Ingmar Bergman

From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me (2000)

275 From the Life of the Marionettes: Bergman, Sweden, and Me Bergman and Me Bergman’s films are, before everything else, personal. The most fully characteristic are intense psychodramas in which one feels one is watching an internal battle being played out—a battle among human individuals but also among warring and often murderous impulses within a single mind or personality. The battle sometimes ends in explicit defeat (Shame, A Passion), sometimes (but mainly in earlier films) in less-than-entirelyconvincing affirmation (The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries), sometimes in patently ridiculous wish-fulfillment (Through a Glass Darkly), sometimes in what looks like utter exhaustion but might just pass for “making the best of a bad job” (Winter Light). In any case, the films seem to wish to provoke a correspondingly personal response: we feel we are invited to “compare and contrast” our own experiences with those shown on the screen and use our reactions and inferences however we may. The films seem to be addressed, as it were, from one suffering human being to other suffering human beings. Their central (and crucial) ambiguity is whether they are intended to make us seek answers 276 robin wood or whether they are incitements to a shared despair and a sense of the hopelessness of it all. I wrote a book on Bergman’s films a long time ago, when I was still extremely young, not even forty, when (as a very late developer) I began to grow up. As far as I know, it has never been translated into Swedish. (Why, after all, would it be? In England, people found Bergman’s films “very Swedish,” but that is because at that time they hardly ever talked about sex except in lewd jokes.) At the time, I thought the book was wonderful and amazing and revelatory, but now there is much in it that I am ashamed of. To Swedish readers, if there were any, it probably seemed terribly naive. However, my sense that Bergman , in his films, was talking to me personally, whether challenging me to live or urging me to suicide, remains quite strong. I write today as a somewhat different person, yet my response is still “personal.” How can it not be, given the ways in which the films address the viewer? There will be readers who believe that criticism should be “objective,” “rational,” “scientific” (possibly it “should” be, in some perfect world, but if they think it ever is in this one they are even bigger idiots than I am). If they are patient, they will (eventually) come across a partial analysis of From the Life of the Marionettes, which I hope will make (partial ) sense to them. But I cannot write about Bergman without constantly acknowledging my ongoing personal debate with his films and the changes in my perspective since I wrote my book, and the first part of this chapter will necessarily be an account of why, early, I committed myself to his films so unequivocally and why, since, I have found it inevitable that I must distance myself from them, while never losing my respect for the astonishing honesty and integrity with which he has exposed himself From the Life of the Marionettes 277 to audiences all over the world. In the interests of communicating one human being’s experiences of what it means to be alive, intelligent, honest, and fearless, he has stripped himself naked before the gaze of anyone who dares to look. This chapter will be, perhaps inevitably, to some degree an attack on an artist who has been a crucial formative influence on my life but an influence I have found it necessary (to my very continued existence perhaps) subsequently to disown, at least in part. It is not intended to dishonor or, least of all, dismiss him. Bergman’s films are as essential a part of our heritage as the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Dostoyevsky. And, after all, wouldn’t the world be a better place if we all went naked (physically, perhaps , in warm enough weather, but certainly emotionally and psychically)? And if the artist dares expose himself so honestly, shouldn’t (in fairness and justice) the critic—who is not, necessarily , the Jarl Kulle of Now About These Women? When I wrote my book on Bergman I was (officially, that is) a happily married heterosexual family man with...