The lust and the demons...

Ingmar Bergman.

[Updated June 26]. From the book about Ingmar Bergman “Lusten och dämonerna” or “The Lust and the Demons”: In many interviews Bergman invited to an interpretation of his work as direct results of his life. With this not said everything is univocally (entydigt) biographic the author Mikael Timm thinks.

Timm writes about different models for interpretation of Bergman’s work (phew! Why not the simple explanation?); the Marxist, the psychoanalytical, the structural, the semiotic… Using any of them one risk missing as much as if one uses the sole biographic method he thinks. Phew again!

When Bergman himself described his own work-method he said he threw the javelin (spjut) first right into the dark and then went to look where it landed. First intuition and then analysis.

The more one penetrate into his work the clearer it becomes that he has had as his starting point something he has observed, either in his own life from very early or in other people’s lives. Bergman said to Timm that he had never made anything up.

A Herbert Grevenius tried to explain why Bergman had a special ability to wake attention among (or compared to) his contemporary:

“Ingmar Bergman who has caused so much commotion (rabalder) the last decade, is now a 34 year old man with many children but is seen by judges (bedömare) as a high school student (gymnasist) in pubertal crisis still. Why? Maybe because he stubbornly writes about the confrontation between the life and the childhood idyll, between young vulnerable people and older in armours and masks, about love and death. The wiser and more careful of them just wrap things up (lindar in saker) a little more or express it a little more complicated. Ingmar has never done that. Even if he could have. But he is too impatient.”

I have thought and am thinking again if it was (or is) acceptable for a woman devoting herself so to her work as Bergman did to his?? And to have 9 children at the same time? Leaving them to the other parent too? Not that this would have been my model…

Women in a similar position would choose not to have any children?

And some have neither a career nor children…

Reading this was a little comforting for me: as the spontaneous, quick, impatient I am in a way! Behind shyness, a certain guardedness? Why I have chosen the work I have? To be allowed expressing things, being spontaneous, alive? Throwing out things first, and then returning watching what I have done (sometimes with blushing cheeks), rewriting, changing...

Addition June 26: See the article “Ingmar Bergman: A morally flawed recluse, but a director touched by genius” by Geoffrey McNab in the Independent July 31, 2007.

Practician…

The letter
(which one of our students is going to sing in the church at the concert tomorrow evening).

According to a test on what blog type you are the result for me was that I am a practician! I was moderately flattered by his.

I have been out for a bike-ride before lunch, sneezing and coughing, recovering from a cold.
Yesterday I watched a TV-programme (I had a TV-evening yesterday!) about a new book on Ingmar Bergman. The author, Michael Timm (in my age I guess), said about Bergman, with whom he had developed a fairly close friendship, that he was lively, changeable, energetic, quick, very curious, after an interview on half an hour Bergman got tired and started to ask the interviewer a lot of questions instead of the opposite.

I also came to think of how extremely organized Bergman was. He was always extremely well prepared in his work. He had a fixed schedule every day for his writing at Fårö; for his walks, when he visited his cinema and watched films each evening and so on. He needed to keep his demons (or “dämoner” as he called them in Swedish) in check.

And he avoided psycho therapy (but what sort would he have gotten then?) because I guess he believed that his neurosis was the prerequisite for his creativity, that he would loose it if he came to terms with them. As I think many creative people thought then (and maybe still think too often). But what was he actually afraid of? The truth lay just under the surface and he was aware of it, on an unconscious or subconscious level, and was in touch with the panic connected with it?

During the tax-affair (round 1975) he got a psychic breakdown and landed on a psychiatric clinic and was heavily medicated, so he walked there like a zombie. But he decided to quit all medication, and did that abruptly too, and met all the anxieties. He has described this in one of his books. And left Sweden with his wife Ingrid (by the way the author of the new book on Bergman thinks Bergman had had women who could measure up to him actually, and contribute to his work. Know that he and the pianist-wife Käbi Laretei inspired each other a lot, but they had a mutual respectful fear or each other? And Bergman later said that they played roles to each other, didn’t dare to meet as real, genuine human beings, meetings between two genuine , true selves, or how one shall express it).

Yes, maybe one has to be organized with artistic works struck me. Boundaries are more important there than in many other works and occupations? We need limits, in our work. And all artists aren’t bohemians, as maybe many thinks? Because for the first you need a lot of discipline to come where you have come! To develop the skill you have developed. And for this you can’t be too bohemian? If you aren’t lucky having someone a housekeeper and mommy?

k. – the spontaneous! Not always weighing the words, hmmm… Spontaneously expressing things, thoughts etc. Behind a certain amount of shyness. Not having a censurer - and having one. Blushing red sometimes (or rather often): but what did I say? And how? How childish! How stupid! How stupid, childish ideas!

Also struck me the other day about an older friend who has known me for long, who said she thought that people maybe could react on my quick thinking… That they didn’t really keep up with it. I don’t know if this was so good telling me however.

Yes, only a word or expression can trigger a lot of thoughts and feelings. And when I write I can start in one end and end in an entirely different, with a million sidetracks?

And after having worked with young people for so many years my language has also got coloured by that sort of language? When I studied pedagogy once (beside full time work) I expressed myself differently, adapted a bit to that language? The same when I was student at a tutor-education at the Royal College of music in Stockholm (5 years ago, 7, 5 international academic points).

No, now I need to practice for 2, 5 - 3 hours. And it would be nice getting time on the balcony with a cup of tea with honey (need that for my cold). Have thought of taking the bike to town and the pharmacy to buy something for my nose, Renaissance I had thought of.