An open letter to Ingmar Bergman

Dear Mr. Bergman, I take this opportunity to write an open letter to you. The chance to share my comments on an article you wrote induced a peculiar feeling in me—comments from an Indian film buff 49 years later! My initiation to world cinema was through your films some fifteen years ago, and to date you have remained the one film-maker who has had the most profound influence on my cinematic aesthetic sense. So it is quite an honour for me to critique an article by you: “Film has nothing to do with Literature”* Who gave the article this title? You or your editors or your translators? I think it’s a misnomer since the article basically deals with the creative process that one undergoes when one plans a film, right from the spark of an idea to the script to its final execution. The debate that you raise does not take up even half the article! I fully understand your view when you say that the first lightning of an idea is “a mental state, not an actual story”. It’s a level of abstraction which you’re hinting at, which you interpret further to make a story (the winding up of the thread as you mention), then a script and finally the blueprint for shooting. I think literature can also act as this precursor. India is a country where for centuries literature was read out loud along the banks of holy rivers and in the courts of kings. Literature here is hence perceived as a story-telling medium. The history of Swedish literature in the first half of the 19th century is probably not that enriched, and the youth of the ’40s and ’50s were rather more focused on things other than literature, their generic and marked lineage to the Nazi state always quite apparent. Evidently, literature was not as influential in your cinema as it was in Indian cinema. But take it from me, Mr. Bergman, it’s just another level of logical abstraction when you get to read a literary piece, an idea strikes you and you sit down to write your script. No idea, in the purest form of the word, is entirely original, and I feel we shouldn’t hanker over the conceit that someone else’s literature is originally yours. In the end, every inspiration is derived from life—that is what counts. I cannot resist the temptation to quote here the eminent film scholar and dramatist Bela Balazs: “Nearly every artistically serious and intelligent adaptation is a re-interpretation of that material”. And we have umpteen examples in our favour! But I definitely agree: trying to make a blind copy of the literature in a different medium in an attempt to remain ‘faithful’ is in most cases doomed to be a failure. Apart from the relationship of literature to film as the latter’s idea generator, there is another aspect with which I disagree with you. You have written: “When we experience a film, we consciously prime for illusion.” From my point of view, in very few cases does film creates an illusion in the same way literature does. There is not much a viewer can do; you are right in saying that “the sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings”. The viewer is forced to see what is being shown in most cases; his mind is too preoccupied to be prepared for illusion. There is probably only a single Pather Panchali by Satyajit Ray, but there are hundreds and thousands of Apus in Bibhutibhushan’s masterpiece (on which Ray based his classic with his own interpretations). Every reader has his own cast, his own costume, his own setting, playing and fast-forwarding again and again in his own head. I will end this letter by touching upon an interesting aspect which I felt did come up in your essay: the technical differences between film and literature, and why to you, it’s virtually impossible to translate literature into films. Here I quote Sergei Eisenstein (from his book Film Form): “I consider that besides mastering the elements of filmic diction, the technique of the frame, and the story of montage, we have another credit to the list—the value of profound ties with the traditions and methodology of literature.” The ‘methodology’ is a very significant term here since this is where the two media come into conflict. Accepting fully the differences between the two or, as I mentioned earlier, that making a film from literature is essentially a re-interpretation of the latter in terms of the language and grammar of film, it’s interesting how ‘literary’ your films of the 1950’s were. The confessions of the Knight in the church which was almost a soliloquy in The Seventh Seal, or the narrative logic to describe Professor Borg’s constant swing between reality and his dreams, are the by-product of purely literary techniques. In many of your films of the 1950’s (before you wrote this article)—viz. The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Smiles of a Summer night, The Magician, The Virgin Spring—all have extensive dialogues or background narration to depict a mood or to outline a character or to indicate an emotional turbulence. For example, in Wild Strawberries, in one of the dream sequences (looking into a microscope to see his own eye in horror), Professor Borg’s alienation is what we were ‘told’ via narration, the sequence has no visual impact on us as the audience. And in most of the films of this era, we find barren landscapes with mystical light as a ray of hope or dark clouds to depict terror, man-made or otherwise, where your characters are always trying to bridge the ‘gaps’. The reference to the supernatural and the spiritual can at best be termed ‘Gothic’. And as a foil to this style you used narration, the verbalization of your thoughts and ideas. The 1960’s saw a change in your style; you came closer to your characters and focused on the face as you once said later on: “For me, the human face is the most important subject of cinema”. This relationship with your characters made us feel your association with them more directly, and to me your style , from then onwards, was more cinematic. Also, from your published screenplays we can see how each differs from its cinema version. For you the process of interpreting the written word for film probably started then. Hence, this article is historically the link between your old style and the new form. I doubt if you really believed that “Film has nothing to do with literature”. Your own work reveals that even to disown literature you have to internalize its style and then adapt it for your filmic needs. Till then, we can hate but probably cannot ignore the influence of literature on film. Cheers! Amitava Nag

A response to Bergman & the Open Letter by Amitava Nag

by Gaston Roberge

(Before reading Amitava Nag's letter) I am in deep communion with Bergman's essay. And I’m happy to have been given the opportunity to read it. Whether you think in terms of images, of music, of a scene, your film must be triggered by an aesthetic impulse. An example comes to mind: Eisenstein conceived Ivan the Terrible when he imagined a scene, the mood, the vibration of which determined the entire film, but that particular scene, although it was filmed for an eventual part III of Ivan the Terrible, was not retained in the finished film. Personally, although I don't consider myself a filmmaker, I once had an exciting experience: I happened to visit a classroom of first graders (in Los Angeles, when I was a student at UCLA). For some reason the quality of the light in the classroom moved me so deeply that I decided on the spot that I'd make a film on that particular classroom. And I did it. Whether it was a good film or not is not the point here. A third example is that of Manikda (Satyajit Ray). It is known that when he wrote his screenplays, bits of music came to his mind and he would write them in staff notation in the margin of his text. Further, I argued that his Ganashatru was music, in the sense that it had a musical form, not a dramatic form as purists claimed it should have had since it was based on a play. (After reading Amitava’s letter) Paraphrasing Bergman, in this case (Ganashatru), I would say film has nothing to do with drama. But then, that would be an exaggeration. And I think Amitava is right in feeling that the title of Bergman’s article may be a misnomer. Film as such has to do with all the arts; a particular film may have to do more with some arts and less with others. But in as much as film is an art form, it cannot be dissociated from the other forms. ________________________________ * From “Four Screenplays” by Ingmar Bergman, Simon and Schuster, 1960. (Translated by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner). New Quest had invited comment on this short article by Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), which could not be reprinted for the benefit of NQ’s readers as permission was not secured from the original publisher. It was reprinted in “Subject and Structure” (An Anthology for Writers), John M. Wasson, ed., Little, Brown and Company, 1972.