SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT AN OLD COLLEAGUE ON HIS WAY TO CANONIZATION

EVA DAHLBECK

Eva Dahlbeck appeared in six of Ingmar Bergman’s films; Secrets of Women, A Lesson in Love, Dreams, Smiles of a Summer Night, Brink of Life, and All These Women. She now devotes her time to her writing career and is the author of more than a dozen novels.

IN RECENT YEARS INGMAR BERGMAN HAS ATTRACTED A level of interest that few living individuals ever experience. Not only have his works been the object of endless analyses and dissections, but the man himself has been placed in an intensive spotlight — as if the secret behind the fascination of his works could be discovered in some eccentricity of the master himself. It is a common association and in this case, at least, it may prove justified.

But all this aside, charting a person’s works is a less intricate enterprise than charting a person. People have wondered, guessed, listened, deduced, and drawn conclusions, without actually getting any further than a deepening mystification. Like his works, in the end Ingmar Bergman has come to be regarded as a unique phenomenon, many-faceted and impenetrable, sometimes debatable, always controversial.

How has this happened? What is behind this steadily growing, almost hypnotic preoccupation with the artist and his works?

It may be appropriate to compare it with the proverbial snowball, which starts rolling and automatically grows according to some law of physics.

But is it really such a simple mechanism? And even if it were, what got the snowball rolling? What started this accumulating fascination with Ingmar Bergman?

I will make no pretentious attempt here to achieve a categorical solution to this puzzle. As I have indicated, the mechanisms of fascination are often profoundly complex and difficult to pinpoint. The purpose of this exercise is to state some views from the perspective of a colleague and interested fellow human being.

By now many years have passed since I worked with Ingmar Bergman. Without my knowledge, there may have been a lot of changes in his personality as well as in his vision and need for expression. But it would greatly surprise me if there had been any changes in the essentials — in the core of his personality or in his sense of commitment.

There are two sides of Ingmar that strike me as so characteristic that I want to dwell on them just a bit —two sides that may seem contradictory but which in fact are intimately related. I am not talking about any sensational revelations. They are two very well-known facets of his character, perhaps viewed here from a slightly unusual perspective: the jester and the god-seeker. These two traits often have a common denominator.

In my opinion, one of Ingmar’s most suggestive films is The Naked Night.¹ In it he reveals many of his thoughts about the mentality and function of performers. One can venture the guess that these thoughts are applicable to the artistic professions in general. Artists are a breed slightly apart from practical society — a coterie of observers, reflectors, and interpreters who utilize specific qualities apart from purely rational ones, such as imagination, insight, intuition, and a highly developed emotional life — of course aside from their irresistible urge for self-expression. And their rigid sense of mental discipline.

Without such mental discipline, an artist becomes a mere prankster —- something completely different from a jester.

The jester is an unmasker, a social critic, a mirror of society. When people laugh at a jester, they are laughing at themselves; when they cry over a jester, they are crying over themselves; and when they hate a jester, they are hating themselves. A jester is a revealer, a scourger, and an incurable lover of people. Jesters love and want to be loved by everybody,

I imagine that Ingmar Bergman still is and still wants to be a jester and live with jesters, as he did when we worked together. In the middle of his critique of society’s often monstrous mechanisms, in the middle of his desperation, his skepticism, indeed in the middle of his cynicism, he seemed to me to be driven by love. Love of his work, his colleagues, his audience. Love of the very life that had been violated. And that impression persists. His love sees both the comedy and the tragedy in the human condition, both its hopelessness and its hopefulness. His reflections give expression to the different facets of life so that we can hardly distinguish them from each other. And his drawing power over our senses can most likely be explained at least partly by the lovingness of his portrayals, by the sense of human solidarity that may lie at the root of all his efforts. Perhaps at times this love has seemed cryptic or less than well articulated.

To me, Ingmar Bergman seems the born jester, with all the powers of insight this implies: insight into the ways and paradoxes of the world, the human soul and its conflicts; the sorrow and disgust, anger and revolt that jesting signifies, and the love it entails; above all, the drive to reflect, describe, frighten, amuse, awaken — in a word, the drive to communicate — that this role implies.

But will people allow him to be a jester? I have wondered in recent years. Isn’t there an inherent danger in the gap that has been created between Ingmar Bergman and the great mass of individuals? Isn’t there a risk that the world he describes will seem unreal, apart, the child of the increasingly exclusive and sophisticated imagination of a brilliant eccentric? Isn’t there a danger in the increasingly categorical demands on this eccentric — demands for originality, sensationalism, and above all a kind of papal infallibility in the artistic realm?

Isn’t there a risk that his being put on such a pedestal may hamper the freedom of inquiry? The flow of inspiration should be allowed to follow its own pathways, while perhaps not always obeying the traffic signs of inflated expectations. Indeed, at times inspiration should be allowed to get sidetracked during its always dangerous journey, without any grave diggers standing ready with their shovels.

I am not arguing that such a danger exists, but am merely posing a question—-a thought from among the ranks of those jesters who are still roaming freely. The press has the power actively to stop an artist, or to kill him with silence. But doesn’t it also have the power to tie him hand and foot through over exploitation?

As I say, I am merely asking. I feel on safer ground when I move on to the identification between jester and god-seeker.

Just as people need their jesters, they need their god-seekers. Not least in our age is there a crying need for both, given the doomsday depression that has spread beneath our empty heaven. To whom can people turn — on the one hand to find spokesmen for their anxieties and on the other to find diversion from these anxieties — if not to their jesters? And where can they find the god they need and dare to believe in?

Of course the church would be the logical tour guide on such a journey of discovery. But, as we all know, the church has become trapped between tradition and science: between anachronistic, mutually contradictory interpretations of the Bible and mystifications and a rational view of the world. At least for the time being, the church is hanging in midair. People have to find slightly firmer ground on which to seek the life sources they will ultimately depend upon. More than ever, they need unmaskers, reflectors, interpreters. They need those capable of lighting up and making fun of untruths — in order thereby to reveal some little morsel of truth, no matter how hypothetical and ambiguous.

Jesters have always been truth-seekers, following the path of antithesis. And in the end, this truth cannot reasonably be anything but the truth about God.

In this way we often find conscious or unconscious god-seekers among artists, especially those with the temperament of Ingmar Bergman the jester. Although his own specific explorations, admittedly, possess an uncommon frenzy and provocativeness, Bergman’s spiritual curiosity seems boundless. And here we finally arrive at a third and equally well-known Bergman character trait, which in turn is closely associated with the two mentioned above. One can even ask whether both the jester and the god-seeker have their deepest roots somewhere in this third and, in one sense, overriding identity — Ingmar Bergman the eroticist.

Once again, 1 must disappoint those who are hoping for some as yet unpublished insight into Ingmar’s highly private love life, because on that point 1 am undoubtedly more poorly informed than many of my readers. When I speak of eroticism here, it is not in the most narrow sense of the word but, rather, in its broadest — an attraction to and sense of union with existence as a whole. I am speaking of the role of eroticism in the overall scheme of things.

I will permit myself to quote a few lines from my just-completed novel, which touches on the erotic dimension I am referring to:

Perhaps it sounds strange, but I believe that David has an erotic relationship with everything around him —with nature, people, things, indeed with everything that happens. It may appear as if he is involved in some universal act of love that is sometimes fruitful and sometimes destructive. But he seems unable, or unwilling, to free himself from the attachment, the attraction and sensation of pleasure that unites him with all living things. One can easily get the impression of a kind of uninterrupted ecstasy — low-keyed, slow-burning, like an electric current. It is a fire that drives him in everything, even as he looks for the key to human life, the sense of order he cannot get out of his mind, … Now I understand better what he means by religion. His religion has hardly any connection with what he refers to as sanctified bureaucracies, nor is it something ethereal or abstract. His religion is presence and concreteness; it is a kind of relationship, or indeed an integration with all of creation. He feels involved in everything that happens, he feels responsible for everything that happens. His religion exists in all his feelings, in his spiritual search, as well as his sexuality.

This is no roman à clef, any more than other novels in which an author borrows material from his or her personal experiences and encounters with people. David is not identical with Ingmar Bergman. But it is true that Ingmar was certainly one of the two central figures I had in mind when I struggled with my David, who in turn represents an increasingly penetrating approach to God — one that combines science with the paths of spiritual knowledge, one that moves the creative vital force right into reality.

Given this alteration in concepts, we cannot avoid also extending the concept of sexuality almost ad infinitum. Eroticism becomes part of the very texture of life and may be strongly or less strongly expressed in individuals. Just as I, in a highly personal way, have understood Ingmar Bergman to be an eroticist in the broadest sense of the word.

Of course, I am fully aware that my analysis may be debatable or even totally off the wall. In that case I am not only prepared but also eager to be corrected by someone who knows better. These thoughts are ultimately based on a personal conviction about the responsibility of jesters: about people’s need for a few public figures who commit themselves to their cause without opportunistic side-glances, political or otherwise — people’s need for the incorrigible love found behind the jester’s sometimes savage and bitter reflections. I have the impression that Ingmar is one of those who is unusually well equipped to fill such a need in people, and that it may possibly be the dimension of human solidarity in his works that first set the ball rolling.

If this should be the case, I only hope that Ingmar Bergman is able to shake off his papal infallibility. I hope he can continue working with that motley brotherhood or sisterhood who eagerly, obstinately, and with varying success strive to portray the cruel, grotesque (and at blessed moments, heavenly and wonderful) state of earthly life.

Ingmar once coined the nickname “Battleship of Femininity” for me. It was an epithet that I clearly managed to live up to in the roles he assigned to me, but which I have considerable difficulty fulfilling in private life. I see this as a good example of the jester’s ability to reflect observed reality to the point of confusion. In other words, to recognize and mobilize in oneself one of the innumerable needs of personality that lie imbedded in the human psyche, temporarily enlarging it and experiencing its life.

So I hope that my impressions of an old colleague are not based on some temporary set of reflections, but on the master’s genuine personality.

Translated by Victor Kayfetz

Note

¹ The Swedish title, Gycklarnas afton, literally means “Night of the Jesters.” Trans.