hardships of the voyage, she tires of her increasingly broadened insight and of the ennui that results from such an insight. She tires and puts out the light, in the respectable certainly that if you put out the light it will be dark at any rate—and quiet. I think it’s important to have said all this, since it is significant for our attitude to the film we are going to make, both humanly and artistically. I mean that the kind of film we are embarking on offers dangerous possibilities of artistic idea-diarrhea. To decide at every moment what is right and true and proper can be rather tricky. And the effort must not be noticeable either. Everything must give an impression of naturalness—and moreover be possible of creating with our limited material resources. So let’s set off on a new adventure!
Ingmar Bergman (died this week) A letter to sent to cast and crew Of his 1976 film, Face to Face
Fårö, 7 December 1974