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BERGMAN AS WRITER
by Hollis Alpert
Originally published in Saturday Review, August 27, 1960
Published screenplays have seldom caused any particular excitement in literary circles. For one thing, they are scarcely very readable, interlarded as they are with CUT TOs, EXTs, FADE INs, and CLOSE SHOTs; and even when these directions are left out of the published versions, screenplays are difficult going (although an exception might be made in the screenplays of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, mainly because of his exceptional ability with dialogue).
Later this year, however, we are undoubtedly going to be in for a change; Simon & Schuster are bringing out a collection of four of Ingmar Bergman's screenplays in translation. Through the kindly offices of Elizabeth Sutherland, the S&S editor who has seen the book through from start to finish, I have been given an advance look at the proofs, and have found myself caught up in the reading of the scripts of Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Magician, which will appear in a volume titled Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman.
Bergman is a phenomenon that has hardly gone unnoticed in the last year or two. It seems to be established that he is the pre-eminent film-maker in the world today, but it is as director rather than writer that he has come to be honoured. Indeed, Miss Sutherland informs me that Bergman was reluctant to have his screenplays published. In his introduction he writes, "I 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."
But whether or not Bergman is, technically speaking, an author, he is certainly a writer and a creative personality of a very high order. Divorced from the screen images, the stories he tells hold one through their narrative power alone, and they are written in a manner that is a combination of narrative fiction and the printed play. There are no technical directions whatsoever. Bergman does not break up his screenplays into the Chinese puzzle of cuts and dissolves and cross-cuts that are the so dearly beloved of the scholarly film specialists. Montages there are in his films, clever, startling uses of all the technical tricks of the cinema; but there is not a sign of these in what he has written. Miss Sutherland, fascinated by what appeared to be a revolutionary kind of screen-writing, made a check to see whether Bergman used a shooting script–that is, a further development of the original screenplay. What she discovered was that these screenplays are exactly what Bergman uses. He has them mimeographed for cast and technicians, and uses one of the mimeographed copies to make notes on as he proceeds. It would seem, then, that for Bergman the technical means of moviemaking serve the ideas, rather than the other way around.
One might even go so far as to assume that Bergman takes the technical language of film for granted. Having been developed, it now exists to be used as one forceful method–if not the most forceful–of telling stories. If his practice should spread, he may very well put a lot of film theorists out of jobs, or at least prevent them from indulging in the jargon of their trade–sometimes known as montagemanship.
The reader of Bergman's screenplays will therefore be lucky. He will be able to notice how well Bergman uses words (the translations by Lars Malmström and David Kushner beautifully bridge the language difference) and how immaculate is his sense of form. Smiles of a Summer Night emerges as an elegant comedy in an area of its own somewhere between an English comedy of manners and a French farce. Fredrik, the middle-aged lawyer, is saddened by the lack of sexual interest in his teen-age wife, and at the same time attracted by the mature charms of an actress who was once his mistress. The characters do not so much play a game of romantic intrigue as they work out a pattern of romantic determinism. The conception would be equally at home in film, on stage, or in a short novel. The detail, on the other hand, is all visual and cinematic.
The detail of Wild Strawberries would seem less congenial to film, were it not for the fact that it is Bergman's best motion picture to date. The form of the screenplay is that of a first-person narrative by a doctor of seventy-six, who chronicles what turns out to be the most meaningful day of his life. It is a day of dream and reverie, of the present opening doors into the past, of honours for achievement turning ironically into a self-indictment. Here is a sample of Bergman's writing:
We drove for a while in silence. The sun stood high in the sky and the road was brilliantly white. Suddenly I had an impulse. I slowed down and swung the car into a small side road on the left, leading down to the sea. It was a twisting, forest road, bordered by piles of newly cut timber which smelled strongly in the heat of the sun....
It may be noticed that Bergman has even included an olfactory detail. What he has not done is to break the scene down to a series of cuts, although they are there implicitly. Anyone who has spent a year in film production would know exactly what to do, so far as camera set-ups and angles are concerned. It is in Bergman's mind that the important work is done. "The script," he writes, "is a very imperfect technical basis for a film." The shades and tones of his vision are what he is after, and these, he has realized, cannot be put down on paper.
His vision of the good knight in The Seventh Seal (that most astoundingly original of movies), seeking the meaning of his life as it is about to end, might have been taken from a medieval tapestry. "The night had brought little relief from the heat, and at dawn a hot gust of wind blows across the colourless sea." So the story begins. We meet the hooded figure of Death, a procession of religious flagellants, a young girl bound to a cross that will topple her into a pyre, a company of minstrels, a man of evil, a fool, and a dance of death outlined against "the dark, retreating sky where summer lightning glitters like silver needles over the horizon." This is a vision first written and then turned into film, laboured over so that the clumsy apparatus that produces the motion picture will at least approximate what was glimpsed in the mind's eye.
It is this method of creating that has made Bergman unique, the recognition that film can be magic, if the imagination is given sway. In The Magician he has looked into the realm of illusion, and has noticed that the prestidigitator, the mesmerist, the mind-reader, mountebank though he may be, is also in touch with powerful forces of the imagination, of the mind, and the will. The artist, too, is mountebank, Bergman seems to be telling us, but he also seems to suggest that he oughtn't to be underrated, for his too is a method of getting at the truth. Bergman, then, is essentially the artist, as much writer as he is a film-maker. His movies begin in what he calls a mental state. An idea, he says, "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." What? No montage? No juxtaposition of shots? What on earth would the Screenwriters Guild say!
© Saturday Review
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