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
Film-making
Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of
films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black
and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity
of their content, and a certain brooding presence that
seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is
long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957),
Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960),
The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of
Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last
film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings.
In the following selection, the Introduction to Four
Ingmar Bergman Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman
1918-2007 discusses how he views the art of film-making.

During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the

northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in
the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there
is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in
the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from
time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, rain-
dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety
of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater
jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes.
Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail
over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were
all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, make-
up men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm.
Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky.
Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and
then another, and then several cranes floating majestically

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in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing

and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better.
We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward
and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought:
this is what it means to make a movie in Sweden. This is
what can happen, this is how we work together with our
old equipment and little money, and this is how we can
suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating
above the tree tops.


My association with film goes back to the world of
childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment
in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining-room table there,
‘listening’ to the sunshine which came in through the
gigantic windows. The cathedral bells went ding-dong, and
the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way.
One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was
five years old, a piano was being played in the next
apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the
wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved
across the picture the water in the canal began to flow,
the pigeons flew up from the square, people talked and
gesticulated. Bells sounded, not those of Uppsala Cathedral
but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came
from that remarkable picture of Venice.
A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage
acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind
the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages,
baptisms, gave advice and prepared sermons. The devil
was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there
was a need to personify him. This is where my magic
lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a
carbide lamp—I can still remember the smell of the hot
metal—and coloured glass slides: Red Riding Hood and
the Wolf, and all the others. And the wolf was the Devil,
without horns but with a tail and a gaping red mouth,
strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness
and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.

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When I was ten years old I received my first, rattling

film projector, with its chimney and lamp. I found it both
mystifying and fascinating. The first film I had was nine
feet long and brown in colour. It showed a girl lying asleep
in a meadow, who woke up and stretched out her arms,
then disappeared to the right. That was all there was to it.
The film was a great success and was projected every night
until it broke and could not be mended any more.
This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set.
And even today I remind myself with childish excitement
that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based
on deception of the human eye. I have worked it out that if
I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit
through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness—the
blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty
of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take
advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus
with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional
manner—make them laugh, scream with fright, smile,
believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked,
charmed, deeply moved or perhaps yawn with boredom.
Thus I am either an impostor or, when the audience is
willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks
with apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any
entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.

  

 


 



A film for me begins with something very vague—a
chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable
event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few
bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes

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in my work at the theatre I have envisioned actors made

up for yet unplayed roles.
These are split second impressions that disappear as
quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood—like
pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story,
but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most
of all, it is a brightly coloured thread sticking out of the
dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this
thread, and do it carefully, a complete film will emerge.
This primitive nucleus strives to achieve definite form,
moving in a way that may be lazy and half asleep at first.
Its stirring is accompanied by vibrations and rhythms
which are very special and unique to each film. The picture
sequences then assume a pattern in accordance with these
rhythms, obeying laws born out of and conditioned by my
original stimulus.
If that embryonic substance seems to have enough
strength to be made into a film, I decide to materialise it.
Then comes something very complicated and difficult: the

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transformation of rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions,

sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences,
into an understandable screenplay.
This is an almost impossible task. The only thing that
can be satisfactorily transferred from that original complex
of rhythms and moods is the dialogue, and even dialogue is
a sensitive substance which may offer resistance. Written
dialogue is like a musical score, almost incomprehensible
to the average person. Its interpretation demands a technical
knack plus a certain kind of imagination and feeling—
qualities which are so often lacking, even among actors.
One can write dialogue, but how it should be delivered, its
rhythm and tempo, what is to take place between lines—all
this must be omitted for practical reasons. Such a detailed
script would be unreadable. I try to squeeze instructions as
to location, characterisation and atmosphere into my
screenplays in understandable terms, but the success of
this depends on my writing ability and the perceptiveness
of the reader, which are not always predictable.


Now we come to essentials, by which I mean montage,
rhythm and the relation of one picture to another—the
vital third dimension without which the film is merely a
dead product from a factory. Here I cannot clearly give a
key, as in a musical score, nor a specific idea of the tempo
which determines the relationship of the elements involved.
It is quite impossible for me to indicate the way in which
the film ‘breathes’ and pulsates.
I have often wished for a kind of notation which would
enable me to put on paper all the shades and tones of my
vision, to record distinctly the inner structure of a film.
For when I stand in the artistically devastating atmosphere
of the studio, my hands and head full of all the trivial and
irritating details that go with motion-picture production,
it often takes a tremendous effort to remember how I
originally saw and thought out this or that sequence, or
what was the relation between the scene of four weeks ago
and that of today. If I could express myself clearly, in

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explicit symbols, then this problem would be almost

eliminated and I could work with absolute confidence that
whenever I liked I could prove the relationship between
the part and the whole and put my finger on the rhythm,
the continuity of the film.
Thus the script is a very imperfect technical basis for a
film. And there is another important point in this
connection which I should like to mention. Film has nothing
to do with literature; the character and substance of the
two art forms are usually in conflict. This probably has
something to do with the receptive process of the mind.
The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious
act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little
it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is
different with a motion picture. When we experience a film,
we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside
will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination.
The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.
Music works in the same fashion; I would say that
there is no art form that has so much in common with film
as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the
intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and
exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood,
music has been my great source of recreation and
stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically.

  

 

 



It is mainly because of this difference between film
and literature that we should avoid making films out of
books. The irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ
of its existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms—
and it, in turn, destroys the special, irrational dimension
of the film. If, despite this, we wish to translate something

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literary into film terms, we must make an infinite number

of complicated adjustments which often bear little or no
fruit in proportion to the effort expended.
I myself have never had any ambition to be an author.
I do not want to write novels, short stories, essays,
biographies, or even plays for the theatre. I only want to
make films—films about conditions, tensions, pictures,
rhythms and characters which are in one way or another
important to me. The motion picture, with its complicated
process of birth, is my method of saying what I want to my
fellow men. I am a film-maker, not an author.
Thus the writing of the script is a difficult period but
a useful one, for it compels me to prove logically the validity
of my ideas. In doing this, I am caught in a conflict—a
conflict between my need to transmit a complicated
situation through visual images, and my desire for absolute
clarity. I do not intend my work to be solely for the benefit
of myself or the few, but for the entertainment of the general
public. The wishes of the public are imperative. But
sometimes I risk following my own impulse, and it has
been shown that the public can respond with surprising
sensitivity to the most unconventional line of development.
When shooting begins, the most important thing is
that those who work with me feel a definite contact, that
all of us somehow cancel out our conflicts through working
together. We must pull in one direction for the sake of the
work at hand. Sometimes this leads to dispute. But the
more definite and clear the ‘marching orders’, the easier it
is to reach the goal which has been set. This is the basis
for my conduct as director, and perhaps the explanation of
much of the nonsense that has been written about me.
While I cannot let myself be concerned with what people
think and say about me personally, I believe that reviewers
and critics have every right to interpret my films as they
like. I refuse to interpret my work to others, and I cannot
tell the critic what to think; each person has the right to
understand a film as he sees it. Either he is attracted or
repelled. A film is made to create reaction. If the audience
does not react one way or another, it is an indifferent work
and worthless.

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I do not mean by this that I believe in being ‘different’

at any price. A lot has been said about the value of
originality, and I find this foolish. Either you are original
or you are not. It is completely natural for artists to take
from and give to each other, to borrow from and experience
one another. In my own life, my great literary experience
was Strindberg. There are works of his which can still
make my hair stand on end—The People of Hemso, for
example. And it is my dream to produce Dream Play some
day. Olof Molander’s production of it in 1934 was for me a
fundamental dramatic experience.

  

 

       



On a personal level, there are many people who have
meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were
certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but
because they created a world for me to revolt against. In
my family there was an atmosphere of hearty
wholesomeness which I, a sensitive young plant, scorned
and rebelled against. But that strict middle-class home
gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself
against. At the same time they taught me a number of
values—efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial
responsibility—which may be ‘bourgeois’ but are
nevertheless important to the artist. They are part of the
process of setting oneself severe standards. Today as a
film maker I am conscientious, hard-working and extremely
careful; my films involve good craftsmanship, and my pride
is the pride of a good craftsman.
Among the people who have meant something in my
professional development is Torsten Hammaren of
Gothenburg. I went there from Hälsingborg, where I had
been head of the municipal theatre for two years. I had no

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conception of what theatre was; Hammaren taught me

during the four years I stayed in Gothenburg. Then, when
I made my first attempts at film, Alf Sjöberg—who directed
Torment—taught me a great deal. And there was Lorens
Marmstedt, who really taught me filmmaking from scratch
after my first unsuccessful movie. Among other things I
learned from Marmstedt is the one unbreakable rule: you
must look at your own work very coldly and clearly; you
must be a devil to yourself in the screening room when
watching the day’s rushes. Then there is Herbert Grevenius,
one of the few who believed in me as a writer. I had trouble
with script-writing, and was reaching out more and more
to the drama, to dialogue, as a means of expression. He
gave me great encouragement.
Finally, there is Carl Anders Dymling, my producer.
He is crazy enough to place more faith in the sense of
responsibility of a creative artist than in calculations of
profit and loss. I am thus able to work with an integrity
that has become the very air I breathe, and one of the
main reasons I do not want to work outside of Sweden. The
moment I lose this freedom I will cease to be a film-maker,
because I have no skill in the art of compromise. My only
significance in the world of film lies in the freedom of my
creativity.


Today, the ambitious film-maker is obliged to walk a
tightrope without a net. He may be a conjurer, but no one
conjures the producer, the bank director or the theatre
owners when the public refuses to go see a film and lay
down the money by which producer, bank director, theatre
owner and conjurer can live. The conjurer may then be
deprived of his magic wand; I would like to be able to
measure the amount of talent, initiative and creative ability
which has been destroyed by the film industry in its
ruthlessly efficient sausage machine. What was play to me
once has now become a struggle. Failure, criticism, public
indifference all hurt more today than yesterday. The brutality
of the industry is undisguised—yet that can be an advantage.

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So much for people and the film business. I have been

asked, as a clergyman’s son, about the role of religion in my
thinking and film-making. To me, religious problems are
continuously alive. I never cease to concern myself with
them; it goes on every hour of every day. Yet this does not
take place on the emotional level, but on an intellectual
one. Religious emotion, religious sentimentality, is
something I got rid of long ago—I hope. The religious problem
is an intellectual one to me: the relationship of my mind to
my intuition. The result of this conflict is usually some
kind of tower of Babel.
Philosophically, there is a book which was a tremendous
experience for me: Eiono Kaila’s Psychology of the Personality.
His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs—
negative and positive—was shattering to me, but terribly
true. And I built on this ground.


People ask what are my intentions with my films—my
aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually
give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the
human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems
to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to
describe what I would like my aim to be.
There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres
was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then
thousands of people came from all points of the compass,
like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to
rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the
building was completed—master builders, artists, labourers,
clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained
anonymous and no one knows to this day who built the
cathedral of Chartres.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which
are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that
art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated
from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its
own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former
days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the

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glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less

important than other artisans; ‘eternal values’, ‘immortality’
and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case.
The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished
invulnerable assurance and natural humility.
Today the individual has become the highest form and
the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound
or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it
were of eternal importance. The artist considers his
isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy.
Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand
and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each
other and without realising that we are smothering each
other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s
eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in
circles, so limited by our anxieties that we can no longer
distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s
whim and the purest ideal.
Thus if I am asked what I would like the general
purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be
one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I
want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil—or perhaps
a saint—out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the
sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I
believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would
play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

  

 

 



With over 30 honorary doctorates and a string of literary and
academic awards, Umberto Eco has the reputation of being one of
the world’s foremost intellectuals. A professor at the University of
Bologna in Italy, Umberto Eco is known for his ideas on semiotics,
literary interpretation and medieval aesthetics. He is a
distinguished novelist and writer. His novel, The Name of the

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Rose, published in 1980 sold over ten million copies. Here is an

excerpt from an interview with Eco where he expresses his views
on the filming of books.
The Name of the Rose is a very serious novel. It’s a detective
yarn at one level but it also delves into metaphysics,
theology, and medieval history. Yet it enjoyed a huge mass
audience. Were you puzzled at all by this?
No. Journalists are puzzled. And sometimes publishers. And this is
because journalists and publishers believe that people like
trash and don’t like difficult reading experiences. Consider there
are six billion people in this planet. The Name of the Rose sold
between 10 and 15 million copies. So in a way I reached only a
small percentage of readers. But it is exactly these kinds of
readers who don’t want easy experiences. Or at least don’t
always want this. I myself, at 9 pm after dinner, watch television
and want to see either ‘Miami Vice’ or ‘Emergency Room’. I enjoy
it and I need it. But not all day.
Could the huge success of the novel have anything to do with
the fact that it dealt with a period of medieval history that...
That’s possible. But let me tell you another story, because I often
tell stories like a Chinese wise man. My American publisher
said while she loved my book, she didn’t expect to sell more
than 3,000 copies in a country where nobody has seen a
cathedral or studies Latin. So I was given an advance for 3,000
copies, but in the end it sold two or three million in the U.S.
A lot of books have been written about the medieval past far
before mine. I think the success of the book is a mystery. Nobody
can predict it. I think if I had written The Name of the Rose ten
years earlier or ten years later, it wouldn’t have been the same.
Why it worked at that time is a mystery.
What did you think about the film [directed by Jean Jacques
Annaud and starring Sean Connery]? Why weren’t you happy
with it?
I expected the film to be different. My novel is a kind of club
sandwich—lettuce, tomato, cheese...
Different layers of meaning?
Yes. A film cannot select all the layers. It has to make do with jambon
or cheese... I didn’t react like authors who, immediately after
the film is made, say it is not at all like my book. But after that
experience, I asked my publisher not to sell the rights of the
novel to cinema. I did this because I discovered that 80 per
cent of readers read the book after the movie. And that is very
painful for a novelist.

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But surely this also means greater success, greater

remuneration?
Yes. But it is embarrassing to know that somebody else has already
told the reader that the novel should be read in a particular
way. That he should imagine the face of a character in a
particular way. The only enviable position is that of Homer’s
who had the film made more than 2000 years after the book
(laughs).
So this is why Stanley Kubrick never got to make Foucault’s
Pendulum?
Since I had laid down a general rule, the publisher said no. Then
Stanley Kubrick died. But it may have been a great movie
(laughs).
Talking about Foucault’s Pendulum, there is a sense in which
you did the Da Vinci Code before Dan Brown did. Of course,
you did it as a myth that takes on a strange reality and he
did it as it was historical truth.
I told Dan Brown’s story. My characters are his. I gave the broad
picture of this kind of literature.

MUKUND PADMANABHAN


1. Pick out examples from the text that show Bergman’s sensitivity
to sensory impressions which have made him a great film-
maker.
2. What do you understand of the complexity of the little invisible
steps that go into the making of a good film?
3. What are some of the risks that film-making involves?
4. What misgivings does Bergman have about the contemporary
film industry?
5. Compare Bergman’s views about making films out of books with
that of Umberto Eco’s.


1. According to the author, split-second impressions form a
‘mental state, not an actual story, but one abounding in fertile
associations and images’.
Compare this with Virginia Woolf’s experiment with the stream
of consciousness technique in ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

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2. Bergman talks about the various influences in his life including

his parents and his religious upbringing. To what extent are
an individual’s achievements dependent on the kind of
influences he or she has had in life? Discuss.


1. Autobiographical accounts make interesting reading when the
author selects episodes that are connected to the pursuit of
excellence. How does this apply to Ingmar Bergman’s narration
of the details of film-making?
2. Comment on the conversational tone of the narration. Compare
this with the very informal style adopted by Umberto Eco in
the interview.


A. Vocabulary
Find out and write down the definitions of the following terms
used in the film industry
script project montage flashback
stage prop footlights

B. Grammar
We saw in the grammar section of the unit on Freedom that a
sentence can consist of clauses and phrases.
Let us now look at the basic form of a sentence and study its
parts. A sentence consists of a subject and a predicate. Take
the sentence
My grandmother had a very large old apartment in Uppsala.
The sentence here talks about ‘the grandmother’. ‘The
grandmother’ is the subject of the sentence. What is said about
the subject ‘grandmother’ is the predicate of the sentence. ‘had
a very large old apartment in Uppsala’ is the predicate.
Generally a sentence begins with the subject. The predicate
begins with a verb. ‘had’ is the verb in the example above. The
subject answers the question ‘who’ or ‘what’ before the verb.
Question: ‘Who had?’
Answer: ‘the grandmother had’.

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The object of a sentence generally comes after the verb. It

answers the question ‘what’ after the verb. ‘Had what?’ ‘had
an apartment’ is the answer. ‘Apartment’ is the object of the
sentence. The word ‘apartment’ has an article and two
adjectives preceding it.
‘a very large old apartment’; the word ‘very’ is an intensifier for
the adjective ‘large’. We are also given information about the
location of the apartment, ‘in Uppsala’. This is a prepositional
phrase and consists of a preposition and a noun. ‘in Uppsala’
is an adjunct. It gives additional information.

TASK
Analyse the parts of the following sentences according to the pattern
above
• My association with film goes back to the world of childhood.
• This is an almost impossible task.
• Thus the script is a very imperfect technical basis for a film.
• I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.
• The ability to create was a gift.

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C. Pronunciation
We have seen that it is not necessary, nor desirable, to
pronounce every sound perfectly to be understood. Quite a lot
of sounds that you might expect to hear are not actually
pronounced. In rapid speech, sounds may be left out or elided,
especially when they occur as part of a cluster of consonants.
For example in the phrase ‘next day’, the /t/ is lost
next/ day

TASK
Mark the consonants that are left out or elided in the following utterances
• new textbooks
• written scripts
• he must be ill
• mashed potatoes


Think of a particular episode that could be enacted. Now
imagine that you are a scriptwriter and write the screenplay
for the first ten minutes of the episode, in the following format
Title :
Actors :
Scene -1
Description Dialogue

The column ‘Dialogue’ would contain the words to be actually

spoken by the characters. ‘Description’ would include
instructions regarding stage props, position of lights, movement
of actors and so on.


Four Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman.

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