Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman
Ernst Ingmar Bergman; 14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer who worked in film, television, and theatre. He is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential auteurs of all time and is most famous for films such as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispersand Fanny and Alexander...
NationalitySwedish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth14 July 1918
CityUppsala, Sweden
CountrySweden
There is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect.
A film causes me so many worries and such a lot of reactions that I have to love it in order to get over it and past it.
For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour.
I'm planning, you see, to try to confine myself to the truth. That's hard for an old, inveterate fantasy martyr and liar who has never hesitated to give truth the form he felt the occasion demanded.
This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?
I liked Truffaut a lot, I've felt a lot of admiration for his way to address the audience, and his storytelling.... La nuit américaine is adorable, and another film I like to see is L'enfant sauvage , with its fine humanism.
When you die, you are extinguished. From being you will be transformed to non-being. A god does not necessarily dwell among our capricious atoms.
Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.
Then I felt that every inflection of my voice, every word in my mouth, was a lie, a play whose sole purpose was to cover emptiness and boredom. There was only one way I could avoid a state of despair and a breakdown. To be silent. And to reach behind the silence for clarity or at least try to collect the resources that might still be available to me.
I supply my own angels and demons. I exist on a stony beach, which lowers itself in waves toward a protective ocean. A dog barks; a child cries; the day sinks and becomes night. You can never scare me. No human being will be able to scare me ever again. I have a prayer that I repeat to myself in absolute stillness: May a wind come to stir up the ocean and the stifling twilight. May a bird come from water out there and explode the silence with its call.
I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.