Cries and Whispers // dir. Ingmar Bergman

“Bergman is everything. He’s so much. He left his mark in the minds of so many Swedish actors. And he dealt with so many human problems and relationships. He has, of course, been very disturbing for many people, but he has inspired so many more. And if I hadn’t had my time with Bergman, I certainly would not be here today. I have so much to thank him for. He was an inspiration for us, a great teacher. And he was at the same time a very charming person and funny to work with—oh, yes—with a great sense of humor.” — Max von Sydow

Were you surprised to to see the ending of the film?
Liv Ullmann: Of Persona? Yes, very much. Very much of that picture happened at the cutting table. This scene was not in the script. Also the scene where the two faces come together, we did not know about that either. [Bergman] took us once to the cutting room. We hadn’t heard about this. He said, “I want you to watch something.” We saw this strange face. I thought, “Oh, God. Bibi is fantastic. She looks completely neurotic.” At the same time, Bibi thought, “How did Liv do it?” Suddenly we saw that if was half of each. It was really frightening. That was also an idea that he had thought of during the shooting.

February 11, 1963 — Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light premieres in Sweden.

“Well, it was a difficult film, one of the hardest I’ve made so far. The audience has to work. It’s a progression from Through a Glass Darkly, and it in turn is carried forward to The Silence. The three stand together. My basic concern in making them was to dramatize the all-importance of communication, of the capacity for feeling. They are not concerned—as many critics have theorized—with God or His absence, but with the saving force of love. Most of the people in these three films are dead, completely dead. They don’t know how to love or to feel any emotions. They are lost because they can’t reach anyone outside of themselves.

“The man in Winter Light, the pastor, is nothing. He’s nearly dead, you understand. He’s almost completely cut off from everyone. The central character is the woman. She doesn’t believe in God, but she has strength; it’s the women who are strong. She can love. She can save with her love. Her problem is that she doesn’t know how to express this love. She’s ugly, clumsy. She smothers him, and he hates her for it and for her ugliness. But she finally learns how to love. Only at the end, when they’re in the empty church for the three o’clock service that has become perfectly meaningless for him, her prayer in a sense is answered: he responds to her love by going on with the service in that empty country church. It’s his own first step toward feeling, toward learning how to love. We’re not saved by God, but by love. That’s the most we can hope for.” — Ingmar Bergman, 1964

“I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is Winter Light. That is my only picture about which I feel that I have started here and ended there and that everything along the way has obeyed me. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture. I couldn’t make this picture today; it’s impossible; but I saw it a few weeks ago together with a friend and I was very satisfied.” — Ingmar Bergman, 1972

“I was quite tired of the entertainment Arne Mattsson made me perform, where I had to run blonde and beautiful through a meadow hand in hand with a young man. Bergman made me so ugly as soon as he clapped eyes on me, so I didn’t need to feel that I was putting on a show. Those difficult, psychological roles suited me better.”

Ingrid Thulin
January 27, 1926 — January 7, 2004

Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann photographed by Gunnar Källström near their home in Fårö on July 14, 1968, Ingmar’s 50th birthday.

“To me, when cinematography is at its best, it is very close to the state of dreaming. You know, in any other art you can’t create a situation that is as close to dreaming. Think only of the time gap. You can make things as long as you want, exactly as in a dream. You can make things as short as you want, exactly as in a dream. As a director, a creator of the picture, you are like a dreamer. You can make what you want. You can construct everything. I think that is one of the most fascinating things that exists.” — Ingmar Bergman

FILMMAKERS ON JEAN-LUC GODARD

Chantal Akerman: You can see him excluding himself from the world in an almost autistic manner. For people like me, who started doing film because of him, it is a terrible fright. And the fact that the long evolution that Godard has been through can lead to this, almost brings me to despair. He was kind of a pioneer, an inventor who didn’t care much about anybody or anything. And that a man at this stage of his life isolates himself, should also be a lesson for us other film makers. 

Woody Allen: I think he’s a brilliant innovator. I don’t always love every film he’s made. I think he’s very inventive, but sometimes his inventions are taken by other people and used better. But he’s certainly one of the innovators of cinema.

Paul Thomas Anderson: I love Godard in a very film school way. I can’t say that I’ve ever been emotionally attacked by him. Where I have been emotionally attacked by Truffaut.

Michelangelo Antonioni: Godard flings reality in our faces, and I’m struck by this. But never by Truffaut.

Ingmar Bergman: I’ve never been able to appreciate any of his films, nor even understand them. Truffaut and I used to meet on several occasions at film festivals. We had an instant understanding that extended to his films. But Godard: I find his films affected, intellectual, self-obsessed and, as cinema, without interest and frankly dull. Endless and tiresome. Godard is a desperate bore. I’ve always thought that he made films for critics. He made one here in Sweden, Masculin Féminin, so boring that my hair stood on end.

Luis Buñuel: I’ll give him two years more, he is just a fashion.

Jean-Luc Godard: I am not an auteur, well, not now anyway. We once believed we were auteurs but we weren’t. We had no idea, really. Film is over. It’s sad nobody is really exploring it. But what to do? And anyway, with mobile phones and everything, everyone is now an auteur.

Werner Herzog: Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.

Fritz Lang: I like him a great deal: he is very honest, he loves the cinema, he is just as fanatical as I was. In fact, I think he tries to continue what we started one day, the day when we began making our first films. Only his approach is different. Not the spirit.

Roman Polanski: In fact the worst thing possible is to be absolutely certain about things. Hitler, for example, must have been convinced in the certainty of his ideas and that he was right. I don’t think he did anything without believing in it, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it to start with. And I think Jean-Luc Godard believes he makes good films, but maybe they aren’t that good.

Satyajit Ray: Godard especially opened up new ways of… making points, let us say. And he shook the foundations of film grammar in a very healthy sort of way, which is excellent.

Quentin Tarantino: To me, Godard did to movies what Bob Dylan did to music: they both revolutionized their forms.

François Truffaut: You’re nothing but a piece of shit on a pedestal. […] You fostered the myth, you accentuated that side of you that was mysterious, inaccessible and temperamental, all for the slavish admiration of those around you. You need to play a role and the role needs to be a prestigious one; I’ve always had the impression that real militants are like cleaning women, doing a thankless, daily but necessary job. But you, you’re the Ursula Andress of militancy, you make a brief appearance, just enough time for the cameras to flash, you make two or three duly startling remarks and then you disappear again, trailing clouds of self-serving mystery.

Orson Welles: He’s the definitive influence if not really the first film artist of this last decade, and his gifts as a director are enormous. I just can’t take him very seriously as a thinker—and that’s where we seem to differ, because he does. His message is what he cares about these days, and, like most movie messages, it could be written on the head of a pin. But what’s so admirable about him is his marvelous contempt for the machinery of movies and even movies themselves—a kind of anarchistic, nihilistic contempt for the medium—which, when he’s at his best and most vigorous, is very exciting.

Wim Wenders: For me, discovering cinema was directly connected to his films. I was living in Paris at the time. When Made in USA opened, I went to the first show—it was around noon—and I sat there until midnight. I saw it six times in a row.

Gunnar Björnstrand
November 13, 1909 — May 24, 1986

“Smiles of a Summer Night was my best part of all, I think, to play. It was a wonderful time. So it went on from year to year. The part of the writer in Through a Glass Darkly was a portrait of Bergman himself. I had to weep, very short and very intensely, and when they did the playback it was too short. So, Ingmar said it was so good, but one more take, one more take! Anything I am playing, I draw it from within myself, from every part of my character. Being an actor means taking one aspect of yourself and projecting it—you’ve got everything within you, actually. That can be very difficult, especially to avoid compromising. I cannot do it coldly and technically.”

La Pointe Courte (dir. Agnès Varda - 1955)
Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman - 1966)
Love and Death (dir. Woody Allen - 1975)
Mulholland Dr. (dir. David Lynch - 2001)