Fårö: non-Ingmar places

Or nearly. Because of course Bergman husband and wife are buried in Fårö churchyard, and I guess he must have gone there often before he was buried in his state-of-the-art coffin (he wanted one just like Pope John Paul's, apparently; so much for Calvinist austerity). But quite independent of the Ingmar topology is this marvellous kutatavlan or seal hunter painting ('kut' is Fåröese dialect for 'seal'), one of two on the church's north wall.

In the winter of 1603 15 seal hunters found that the ice floe they were standing on was drifting out to sea. Three reached land at Gotska Sandön, while the others took 14 days to turn up somewhere on the Swedish archipelago. As a thanksgiving, they had this picture made, which shows them in their Sunday best with hunting equipment as well as the oldest known image of Visborg Castle in Visby. A poem beneath in rhyming Danish tells the story of their hardship, living off nothing but raw seal meat and battered by snowstorms.

The poem is reproduced in a book on the Gotlandic journey of Carl von Linne, aka Linnaeus. On 29 June 1741 he set out with his team of fellow researchers on a day's excursion around the east of Fårö, noting down marram and other plants and observing local customs like catching seabirds with snares. The heat was so intense that they sought shade beneath the then already very large oak on the farm at Ava.


Linnaeus measured the circumference - 4.2 metres at waist height - and noted that on the nearby fence was hanging a net for seal-hunting made of treble twine. Lichen grew on some of the walls. Linnaeus noted its use as yellow dye for cloth.


I walked there on my evening off from the screening of Smiles of a Summer Night in Sudersand cinema. The heavenly circuit took me inland through woods


out to the coast through fields full of the famous Fårö sheep


and pines on fire in the sunset


before heading back along the shore against very intense, 11pmish skies (hence those treasurable images reproduced below and over at TAD). Even though I was wearing shoes and socks, and had plastered face and arms with tropical insect repellent, mosquitoes and horseflies got at my ankles in a big way, as I discovered painfully over the next few days. You need to do some penance in paradise, especially if it's Bergman's ambivalent haven. And I know, I know, I should see it in the winter when all colour drains from the scene.

But back to the midday summer sun which brought out Ingmar's demons, and our first lunch at Kutens Bensin. There's a connection, of course, with the film world - the Creperie Tati serves up such specialities as the Marilyn and the Miss Taylor - but this is a world unto itself.


The vigorous owner, whom I can only call Thomas as he prefers to remain anonymous on the place's very idiosyncratic website, came out to tell us all about the stars of the rock and folk world who've played in his barn.


His daughter, who lived in France for many years and studied with a cordon bleu chef, served up lunches with sensational baking during our hours spent in the private cinema. And anyway, even if the food weren't up to much, you'd be happy to sit there for hours admiring the rusty old cars and fridges.



One man I know would love it is our friend Paul Beecham, stage manager of the Quentin Follies and former ENO backstage doyen. So ending with a shot of him at the revels Saturday before last should lead you back to the extravaganza below.

Liv-ing on Fårö

Finally put up my official thoughts about Prospero Bergman's enchanted island as one of the Arts Desk's Sunday 'letters from...'. Still, there's much more to add. Reassuring the Triestophiles among you that I haven't given up on the Winckelmann or James Joyce entries I promised, I'd better stagger the Fårö afterthoughts too. Note that for once I've bothered with the accents: it really is important to see that it might be pronounced 'Four-er'.

Liv Ullmann came across as a warm and spontaneous human being, crying with a kind of bittersweet happiness about the miracle of being back for the first time since the funeral. Here's the gravestone for the burial-place Ingmar shares with his wife (no relation to the great actress who starred alongside Liv in his Autumn Sonata). It's in a quiet corner of Fårö Church, furthest from both the road and the sea, and fronted by a crazy-paving sweep expressly against the greensward surrounding the master requested.


After the question and answer session with Jannike Ahlund, Ullmann came out the back to speak to the Magnificent Eight, as one of my fellow critics dubbed us (there's my roommate Li standing next to her in the top shot. Shame it doesn't catch her bright blue eyes - there's a better head shot by the official photographer in the TAD piece). I did film her talking about how the scene with the broken glass in Persona wasn't premeditated; nor was the iconic shot of hers and Bibi's faces joining together. Both came about by accident. Stupidly, I shot the little speech in portrait format on my camera, and forgot that films, unlike stills, can't be turned round. Still, I have that little piece of history to treasure and hope we can revisit the interview proper (which was professionally filmed).

Should add just a bit more about the private cinema, too, as not all the photos I wanted could be accommodated in the TAD piece. Here's Liv and Ingmar's daughter Linn talking outside it about her childhood, and how they'd all meet at 3pm and sit on the bench by which she's standing:


And, since she recalled the premiere screening of The Magic Flute - which was edited in the room above the 15-seater, here's the only adornment in the cinema, which seems so modern (and in fact was opened to a very select public when we were there for the first time). It's a rather marvellous tapestry by Anita Grede, depicting characters from the opera against the background of Fårö scenes.


Some of the film's people, especially the Queen of the Night, the Three Ladies and Monostatos, are represented as we see them in the film. But there, of course, is Bergman himself playing Sarastro with the magic flute.


I've just begun Linn's novel A Blessed Child, by the way, partly based on her relationship with her father and the island (dimly veiled as 'Hammarsö' - Hammars is where Bergman's house is situated). It's written with a poetic simplicity that must be well reflected in Sarah Death's translation from the Norwegian.


And that will have to do for now. There were so many stills I wanted to use of scenes and rehearsals for the Fårö five - Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Scenes from a Marriage, Shame and The Passion of Anna - but since Swedish Film International demanded $200 a shot, that just wasn't possible. Next time, we'll have a look at a few places NOT associated with Ingmar on Fårö.

Bergmen

Again, apologies for the unproclaimed absence: I've been in Faro - really should start adopting the accents here, the nearest pronounciation we can get is 'Four-er' - the magic-scary Swedish island of Prospero Ingmar Bergman ever since he landed there in 1960 and decided to film Through a Glass Darkly on the coast near what would become his home.

To Four-er was invited a select 'delegation of international journalists' to observe and participate in the annual Bergman Week. And here we all are, a harmonious bunch of diverse temperaments, outside the Damba barn which served first as the studio for the interiors of Scenes from a Marriage and then became Bergman's private cinema. Can you imagine the awe and emotion of being a dozen or so spectators in the fifteen-seater, sinking into the chairs around the one with the cushion that must always be left empty - that of the Meister?

The assembled company, left to right, consists of Mike Goodridge (Screen International, London, lately the mag's LA man), Jan Brachmann (Berliner Zeitung, the chap to talk music with when film chat became a bit too arcane for me, an amateur in I hope the best sense), Gerald Peary (Boston Globe, genial old-school maker of a well-received documentary about American film critics), some creature in pink minding his head on the threshold of the sacred shrine, Satyen Bordoloi (Indo-Asian News Service, Mumbai, enthusiast and photo-taker extraordinaire), Li Hongyu (Southern Weekly, Beijing, and a tidy roommate in one of the campsite capsules they housed us in for the four days), Peter Rainer (NPR, LA, just assembling thirty years of film criticism into a book and big anecdotalist of time with the greats) and Roman Volobuev (Afisha Magazine, Moscow, brain and memory the size of a planet, chainsmoker, individualist and a former colleague of Anna Politkovskaya, of whom he had some revealing things to say).

Lest you think that the man who made About All These Women would have been sorely disappointed by the all-male clan, we did have feminine company in the shape of the smiley Kajsa Guterstam, International Project Manager of the Swedish Institute, and the fabulously informative Pia Lundberg, Head of the International Department of the Swedish Film Institute, who chose the four new Swedish films we had the privilege of seeing in advance screenings in the private cinema. There were also the very emotional and truthful Liv Ullmann, who hadn't been back to the island since Bergman's death three years ago, and the daughter she had with IB, the novelist Linn Ullmann (I'm looking forward to reading A Blessed Child, which has more than a little of the Faro flavour about it, she told us). Anyway, here Pia and Kajsa join the throng along with Trutz von Ahlefeld, another genial guide around an island he knows well.


No time to download the bulk of my own pics yet, but I must just stick in two to show the extremes of this island, so mediterranean in parts in high summer but with the potential for the ultimate bleakness, the isle of death as IB once called it. The south and west coasts are mostly like this, with viper's bugloss purple-blueing the landscape:


while the north-west coast is lined with rauks - sea stacks - and pebbly beaches with fossilised coral in the stones. They tell us Faro broke away from Africa, hard as that may be to believe, and this is the result.


All these were locations for a clutch of Bergman's most lacerating movies, but I'd better save all that for my Arts Desk piece, due for next Sunday. Now I must get the tenth and last of my Meistersinger classes in shape. We'll whizz through the final revels in an hour because before that Richard Jones is coming to talk. Hope he's just as pleased as I am to know that in the listening room cum study of Bergman's home at Hammars is the (I think) Knappertsbusch recording.


Inevitably an important work for a creator who knew that nothing vital comes about without a touch of Wahn to prompt it.

After Bergman...

...there were a couple of astounding Dogma films to maintain the unfashionable tradition of true soul-scouring movies. But Lars von Trier is erratic, to say the least, if always compulsive (though I can't steel myself to see the latest).

Yet it struck me, watching first Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale and then working back through the other films starring the ineffable Emmanuelle Devos and sexy, compelling Mathieu Amalric, that here at last was a filmmaker prepared to plumb the depths (no idea, by the way, why he's called 'Ousmane Desplechin' on the above DVD cover). Sure enough, in interview, Desplechin invokes Bergman - Ingrid as well as Ingmar, by virtue of her fearlessness in presenting a woman who is neither directly sympathetic nor cuddly, as he maintains they mostly are in the recent movies he's seen (Notorious was the film of choice).

If this suggests that Rois et Reine, the most recent Desplechin movie I've caught up with, is grim, that's far from the case. There's an edgy humour which applies especially to Amalric's manic-depressive hero. I slightly regret having to pass over the bewitching Devos in favour of Deneuve's cameo psychiatrist, but this little scene gives a good sample of dialogue which you never know whether to laugh or shout about. Click a second time on the screen to catch the full picture on YouTube.



In addition, the lighting in the cinematography is extraordinary, the script sometimes infuriating in that edge-of-pretentious French way but always engaging, the flashback technique and a very Bergmanesque ghost visit haunting.

Who's doing this sort of thing in literature? Back into the picture comes Hilary Mantel. Since I last wrote about my discovery, I've read a few more of her unpredictable novels, including the most vivid, as-if-it-were-yesterday of historical novels, Wolf Hall. No Mantel subject is anything like the one before it, but in terms of emotional range, asking the difficult questions and weaving an elegant polyphony of voices, family chronicles don't come any richer than A Change of Climate.


I just finished it this morning, and the last twenty or so pages have to be the most poignant of crisis fallouts in any novel; I'm too close to it to say more about subject or style except that I worship this woman and I won't stop until I've read everything she's written. As A Place of Greater Safety is still on the list, evidently I have great riches in store.