Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face

Michael Tapper

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231851213
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

The 1976 premiere of Face to Face came at the height of director-screenwriter Ingmar Bergman's career. Prestigious awards and critical acclaim had made him into a leading name in European art cinema, yet today Face to Face is a largely overlooked and dismissed work.

This book tells the story of its rise and fall. It presents a new portrait of Bergman as a political artist exploring a new medium with huge public impact: television. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen, feminism, and alternative psychotherapy, he made a series of portraits of the modern bourgeois family focusing on the plight of women; Face to Face followed in the tracks of The Lie (1970) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973). By his workbooks, engagement planners, and other archival material, we can trace his investigation into the heart of repressive family structures to eventually glimpse a way out. This volume culminates in an extensive study of the two-year process from the first outlines of the screenplay to the reception and aftermath of Face to Face. It thus offers a unique insight into Bergman's world, his ideas and artistry during a turbulent time in cinema history.

PART ONE

PRELUDE: THE 1960S

UNDER FIRE

When Bergman released The Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) in early 1968, the artistic triumph of Persona was quickly forgotten and Widerberg’s criticism returned with a vengeance. The film was received as an artistic regression. Again, Bergman was deemed a closed-off introvert – a solipsist in a time of social activism and political mass movements – rearranging old motifs and characters that were deemed as being of little significance to anyone but himself (Geber 1977a, p. 367).

Later in the same year, The Shame (Skammen) premiered. It seemed as if Bergman, at last, had taken notice of the call to political arms. Expressionist demons of the past were replaced by the topical horrors of war, more specifically the Vietnam War, which many critics saw as the film’s obvious allegorical reference. Bergman confirmed this connection openly both in interviews made at the time of the film’s release and in his reflections many years later (Björkman et al. 1973, pp. 228–229; Bergman 1995, p. 300).

At first, the reception was positive, celebrating a director revived by new ideas, new motifs (Geber 1977b, p. 400). Bergman had, according to the critics, finally raised his eyes from navel-gazing at a private hell to take a good look at the very real horrors of the contemporary world. Then a debate started that soon turned into a tidal wave of fury against the film.

Poet Lars Forssell’s review in BLM was an omen of things to come. After calling the film “one of the most interesting and important” Bergman had made so far, he concluded with a speculation on what the left would do with the film’s refusal to take sides (Forssell 1968, pp. 605–607). In Aftonbladet author and prominent antiwar activist Sara Lidman answered Forssell’s misgivings by launching a series of attacks on The Shame, calling it a failure both artistically and politically. Bergman’s non-commitment she saw as “propaganda for the American administration far better than they could ever dream of ” (Lidman 1968).

In her 1996 reception study of Bergman’s films, Birgitta Steene regarded the attacks on Bergman as a sign of the times, part of the zeitgeist. To the New Left intelligentsia and a wide spectrum of cultural journalists, debaters and reviewers, he was a belated echo of the nineteenth-century individualist artist: romantic and self-obsessed – that is, irrelevant to the cultural climate of the late 1960s (Steene 1996, pp. 111–13).

That Bergman was an outspoken supporter of the Social Democratic Party only added to the animosity against his films (Aghed 1969; Björkman et al. 1973, p. 178). Having been in government since 1932, they were the main enemy for the New Left, who saw them as traitors of the working class and even as social fascists (Tapper 2014, pp. 64–66). Moreover, the antipathy against Bergman was fuelled by his key positions in Swedish cultural life.

At the beginning of the 1960s he had become the undisputed leading director at the largest film company, Svensk Filmindustri. Behind the scenes, he also was the company’s artistic advisor, controlling what new directors and screenwriters to recruit (Furhammar 2003, p. 264). Then, from 1963 to 1966, he was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten). Moreover, he was Sweden’s leading auteur, that is, the standard against whom every director was measured. His creative freedom was envied by everyone, but many also saw him as the obstacle that blocked the new generation’s claim for a place in the sun. In short, Bergman was “the centre of the bourgeois artistic establishment” (Bergom-Larsson 1978, p. 11), and this caused much resentment.

When Bergman’s friend Harry Schein founded the Swedish Film Institute in 1963 it was to promote films with artistic ambitions. A jury of ‘film experts’ – mostly critics, but also some producers – administered ‘quality points’ that corresponded with the amount of governmental support a film would get from the Institute’s funds. The jury also installed the Swedish film awards, Guldbaggegalan, in 1964. Needless to say, Bergman scored high both in quality points and in Guldbagge Awards during the first years. However, that changed with the controversy of The Hour of the Wolf and The Shame.

In 1968, the jury gave Stefan Jarl’s documentary They Call Us Misfits (Dom kallar oss mods) a significantly higher score than Bergman’s two releases, and the collective political documentary The White Game (Den vita sporten), helmed by a collective of filmmakers led by none other than Bo Widerberg, won the Best Film category at the Guldbagge Awards (Steene 1996, p. 111). The following year, Bergman’s A Passion (En passion, 1969; aka The Passion of Anna) was snubbed, and the Best Film Award was bestowed on young directors Roy Andersson for A Love Story (En kärlekshistoria, 1970) and Lasse Forsberg for The Assault (Misshandlingen, 1969) – both politically engaged, both outspoken critics of Bergman.

Meanwhile, the Swedish film industry was in a state of crisis. Ticket sales continued to dwindle at the end of the decade; cinema theatres closed in alarming numbers. At the same time, new and alternative means of production and distribution challenged the dominating capitalist film industry.

In 1968, FilmCentrum was founded by Stefan Jarl and other young filmmakers as a distribution organisation primarily for documentary film, and in 1973 it hived off the alternative cinema theatre organisation Folkets Bio. Bergman tried to be part of the new cinema by having FilmCentrum distribute some of his TV productions, but that went largely unnoticed. To the new generation, he was still seen as the embodiment of the Swedish cinema establishment.^* Radical new winds were blowing away the old to make room for the new, and although Bergman had a comeback in the 1970s, anti-Bergman sentiments lingered for decades (Steene 1996, pp. 112–114).

The early 1970s was an uncertain time in the film industry, as there was a change of generations in a period of social upheaval and industrial readjustment. It had a radical impact on Bergman personally and artistically, not the least since he had become financially vulnerable. In 1967 he had started the Switzerland-located company Persona AG 1968 (liquidated in 1974) for productions outside Sweden, and in the same year he founded Cinematograph for producing films at home – both his own films and works by others. To explore new commercial and artistic possibilities he had two bold strategies for Cinematograph: to make films in English for the foreign market, and to make films directly for TV (Vinberg 1968; Cowie 1988, p. 298).

* See the TV programme Presskonferens, broadcast 26 February 1971.

CRISIS

In October 1969, A Passion premiered. Ingmar Bergman later recalled the filming as “one of the worst I have ever experienced” together with a few other notable examples, one of them being the following production for the big screen, The Touch (Bergman 1995, p. 310). On a positive note, some Swedish critics defended Bergman’s right to cultivate his own type of cinema, regardless of the political trends of the day. Several reviews also appreciated the use of colour (Eastmancolor), Bergman’s first in a dramatic film.*

However, this response was more a reply to the overzealous attacks on The Shame than praise for A Passion. Even the most enthusiastic reviews could not find anything new and fresh about the film. Rather, it was regarded as yet another Fårö film, rehashing the same old motifs with the same set of actors in the same austere style and landscape.^†

Meanwhile in the US, his most important market, the critics’ love affair with Bergman continued. The National Society of Film Critics named him Best Director four times – for Persona, The Hour of the Wolf, The Shame and A Passion – and both Bibi Andersson (Persona) and Liv Ullmann (The Hour of the Wolf) were named Best Actress (Balio 2010, p. 284). Several of his actors had become stars in international productions, including Hollywood: Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Harriet Andersson in The Deadly Affair (1966) and Bibi Andersson in The Kremlin Letter (1970). The New York papers and journals in particular devoted much space to his films. Even Playboy had shown an interest in Bergman, publishing an extensive interview with the director by Cynthia Grenier in 1964.

In the late 1960s, Universal planned to make an anthology film with Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini. Bergman wrote an outline to his segment called ‘Rebecca’ and reserved four weeks in his schedule to meet with his peers at Cinecittà in Rome. Either because Kurosawa got sick or because Fellini never finished his screenplay, Bergman decided to withdraw from the project.* By now there were also clouds on the commercial horizon.

Following Janus Films’ successful marketing of Bergman in the late 1950s and early 1960s, United Artists had bought the rights to his films, starting with Persona. But the films all failed miserably at the box office despite the critics’ passionate reviews. Following the flop of A Passion, they decided to drop Bergman altogether (Balio 2010, p. 284).

Bergman’s prospects for an international career now looked grim, which would explain his decision to make a film in a language that was not even second to him. It would prove to be an even bigger failure. In both Images and The Magic Lantern, The Touch is only mentioned briefly and then as an instance of outright artistic failure, in stark contrast to his passionate defence of the film at the time of its release.^† Since its initial premiere it has rarely been screened, and today it is one of few Bergman films unavailable in any video format. The dialogue was mainly in English, with only a few lines in Swedish. Newly formed ABC Pictures Corporation, a film-producing subdivision of the American television company, financed and distributed it.

The production cost was two million dollars, roughly ten million Swedish kronor at the time. Its budget was small by Hollywood standards, but corresponding to the cost of ten Swedish film productions on average budgets. In the male lead, Bergman had originally wanted Dustin Hoffman, who had to decline due to other contractual obligations (Björkman 1970). Instead, the role went to Elliot Gould, fresh from his highly-praised performance in the countercultural hit movie M*A*S*H (1970). According to press reports, ABC Pictures Corporation had by its 110-page-long contract the exclusive rights to the film in all galaxies and planets (Sörenson 1970b). But alas, the intergalactic success passed Bergman by.

At the Berlin festival screening, where it got its world premiere, there were reports of a fiasco – the audience had booed during the screening. Bergman commented on the event with a stiff upper lip and some quips, and Bibi Andersson responded by writing an article in defence of the film in Sweden’s leading morning paper (Andersson 1971; Mehr 1971). The Swedish critics were divided. In response to the hostile reception in Berlin, some took sides with Bergman. To them, it was a simple and perhaps even banal film but nonetheless beautiful and true (Bergström 1971; Edström 1971; Sima 1971a). Others just saw it as pointless and dull (Nordberg 1971; Olsson 1971; Schildt 1971). An open letter by a literary critic in film journal Chaplin asked rhetorically, “Is Bergman finished as an artist?” (Widegren 1972).

This time not even the New York critics made a collective rush to Bergman’s rescue. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote a respectful but nonetheless negative review (Canby 1971a), and when the advertisements for the film snipp...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: Prelude: The 1960s
• Part Two: Bergman Goes TV
• Part Three: Bergman’s Modernism
• Part Four: The Djursholm Trilogy Plus One
• Part Five: Face To Face
• References
• Index