Bergman on holiness, music and death

I originally posted this, which because of what the master says is one of the most important entries here to me - as is my Fårö report with respect to The Arts Desk - eight years ago, on 16 July 2010. The actual 100th anniversary, 14 July, almost passed me by yesterday- it was only because there seemed to be so many Ingmar clips up on LinkedIn that my memory was revived. Happy to reproduce this again, because I still find IB's words intensely moving.

Not a day passed when the master didn't think of all three [holiness, music and death]. So it was quite an experience after the visit (hopefully numinous images from which I reproduce throughout) to return to Bergman on Fårö, one of the five detailed films Marie Nyreröd made with him at the very end of his life, and find that he had whittled down his often unruly thoughts to essentials. No doubt his 'demon of control', as he put it, made sure what went alongside the interviews in terms of film clips, how he was filmed and where; and why not?

The first chunk is from when he takes Nyreröd into that wonderful little cinema at Dämba and shows her and us a very specific clip, from Private Confessions (1996). This is Max von Sydow's Bishop Jakob being asked by Pernilla Ostergren's character whether he believe in God. His answer:

Don't use the word 'God'. Say 'holiness'. There's holiness in everyone. Human holiness. Everything else is attributes, disguise - manifestation and trickery. You can never capture or figure out human holiness. At the same time, it's something to cling to. Something tangible, lasting unto death. [Bach's 'Jesu, joy of man's desiring' is heard] Whatever happens then is hidden from us. Only poets, musicians and saints may depict that which we can but discern: the inconceivable. They've seen, known, understood - not fully, but in fragments. For me, it's a comfort to think about human holiness.

The projectionist stops the film. Bergman turns to Nyreröd and adds his commentary:

We've been talking a lot about the religious aspects of my oeuvre. And really we should try to concentrate it, and instead of our sitting stammering through an explanation, I think the Bishop here has put it succinctly. He says exactly what I feel: that we shouldn't talk about God but about the holiness within man. And that through the musicians, the prophets and the saints, we've been enlightened about other worlds. Particularly through music, of course. We ask: 'where does music come from?' I've asked so many musicians, famous and less famous, why we have music, where it comes from. And the strange thing is that they've never had a proper answer.

The film cuts to Bergman putting a recording of the Sarabande from Bach's Fifth Cello Suite on the turntable at Hammars.

Let's cut ourselves to the final question.


I wrote a film about death...The Seventh Seal. It was excellent therapy. Sometimes the things you do, the things you write, can be therapeutic. And this was. [sighs] But then something curious happened. What happened was that I developed an abscess with early signs of blood poisoning and the swelling had to be cut away. That was done at the Sophiahemmet Hospital [in Stockholm, where he had lived as a child]. I felt a little prick and then nothing. Eight hours of my life, you see, were completely obliterated. I was hypersensitive to the anesthetic and they'd given me too much. This fascinated me because I thought, 'is this what death is like?'. You are a light that's lit, and then one day it's extinguished. There's nothing, no flame left. So death is nothing to be afraid of. It's something exceedingly merciful, something magnificent.


So having understood that, I lived a contented life. I noticed that my daily thoughts of death could be brushed aside. They always came, especially during my hour of the wolf just before dawn, but I could dismiss them by telling myself they were nothing. From being something, suddenly I'm nothing. I liked the idea. And then came [sighs, trembles] - the big problem. The devastating problem. That was when Ingrid [his last wife of 24 years] died almost exactly eight years ago.


And logically, I said to myself, I'll never see Ingrid again. She's gone for ever. But the strange thing is that I feel Ingrid's presence, especially here on Fårö. Acutely. And I think, I can't feel her presence if she doesn't exist, can I? [rubs his left eye nervously] So this operation was a chemical reaction. It wasn't a real death, but an artificial reaction. In actual death, maybe Ingrid is waiting for me and she exists. And she'll come to meet me [the film cuts to an essential monologue from Bergman's last film, Saraband] I accept that I'm going to meet Ingrid, and I've completely erased that other nightmare thought that I'll never again meet her. I acknowledge the fact that I'm going to meet Ingrid.

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala 92 years and two days ago*, and died on Fårö on 30 July 2007, four years after these films were made.

*100 years ago yesterday as far as the update is concerned.

Tove Jansson: summer and winter

My thanks to Minnie for putting me in touch with a highly popular man of blogging ideas, Norman Geras. He invited me to select a favourite book for his series of writers' choices, and after wandering in mazes for weeks I settled on one I happened to have just read. The piece is here, so I don't really need to explain or expand on the perfection of Tove Jansson's The Summer Book. I will at least reiterate that it tied in so hauntingly with my time on Bergman's magical Fårö, more images of which I take the liberty of scattering here.


What I would like to add is simply that since than I've also read Jansson's The True Deceiver, which Norman admires in equal measure. It's the dark shadow of The Summer Book, though since Jansson is interested in a spare approach to human truth, neither is black or white, and both are tough. This time it's winter on the Swedish coast, and snow coats everything in near silence. A strange woman goes out of her way to move in on a solitary old artist and provide a decent home for her simple brother Mats. But she isn't just the big bad wolf in a fairy tale, nor is the older lady the rabbit. These are human beings in all their mystery and inconsistency.


I'd like to leave the last word to Ali Smith, who writes so eloquent an introduction to The True Deceiver:

'Mats has no secrets. That's why he's so mysterious.' Jansson's own texts, works which seem so simple as to be near-throwaway, are always honed to perfection, given a lightness that proves deceptive, an ease of surface which, like a covering of ice over a lake, allows you a rare access to something a lot more feisty and profound. 'Rarely do books give as clear an impression as yours that they simply matured to the point of inevitability', Jansson's...Swedish publisher wrote to her when she was struggling with difficult work.

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.