Read Online Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Roger Ebert
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asked my friends Liv and Erland Josephson to read it, and they were interested. Well, everything happened just like that. It was the biggest success in the history of Swedish television-and all over Scandinavia. At last, my neighbors on the island had seen something of mine they could relate to."
Scenes from a Marriage was shot in sixteen-millimeter, unlike his previous work, which had all been in the standard thirty-five-millimeter. That was fine for television, but now Sven Nykvist was telling him that the new sixteen-millimeter Kodak color film was so good that features could be shot in it, too, with little difference in quality, a great advance in flexibility, and for a lot less money. Bergman was dubious, but agreed to shoot Mozart's The Magic Flute in sixteen-millimeter.
It was a project commissioned by Swedish television, and he decided to film it as it might have been performed in a little eighteenth-century theater like the Drottingholm Court Theater, perfectly preserved for two hundred years in a royal park outside Stockholm. The theater's interiors and its ingenious stage machinery-good for making thunder and lightning and waves-were duplicated in Film House, and the opera was shot in sixteen-millimeter.
After its Swedish television premiere, Nykvist and Bergman screened a thirty-five-millimeter theatrical print blown up from sixteen-millimeter, and were happy with the quality; Bergman agreed with Nykvist that the image was clear and subtle even by their demanding standards, and they decided to shoot in sixteen-millimeter from then on. Face to Face was being shot in sixteen-millimeter-although that was one of the few things regarding it Bergman seemed to be absolutely sure of.
"It's a little difficult to talk about right now," he said, "because we're in the middle of things and often it's not until I take the film back to my island and begin to edit it that it becomes clear to me. Of course I can say, yes, it's about a woman who tries to commit suicide, and the picture is sort of an investigation of why she does that, but-honestly, I don't know. I wrote it, but when I shoot a film I never think of it as my own script, because then I couldn't shoot a single scene. It's very personal, and yet I have to be cold, analytical, about it. Sometimes I read what I've written-dialogue that was written with emotion, and then I try to understand intellectually what a character means, and sometimes I make very strange mistakes.
"The problem is that film is the best way to the emotional center of human beings, but it's very hard to be intellectual about it. There's some sort of strange emotional logic in film that has nothing to do with the meaning. If you're the director, you have to be very careful about what you reach for, because the emotions may make you find something else altogether. But, even then, that's all right, if it makes others feel something ... what makes me unhappy is when the audience is indifferent."
I asked him about Persona, the story of an actress who one day decides to stop talking, and about her relationship with the naive young nurse who's assigned to spend the summer in the country with her. The film created a great deal of critical confusion and debate in 1966, and has continued to reveal levels of emotion; it has the ability to make audiences feel it when they don't really understand it.
"Now there's an example of what I mean," he said. "I have no theories about it. If you asked me to explain it, I couldn't. But I know that Per song literally saved my life at the time I was writing it. I was very ill. I hadn't lost my mental balance, but I'd lost my physical balance. I had an ear disease ... I couldn't stand up or even move my head without nausea. So I started to write down some lines every day, just a few lines, just for the discipline of going from the bed to the table without falling over. As a filmmaker, I could not work if I could not move. Now here was a story about an actress who stopped
Scenes from a Marriage was shot in sixteen-millimeter, unlike his previous work, which had all been in the standard thirty-five-millimeter. That was fine for television, but now Sven Nykvist was telling him that the new sixteen-millimeter Kodak color film was so good that features could be shot in it, too, with little difference in quality, a great advance in flexibility, and for a lot less money. Bergman was dubious, but agreed to shoot Mozart's The Magic Flute in sixteen-millimeter.
It was a project commissioned by Swedish television, and he decided to film it as it might have been performed in a little eighteenth-century theater like the Drottingholm Court Theater, perfectly preserved for two hundred years in a royal park outside Stockholm. The theater's interiors and its ingenious stage machinery-good for making thunder and lightning and waves-were duplicated in Film House, and the opera was shot in sixteen-millimeter.
After its Swedish television premiere, Nykvist and Bergman screened a thirty-five-millimeter theatrical print blown up from sixteen-millimeter, and were happy with the quality; Bergman agreed with Nykvist that the image was clear and subtle even by their demanding standards, and they decided to shoot in sixteen-millimeter from then on. Face to Face was being shot in sixteen-millimeter-although that was one of the few things regarding it Bergman seemed to be absolutely sure of.
"It's a little difficult to talk about right now," he said, "because we're in the middle of things and often it's not until I take the film back to my island and begin to edit it that it becomes clear to me. Of course I can say, yes, it's about a woman who tries to commit suicide, and the picture is sort of an investigation of why she does that, but-honestly, I don't know. I wrote it, but when I shoot a film I never think of it as my own script, because then I couldn't shoot a single scene. It's very personal, and yet I have to be cold, analytical, about it. Sometimes I read what I've written-dialogue that was written with emotion, and then I try to understand intellectually what a character means, and sometimes I make very strange mistakes.
"The problem is that film is the best way to the emotional center of human beings, but it's very hard to be intellectual about it. There's some sort of strange emotional logic in film that has nothing to do with the meaning. If you're the director, you have to be very careful about what you reach for, because the emotions may make you find something else altogether. But, even then, that's all right, if it makes others feel something ... what makes me unhappy is when the audience is indifferent."
I asked him about Persona, the story of an actress who one day decides to stop talking, and about her relationship with the naive young nurse who's assigned to spend the summer in the country with her. The film created a great deal of critical confusion and debate in 1966, and has continued to reveal levels of emotion; it has the ability to make audiences feel it when they don't really understand it.
"Now there's an example of what I mean," he said. "I have no theories about it. If you asked me to explain it, I couldn't. But I know that Per song literally saved my life at the time I was writing it. I was very ill. I hadn't lost my mental balance, but I'd lost my physical balance. I had an ear disease ... I couldn't stand up or even move my head without nausea. So I started to write down some lines every day, just a few lines, just for the discipline of going from the bed to the table without falling over. As a filmmaker, I could not work if I could not move. Now here was a story about an actress who stopped
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