Ingmar Bergman

*

WHAT
IS
“FILM
MAКING״?

“FILM-MAKING” IS for me a necessity of nature, a need comparable to hunger and thirst. For some, self-expression involves writing books, climbing mountains, beating one’s children or dancing the samba. In my case, I express myself in making films.

In The Blood of a Poet, the great Jean Cocteau shows us his alter ego stumbling down the corridors of a nightmare hotel and gives us a glimpse, behind each one of the doors, of one of the factors of which he is composed and which form his ego.

Without attempting here to equate my personality with Cocteau’s, I thought I would take you on a guided tour of my internal studios where, invisibly, my films take form. This visit, I am afraid, will disappoint you; the equipment is always in disorder because the owner is too absorbed in his affairs to have time to straighten it up. Furthermore, the lighting is rather bad in certain spots, and on the door of certain rooms, you will find the word “Private” written in large letters. Finally, the guide himself is not always sure of what is worth the trouble of showing.

Whatever the case may be, we will open a few doors a crack. I won’t guarantee that you will find precisely the answer to the questions you are wondering about, but perhaps, in spite of everything, you will be able to put together a few pieces of the complicated puzzle that the forming of a film represents.

If we consider the most fundamental element of the cinematographic art, the perforated film, we note that it is composed of a number of small, rectangular images—fifty-two per meter—each of which is separated from the other by a thick, black line. Looking more closely, we discover that these tiny rectangles, which at first glance seem to contain exactly the same picture, differ from each other by an almost imperceptible modification of this picture. And when the feeding mechanism of the projector causes the images in question to succeed each other on the screen so that each one is seen only for a twentieth of a second, we have the illusion of movement.

Between each of these small rectangles the shutter closes and plunges us into total darkness, only to return us to full light with the next rectangle. When I was ten years old and working with my first apparatus, a shaky lantern made of sheet metal—with its chimney, its gas lamp and its perpetual films which repeated themselves indefinitely—I used to find the above-mentioned phenomenon exciting and full of mystery. Even today, I feel myself quiver as I did when I was a child when I think of the fact that, in reality, I am creating illusion; for the cinema would not exist but for an imperfection of the human eye, namely its inability to perceive separately a series of images which follow each other rapidly and which are essentially identical.

I have calculated that if I see a film that lasts an hour, I am in fact plunged for twenty minutes in total darkness. In making a film, therefore, I am making myself guilty of a fraud; I am using a device designed to take advantage of a physical imperfection of man, a device by means of which I can transport my audience from a given feeling to the feeling that is diametrically opposed to it, as if each spectator were on a pendulum; I can make an audience laugh, scream with terror, smile, believe in legends, become indignant, take offense, become enthusiastic, lower itself or yawn from boredom. I am, then, either a deceiver or—when the audience is aware of the fraud—an illusionist. I am able to mystify, and I have at my disposal the most precious and the most astounding magical device that has ever, since history began, been put into the hands of a juggler.

There is in all this, or at least there should be, the source of an insoluble moral conflict for all those who create films or work on them.

As for our commercial partners, this is not the place to bring out the mistakes they have made from year to year, but it would certainly be worthwhile someday for a scientist to discover some unit of weight or measure which one could use to “calculate” the quantity of natural gifts, initiatives, genius and creative forces that the film industry has ground through its formidable mills. Obviously, anyone entering into the game must accept the rules in advanee, and there is no reason why work in the cinematographic branch should be more respected than anywhere else. The differenee is due to the fact that, in our specialty, brutality is manifested more overtly, but this is actually rather an advantage.

Loss of balance offers consequences that are even more grave for the film-maker than for a tightrope walker or an acrobat who performs his tricks beneath a circus tent and without a net. For the film-maker as well as for the equilibrist, the danger is of the same order: falling and being killed. No doubt you think I am exaggerating; making a film isn’t as dangerous as all that! I maintain my point, however; the risk is the same. Even if, as I mentioned, one is a bit of a magician, no one can mystify the producers, the bank directors, the movie-theatre owners or the critics when the public abstains from going to see a film and from paying out the obol from which producers, bank directors, movie-theatre owners, critics and magicians must draw their subsistence!

I can give you as an example a very recent experience, the memory of which still makes me shudder—an experience in which I myself risked losing my balance. A singularly bold producer invested money in one of my films which, after a year of intense activity, appeared under the title of The Naked Night (Gycklarnas afton). The reviews were, in general, destructive, the public stayed away, the producer added up his losses, and I had to wait several years before trying again.

If I make two or three more films which fail financially, the producer will quite justifiably consider it a good idea not to bet on my talents.

At that point, I will become, suddenly, a suspect individual, a squanderer, and I will be able to reflect at my leisure on the usefulness of my artistic gifts, for the magician will be deprived of his apparatus.

When I was younger, I didn’t have these fears. Work for me was an exciting game and, whether the results succeeded or failed, I was delighted with my work like a child with his castles of sand or clay. The equilibrist was dancing on his rope, oblivious and therefore unconcerned about the abyss beneath him and the hardness of the ground of the circus-ring.

The game has changed into a bitter combat. The walk on the rope is now performed in full awareness of the danger, and the two points where the rope is attached are now called “fear” and “incertitude.” Each work to be materialized mobilizes all of the resources of one’s energy. The act of creation has become, under the effect of causes that are as much interior as they are exterior and economic, an exacting duty. Failure, criticism, coldness on the part of the public today cause more sensitive wounds. These wounds take longer to heal and their scars are deeper and more lasting.

Before undertaking a work or after having begun it, Jean Anouilh has the habit of playing a little mental game in order to exorcise his fear. He says to himself, “My father is a tailor. He intimately enjoys creating with his hands, and the result is a beautiful pair of pants or an elegant overcoat. This is the joy and the satisfaction of the artisan, the pride of a man who knows his profession.”

This is the same practice I follow. I recognize the game, I play it often and I succeed in duping myself—and a few others—even if this game is in fact nothing but a rather poor sedative: “My films are fine pieces of work, I am enthusiastic, conscientious and extremely attentive of details. I create for my contemporaries and not for eternity; my pride is the pride of an artisan.”

I know however that, if I speak this way, it is in order to deceive myself, and an irrepressible anxiety cries out to me, “What have you done that can last? Is there in any of your movies a single foot of film worthy of being passed on to posterity, a single line of dialogue, a single situation which is really and indisputably true?”

And to this question I am forced to answer—perhaps still under the effect of a disloyalty which is ineradicable even in the most sincere people—”I don’t know, I hope so.”

You must excuse me for having described at such length and with so much commentary the dilemma which those who create films are forced to confront. I wanted to try to explain to you why so many of those who are devoted to the realization of cinematographic works give in to a temptation which cannot really be expressed and which is invisible; why we are afraid; why we sometimes lose our enthusiasm for the works we are doing; why we become fools and allow ourselves to be annihilated by colorless and vile compromises.

I would still, however, like to dwell a bit longer on one of the aspects of the problem, the aspect that is the most important and difficult to comprehend—the public.

The creator of films is involved in a means of expression which concerns not only himself but also millions of other people, and more often than not he feels the same desire as other artists: “I want to succeed today. I want celebrity now. I want to please, to delight, to move people immediately.”

Midway between this desire and its realization is found the public, who demands but one thing of the film: “I’ve paid, I want to be distracted, swept off my feet, involved; I want to forget my troubles, my family, my work, I want to get away from myself. Here I am, seated in the darkness, and, like a woman about to give birth, I want deliverance.”

The film-maker who is aware of these demands and who lives on the money of the public is placed in a situation which is difficult and which creates obligations for him. In making his film, he must always take the reaction of the public into account. On my part, personally, I am forever asking myself this question: “Can I express myself more simply, more purely, more briefly? Will everybody understand what I want to say now? Will the simplest mind be able to follow the course of these events? And, even more importantly, this question : up to what point do I have the right to admit compromise and where do my obligations to myself begin?”

Any experimentation necessarily involves a great risk, for it always keeps the public at a distance, and keeping the public at a distance can lead to sterility and to isolation in an ivory tower.

It would be quite desirable, then, for producers and other technical directors of the cinema to put laboratories at the disposition of the creators. But this is scarcely the case today. The producers have confidence only in the engineers and stupidly imagine that the salvation of the film industry depends on inventions and technical complications.

Nothing is easier than frightening a spectator. One can literally terrify him, for most people have in some part of their bearing a fear that is all ready to blossom. It is much more difficult to make people laugh, and to make them laugh in the right way. It is easy to put a spectator in a state worse than the one he was in when he entered the theatre; it is difficult to put him in a better state; it is precisely this, however, that he desires each time he sits down in the darkness of a movie-theatre. Now, how many times and by what means do we give him this satisfaction?

This is the way I reason; but at the same time I know with an absolute evidence that this reasoning is dangerous, since it involves the risk of condemning all failures, of confusing the ideal with pride, and of considering as absolute the frontiers that the public and the critics establish, whereas you neither recognize these frontiers nor consider them your own, since your personality is perpetually in the process of becoming. On the one hand, I am tempted to adapt myself and to make myself what the public wants me to be; but on the other hand, I feel that this would be the end of everything, and that this would imply a total indifferenee on my part. Thus, I am delighted to have not been born with exactly as many brains as feelings, and it has never been written anywhere that a film-maker must be contented, happy, or satisfied. Who says you can’t make noise, cross frontiers, battle against windmills, send robots to the moon, have visions, play with dynamite or tear pieces of flesh from one’s self or others? Why not frighten film producers? It is their job to be afraid, and they are paid to have stomach ulcers!

But “film-making” is not always confronting problems, dilemmas, economic worries, responsibilities and fear. There are also games, dreams, secret memories.

Often it begins with an image: a face which is suddenly and strongly illuminated; a hand which rises; a square at dawn where a few old ladies are seated on a bench, separated from each other by sacks of apples. Or it may be a few words that are exchanged; two people who, suddenly, say something to each other in a completely personal tone of voice—their backs are perhaps turned from me, I can’t even see their faces, and yet I am forced to listen to them, to wait for them to repeat the same words which are without any particular meaning but which are pregnant with a secret tension, with a tension of which I am not yet even fully conscious but which acts like a crafty potion. The illuminated face, the hand raised as if for an incantation, the old ladies at the square, the few banal words, all of these images come and attach themselves like silvery fish to my net, or more precisely, I myself am trapped in a net, the texture of which I am not aware of—fortunately!

Quite rapidly, even before the motive has been entirely designed in my mind, I submit the game of my imagination to the test of reality. I place, as if I’m playing a game, my sketch, which is still very rough and fragile, on an easel in order to judge it from the point of view of all the technical resources of the studios. This imaginary test of “viability” constitutes for the motive an effective ferruginous bath. Will it suffice? Will the motive keep its value when it is plunged into the daily, murderous routine of the studios, far from the shadows of sunrises, which are quite propitious for the games of the imagination?

A few of my films mature very quickly and are finished rapidly. These are the ones that meet the general expectations, like children that are still undisciplined but in good health and about whom one can predict immediately: “They are the ones who will support the family.”

And then there are other films, films which come slowly, which take years, which refuse to be imprisoned in a formal or technical solution, and which, in general, refuse any concrete solution. They remain in a shadowy zone; if I want to find them, I have to follow them there and find a context, characters and situation. There, faces that are turned aside begin to speak, the streets are strange, a few, scattered people glance out through window-panes, an eye glistens at dusk or changes into a carbuncle and then bursts with a noise of breaking crystal. The square, this autumn morning, is a sea; the old ladies are transformed into ancient trees and the apples are children building cities of sand and stone near the foam of the waves.

The tension is there, ever present, and it appears again, either in the written word, or in the visions, or in the excess of energy, which bends like the arch of a bridge, ready to rise up by its own forces, by these forces which are the most important element, once the manuscript is finished, in setting in motion the immense wheel which the work required in shooting a film represents.

What is “shooting a film,” then? If I were to ask this question of everybody, I would no doubt obtain quite different responses, but perhaps you would all agree on one point: shooting a film is doing what is necessary in order to transport the contents of the manuscript onto a piece of film. In doing so, you would be saying quite a lot and yet not nearly enough. For me, shooting a film represents days of inhumanly relentless work, stiffness of the joints, eyes full of dust, the odors of make-up, sweat and lamps, an indefinite series of tensions and relaxations, an uninterrupted battle between volition and duty, between vision and reality, conscience and laziness. I think of early risings, of nights without sleep, of a feeling keener than life, of a sort of fanaticism centered about a single task, by which I myself become, finally, an integral part of the film, a ridiculously tiny piece of apparatus whose only fault is requiring food and drink.

It sometimes happens—in the middle of all this excitement, when the studios are humming with a life and a labor that seem as if they should make the studios explode—that, suddenly, I find the idea for my next film. You would be wrong, however, if you thought that the activity of a film-maker supposes, at this moment, a kind of ecstatic vertigo, an uncontrolled excitement and a frightening disorganization. To shoot a film is to undertake the taming of a wild beast that is difficult to handle and very valuable; you need a clear mind, meticulousness, stiff and exact calculations. Add to this a temper that is always even and a patience that is not of this world.

Shooting a film is organizing an entire universe, but the essential elements are industry, money, construction, shooting, developing and copying, a schedule to follow but which is rarely followed, a battle plan minutely prepared where the irrational factors occur the most often. The star has too much black around her eyes—a thousand dollars to start the scene over again. One day, the water in the pipes has too much chlorine in it and the negatives get spotted—let’s start again! Another day, death plays a dirty trick on you by taking away an actor—let’s start with another—and there are several thousand more dollars swallowed up. It starts to thunder, the electric transformer breaks down, and there we are, all made up and waiting in the pale light of the day, the hours flying by and money with them.

Idiotic examples, chosen at random. But they have to be idiotic, since they touch that great and sublime idiocy, the transforming of dreams into shadows, the chopping up of a tragedy into five hundred small pieces, the experimentation with each of these pieces, and finally the putting back together of these pieces so that they constitute again a unity which will once more be the tragedy. It is the idiocy of fabricating a tapeworm 8,000 feet long which will nourish itself on the life and mind of the actors, producers, and creators. Shooting a film is all that, but it is still something else, and it is much worse.

Film-making is also plunging with one’s deepest roots back into the world of childhood. Let’s descend, if you wish, into this interior studio, located in the most intimate recesses of the life of the creator. Let’s open up for a moment the most secret of these rooms so that we can look at a painting of Venice, an old window-blind, and a first apparatus for showing “action films.”

At Upsala, my grandmother had a very old apartment. While I was there, I once slipped beneath the dining-room table; I was wearing an apron with a pocket in front of it; from my vantage point I listened to the voice of the sunbeams which entered through the immensely high windows. The rays moved continually; the bells of the cathedral chimed out; the rays moved, and their movement generated a sort of special sound. It was one of those days between winter and spring; I had the measles and I was five years old. In the neighboring apartment, somebody was playing the piano—it was always waltzes—and on the wall hung a big painting of Venice. While the rays of sun and the shadows were passing like waves across the painting, the water of the canal began to flow, the pigeons flew up from the pavement of the square, people spoke to each other noiselessly, making movements with their hands and heads. The sound of the bells wasn’t coming from the cathedral but rather from the painting, as were the strains from the piano. There was something very strange about this painting of Venice. Almost as strange as the fact that the sunbeams in my grandmother’s living-room were not silent but had a sound. Perhaps it was all those bells—or perhaps the enormous pieces of furniture which were conversing uninterruptedly.

I seem to remember, however, an experience even more distant than the one of the year I had measles: the perception—impossible to date—of the movement of a window-blind.

It was a black window-blind of the most modern variety, which I could see, in my nursery, at dawn or at dusk, when everything becomes living and a bit frightening, when even toys transform into things that are either hostile or simply indifferent and curious. At that moment the world would no longer be the everyday world with my mother present, but a vertiginous and silent solitude. It wasn’t that the blind moved; no shadow at all appeared on it. The forms were on the surface itself; they were neither little men, nor animals, nor heads, nor faces, but things for which no name exists! In the darkness, which was interrupted here and there by faint rays of light, these forms freed themselves from the blind and moved toward the green folding-screen or toward the bureau, with its pitcher of water. They were pitiless, impassive and terrifying; they disappeared only after it became completely dark or light, or when I fell asleep.

Anyone who, like myself, was born in the family of a pastor, learns at an early age to look behind the scenes in life and death. Whenever Father has a burial, a marriage, a baptism, a mediation, he writes a sermon. You make an early acquaintance with the devil and, like all children, you need to give him a concrete form. Here is where the magic lantern comes in, a little sheet-metal box with a gas lamp (I can still smell the odor of the heated metal) and which projected colored pictures. Among others, there was Little Red Ridinghood and the wolf. The wolf was the devil, a devil without horns but with a tail and vivid red mouth, a curiously palpable and yet elusive devil, the emissary of evil and persecution on the flowered wallpaper of the nursery.

The first film I ever owned was about ten feet long and brown. It pictured a young girl asleep in a prairie; she woke up, stretched, arose and, with outstretched arms, disappeared at the right side of the picture. That was all. Drawn on the box the film was kept in was a glowing picture with the words, “Frau Holle.” Nobody around me knew who Frau Holle was, but that didn’t matter; the film was quite successful, and we showed it every evening until it got torn so badly we couldn’t repair it.

This shaky bit of cinema was my first sorcerer’s bag, and, in fact, it was pretty strange. It was a mechanical plaything; the people and things never changed, and I have often wondered what could have fascinated me so much and what, even today, still fascinates me in exactly the same way. This thought comes to me sometimes in the studio, or in the semidarkness of the editing room, while I am holding the tiny picture before my eyes and while the film is passing through my hands; or else during that fantastic childbirth that takes place during the recomposition as the finished film slowly finds its own face. I can’t help thinking that I am working with an instrument so refined that with it, it would be possible for us to illuminate the human soul with an infinitely more vivid light, to unmask it even more brutally and to annex to our field of knowledge new domains of reality. Perhaps we would even discover a crack that would allow us to penetrate into the chiaroscuro of surreality, to tell tales in a new and overwhelming manner. At the risk of affirming once more something I cannot prove, let me say that, the way I see it, we film-makers utilize only a minute part of a frightening power—we are moving only the little finger of a giant, a giant who is far from not being dangerous.

But it is equally possible that I am wrong. It might be that the cinema has attained the high point of its evolution, that this instrument, by its very nature, can no longer conquer new territory, that we are stuck with our noses to the wall, since the road ends in a dead end. Many people are of this opinion, and it is true that we are treading water in a marsh, our noses just rising above the surface of the water, and paralyzed by economic problems, conventions, stupidity, fear, incertitude and disorder.

I am asked sometimes what I am trying to attain in my films, what my goal is. The question is difficult and dangerous, and I usually answer it by lying or hedging: “I am trying to tell the truth about the condition of men, the truth as I see it.” This answer always satisfies people, and I often wonder how it happens that nobody notices by bluff, because the true response should be, “I feel an incoercible need to express through film that which, in a completely subjective way, takes form some place in my consciousness. This being the case, I have no other goal but myself, my daily bread, the amusement and respect of the public, a kind of truth that I feel precisely at that moment. And if I try to sum up my second answer, the formula I end up with is not terribly exciting: ‘An activity without much meaning.’”

I am not saying that this conclusion doesn’t distress me inordinately. I am in the same situation as most artists of my generation; the activity of each one of us doesn’t have much meaning. Art for art’s sake. My personal truth, or three-quarters of a truth, or no truth at all, except that it has a value for me.

I realize that this way of looking at things is quite unpopular, particularly today. Let me hasten, then, to form the question in a different way: “What would be your goal in making your films?”

The story is told that, a long time ago, the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned from top to bottom. It is said that thousands of people rushed there from the four corners of the world, people of all conditions; they crossed Europe like lemmings in migration; together, they began to rebuild the cathedral upon its old foundations. They stayed there until the immense edifice was completed, all of them, architects, workers, artists, jugglers, nobles, priests and the bourgeoisie, but their names were unknown, and, even today, nobody knows the names of those who built the cathedral of Chartres.

Without letting that give you any preconceived ideas about my beliefs or doubts—which, furthermore, have nothing to do with what we are discussing here—I think that any art loses its essential potency the moment it becomes separated from the “cult.” It has cut the umbilical cord and it lives its own separate life, a life that is astonishingly sterile, dim, and degenerate. Creative collectivity, humble anonymity are forgotten and buried relics, deprived of any value. Little wounds of the ego and moral colics are examined under a microscope sub specie aeternitatis. The fear of the dark which characterizes subjectivism and scrupulous consciences has become quite stylish, and ultimately we are all running around in a big enclosure where we argue with one another about our solitude without listening to each other or even noticing that we are pushing ourselves mutually to the point of dying of suffocation from all this. It is in such a way that individualists look each other in the eye, deny the existence of those they see and invoke omnipotent obscurity without ever having once felt the saving force of the joys of community. We are so poisoned by our own vicious circles, so closed in by our own anguish that we are becoming incapable of distinguishing true from false, the ideality of gangsters and sincere unaffectedness.

To the question concerning the goal of my films, I could therefore answer: “I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that stands above the plains. I want to occupy myself making from stone a dragon’s head, an angel or a devil, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t really matter; I feel the same enjoyment in each case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, a Christian or a pagan, I am working along with everybody else to construct a cathedral, because I am an artist and an artisan, and because I have learned to extract faces, limbs, and bodies from stone. I never have to worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my first and last names are engraved nowhere, and they will disappear with me. But a small part of my self will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a devil, or perhaps a saint, what does it matter!”

Originally published in Cahiers du Cinéma, XI, no. 61 (July 1956), pp. 10-19; translated from the French by Royal S. Brown.