In Romania, any new spine that appears on the shelf dedicated to cinema books must be congratulated, even if one runs the risk of using cliches by doing so. This imperative of praising everything, to which we were brought by our unquenched thirst for a literature that is so vital to any respectable culture, has no reason to gloss over the punctual merits of the recent title that has been released by Nemira Publishing: Images. My Life in Film, the second, and lesser-known of director Ingmar Bergman’s writing, after The Magical Lantern. This is a daring event, Ioana Ghișa’s translation is more than reasonable, the book looks good and even contains a section dedicated to photographs. All that’s left to do is to read it, then.

Initially published in 1990, Images is a companion of sorts to the canonical title that preceded it, offering an inverted response through a constellation of documents (interviews, diary entries, memoirs) meant to patch up the gaps in the artist’s thick biography. Whereas The Magical Lantern strived to be a stand-alone object, what with its accent on the intimacy of certain primal scenes, Images is a collection of flashes that deeply, yet erratically illuminate a professional life that comprised just about everything one can think of. One can hold many things against Bergman – from the cohort of partners that he carelessly sired children onto, only for him to abandon them in the middle of the road, to the notoriety of one known for his outbursts on set, things which the book quite phlegmatically rejects -, but it’s not like he wouldn’t have developed a complex, seemingly nonchalant discourse in order to bear the weight of a career marked by great successes and blinding flashbulbs. 

That is because there is a persistent feeling, I believe, after entering contact with the written testimonies of yesteryear’s legendary filmmakers, of an unfinished work. Like an imperfect contact with a vision that is both overly prosaic – the master describing his object in practical terms – and excessively transcendent – the creator hurriedly clasping his hands around The Idea. We often remain – and Hitchcock is the paradigmatic case – with a mundane taste after reading, a bitter-sweet conclusion that has the perverse gift of distancing us from the secret of art. The thoughts of directors – when their names are not Robert Bresson or Pedro Costa – are a bizarre species, oftentimes closer to gossip than to enthronement in the pantheon of the Cinematheque. In and of itself, it’s not a bad thing. In the case of Bergman – who doesn’t stray from this rule -, it could even function as a decisive magnetic pull for non-Bergmanians (of whom I profess to belong). To be honest, I prefer a pedestrian Bergman, preoccupying himself with anecdotes, that a capital-C creator who doesn’t produce/create, but touches (this word in particular often recurs in the book, and is, in fact, the title of one of his films: The Touch). I’d even say that, out of his filmography, what I like most is his intense Summer with Monika (1953), which gets but a few lines in the book, which would much rather choose to bring to a desert island than his “serious” films. On top of it, my favorite parts of the book are those which reveal a rough storyteller, who is ready to take us by surprise with his irreverence. Incidentally (or not) many contain plastic references to animals, such as: “Like a repulsive earthworm, I crawl from my armchair to my desk to begin shaping my words” or, even better, “Days are long, big, luminous. They are just as substantial as cows are, these damn huge animals.”

For what it’s worth, people expecting these pages to reveal to them a spiritual Bergman, cut to the myth of the artist who fiddles around with divinity, the psyche, and the demons of the bourgeoisie, are in for a surprise. The Bergman that we find in the book has a voice that emits strong opinions, one that has no doubts regarding the hierarchies within his own oeuvre: Persona, Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander on the right side of things; This Can’t Happen Here, The Passion of Anna and Face to Face are thrown to the garbage bin. His value judgments are sparsely worded, a visible aversion to digressions and “style”: “I’ve done many bad films that I care about. Objectively speaking, I’ve done good films that I do not care about. Other films are, comically so, subjected to my mood shifts. Sometimes it happens that someone tells me that they like a certain film. Then, I become immediately joyful and reply that I also like it a lot.”

However, those who will read Images in search of a sacred monster that is gnawed on the inside by his vulnerability will, indeed, get some form of consolation. I am especially thinking about that diary entry from 1968 in which Bergman confesses, not without candor, that: “The truth is that I am tormented. It’s a sort of continuous pain, mixed in with fear. I don’t know anything. Nobody has said a word. But my intuition makes me feel disheartened. More precisely, I think that I will get a few lukewarm reviews, that is, when they won’t be written in outright bad faith.” The anguish of a world-class director – who, at the time, had already garnered two Oscar nomination, and had triumphed with his modernist Persona just two years ago – who is trembling in expectation of potentially negative reviews, which the Bergman of 1990 will gloss over as being a valuable “inner creative lab” document, does indeed have reasons to make us smile. Especially if we were to consider that Bergman, together with Fellini, Antonioni or Tarkovski, were, at the time – and the tendency will only become stronger, up to a certain point in time – the very few passe-partout guarantees of auteur cinema: precisely the kind of films that could completely forego criticism on their path towards the audience. But the event is evocative due to other reasons, as well: because Bergman was now anticipating, on the coattails of a May 1968 whose shockwaves had traveled all the way to the Nordic countries, that the winds that had up to then been favorable to him were about to change tide. Refusing to join the time’s rallying cries – he was even vaguely scornful towards them, as the following passage indicates: “I had no plan to change my shooting routine and neither did I intend to receive any artistic indications from my crew” – Bergman is the director who, in a politicized era such as ours (to paraphrase the preface penned by critic Andrei Gorzo), doesn’t really have a quota anymore.

Justifiably or not, this current lack of interest towards mystical frolicking infused by a dose of Freudianism, which had hitherto made Bergman the chouchou of snobs willing to flex their intellectual muscles in the cinema hall, could easily be contradicted through the reading of this tome. Here, we discover a Bergman that is not as meek, as he is willing to lucidly distinguish between fabricated work and worthy art, between vain pretension and the lingering craft. At the same time, we discover a flamboyant era which rears its head between the lines: that of the auteur mythos, of the cultural icon – something that emulator Woody Allen will dream of, less successfully -, but also one of cavorting with impunity: “Lorens [Marmstedt, producer] came up with the idea of taking a trip to Cannes, the both of us. I was going to write the script, and he would play the roulette. All the while, we would have food, booze and women at our disposal.” To his credit, Bergman doesn’t seem nostalgic, on the contrary, he even seems to contain an almost comedic factual coldness to himself. In the end, we discover a character who – as the veritable showman that he was – speaks to cinephiles, fans, intellectuals and random readers all at the same time, without making any distinctions in their ranks. One can only wish that this editorial event – coming from the same publisher that offered us tomes by Tarkovsky or Nijinski – will be followed up by others, in the same vein. I wonder if anyone’s willing to pick up Pasolini’s letters, now that we’re celebrating his centennial?

Victor Morozov

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.