Actually everything is very simple, with the two women whose identities are confused: “One bends, the other breaks, and there was nothing more …” The line between the highest abstraction and pun is very thin, and the great masters have none Shy of crossing them. Ingmar Bergman uses the “one bows” formula in the work notes for his film “Persona”, that highly complex cinematographic puzzle game before which critics and viewers pause in exegesis or devotion.
Sentences like these cut through the dense web of visions and scenes that Bergman noted in his work diaries between 1955 and 2001, almost every day, on the same pads, with ballpoint pen or fountain pen, preferably with pencil, in almost illegible writing. He never delivered proper, well-structured scripts. I write films, he explained in an early text from 1948, that is what Renate Bleibtreu called the selection that has now been translated – but immediately says that it should be said: I write film. In these notes you can experience how writing and filming are related, how words generate images. How to film while writing.
In 1962 Bergman begins to develop a fantastic story – it is called “The Man Eaters”, then “The Demons” – of a young woman who lives alone in a hut and one night takes in a stranger who is injured – he becomes chased by demons. It is his own fault, because he wants to illustrate the haunted stories of ETA Hoffmann. What Bergman notes is raw material, brutal and splattery, the film that is made out of it in 1968, on the other hand, is much more reserved, softened by Mozart, it is now called “The Hour of the Wolf”. The project was canceled – a delayed pneumonia, hospitalization, one spring day he met Liv Ullmann accompanied by Bibi Andersson and inserted the film “Persona” with the two of them.
Anton is an anarchist and is preparing the murder of Franz Josef Strauss
The films that emerged from these notes are not final products, and while reading you can see those that were never made. “Love without a lover”, for example, which he wanted to do in Munich (and which seems as wild as a Sam Fuller movie). “Surface and abyss. Abyss and surface. The murder of Public Prosecutor B. State funeral. Peter and Katarina. Their brother Anton is an anarchist and is preparing the murder of Franz Josef Strauss. The facade and the fear. Pent-up anger. Celebrate. Eat. Drink . The Catholics, that is important! The progressive bishop who goes to Petra. And then the woman, the great mother who has forgotten nothing and learned nothing. The dead of the bombing are lying under the new Munich. You can hear the screams from Dachau of the martyred and doomed. Ceremony in the State Opera, with tails and medals and enormous splendor. “
Ingmar Bergman: I write films. Work diaries 1955-2001. A selection has been translated, commented and with an afterword by Renate Bleibtreu. Berenberg Verlag, Berlin 2021. 448 pages, 28 euros.
The images and visions of these diaries are raw material that follow their own logic, as Freud described it with the emergence of dreams in his “Interpretation of Dreams”, another large work diary. Sometimes the super-ego joins the flow of imagination, flirtatious and cheeky: “Just be close, Bergman. Don’t invent. Just be close so that you don’t feel strange and embarrassed.” I write film … “Nothing is like it, and yet it’s a little bit of everything.”