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Book Review
Searchlight Good Book Judge | Zhou Limin (Scholar, Executive Deputy Director of Ba Jin's Former Residence)
The chronology attached to We Are All Circus: The Bergman Anthology tells us that Bergman won eight Oscars, however, he never won a best director award or a screenplay award, which is not ironic for "the greatest film artist since the invention of cinema" (Woody Allen), but a reminder that no award criterion can change the true achievement of the artist, and that many of the vain appearances of the media age are not enough to constitute a real recognition of a person, only his films are towering monuments. As Bergman himself put it, "The only tool an artist has to participate in a debate is his own work." ”
For his own work, Bergman has his pursuit, which has been clearly stated in many words in this book; for audiences who have seen many of his films, this book is undoubtedly a treasure trove of opening these films - in the "Third Part of My Dialogue with Me", he actually interviewed himself in another identity, which shows how strong his eagerness to dissect is. "Listen, discover, understand, recreate, for a lifetime," Bergman needs to do with that, too.
Thus, I was moved by his textured writings, such as when he wrote of being with my father as a child, "We rode together in the glorious spring fields, and my father taught me to recognize the names of trees, flowers, and birds on the road..."; as he mocked the literary scholars and critics, "These people have the ability to develop the obscurity of language to the extreme, and all have the determination to carry out boredom to the end", and the language they use is "not human at all"; as he realized the artistic experience: the more concrete the better, True artists talk with their hearts. ......
I also particularly like the way the book is written, it is not a uniform collection of a certain genre, but a hodgepodge of miscellaneous: prose, film reviews, drama reviews, commentaries on film announcements, prefaces to scripts, interviews... In this form, it presents us with Bergman's complex and rich spiritual world.
Text/Ingmar Bergman
About the Seventh Seal
When I was young, my father would sometimes allow me to follow him to preach in rural churches around Stockholm. We rode together in the bright spring fields, my father taught me to recognize the names of the trees, flowers and birds on the road, and we walked together all day, completely ignoring the pains of the outside world.
For a young boy, sermons are naturally only a matter for adults. As my father stood at the pulpit of the church, leading the parishioners throughout the parish to pray, sing and listen, my interest turned to the mysterious world inside the church: the dome of the church, the thick walls, and the eternal smell that pervaded it. Sunlight shines through the window on the medieval frescoes in the church's atrium, chiseled into the walls and statues on the ceiling, paving the way to the fantasy world: there are angels, saints, dragons, believers, devils and people, as well as a variety of magical animals: the snake in the Garden of Eden, the donkey ridden by Balaam, the whale in Jonah and the condor in Genesis. Depicted in the landscapes of heaven, earth and hell, they look far away and magical, but with a familiar beauty. In the forest, Death was playing chess with the knights; a naked man clutched the trunk of a tree, his eyes wide with horror, and beneath him death sawed the stump happily; on the softly contoured hills in the distance, Death was pulling people to dance, and the last dance to the land of death.
On the other side of the church is a painting of the Virgin Mary, who stands in the rose garden with Jesus in her arms. Mary had hands like a peasant woman, a serious face, birds hovering above her head.
The craftsmen of the Middle Ages created the world with sensitivity, skill, and joy, and I was immediately struck by it, and the world became as real as the world I lived in with my parents and siblings around me. But at the same time, I tried my best to escape jesus who was suffering on the cross in the middle of the church, and my heart felt the powerful violence and great pain condensed on the cross. Many years later, the persistence and doubt of faith chased my thinking all the time.
I've been thinking about a question about how to express this experience and feelings as a child concretely, and I've been looking for answers to that question.
My aim is to create like the paintings of medieval craftsmen, with the same universality, sensitivity and passion as they did. My characters are going to cry, to laugh, to shout, to cry; They are afraid, they suffer, they question, they question, they are afraid of the plague, they are afraid of the last judgment, their stars are wormwood.
Our fears are different, but our words are the same.
Our questions were never answered.
Still in the mirror
One of the questions we talked about at drama school was: Why be an actor? Everyone talked deeply, but at the same time felt very confused. Teachers and students stumbled like they were stumbling on an almost unmarked field, with chaos ahead and a dangerous abyss hidden on the ground. There are naturally relevant theories about why you are an actor, but the theory is written by theorists and is to prove the law with special cases.
So many young people can't figure out why they want to act. If you ask them, the answers are also varied, some objective, some vague, or some simply avoid. Fortunately, the old actors do not have to answer this question, their experience, their lifelong dedication to the audience, the answer is engraved in the depths of their consciousness: the audience has the need to see the mirror reflection of their own situation in the actor, through another angle, with light from the outside to illuminate their lives. Actors are the ones who meet that need.
The artist is like a missionary who creates the world, and the place where his creative act takes place: the stage, the studio or the rehearsal room, is also a place with a spiritual, ritualistic feeling. This simple fact should be the first common sense that every young person who pursues a career in stage theater should know, but unfortunately it is often overlooked.
My own experience is proof of that. If someone had told me earlier that it was the audience and not myself who was in charge first, my personal feelings would not make any sense; If someone had clearly explained to me the reasons for this, I might have let go of the thought swings and emotional ups and downs that had tormented me in my career for so many years, let go of the entanglements that had no substance, and I might have overcome the psychology of trying to please others or fear failure in my creation, and not let them develop into the indelible parasites that dwell in the depths of my heart and constantly torment and humiliate me.
"Your responsibility is to keep the mirror clean!" However, the surface of the mirror may be veiled, and the light falling on it may be beautiful, which I cannot change, just like the boundaries and surfaces of the mirror, but there are many ways to keep the mirror clean. The style and techniques of film certainly have obvious value, but in my opinion, excessive dependence on them carries the danger of contaminating the essence of the film. As an actor, the joy of being recognized and the determination to dedicate to the performance are powerful driving forces for creativity; Of course, it is also good to have self-confidence and talent, but in the long run, these qualities are not targeted without the cognitive ability of the audience and stable technical support.
A missionary without knowledge of the soul is just a primitive medicine man, and an artist without technical skills is just an amateur.
Both types of people are at risk, especially when they are still slightly gifted, and this society is wandering around. In our culturally impoverished country, centuries of consistent rejection of education on the soul have spawned a variety of misconceptions about artistic and religious issues.
Yet I'm only telling half the truth, just as my film captures at best a glimpse of the vast and complex psychic world I want to show everyone. Through the bulky and complex projector, the images that disappear in an instant are transformed into experiences and transmitted to the audience.
This thought terrifies and confuses me, what the hell is going on? Does it have to smash the mirror every time?
Married Life
In order not to let obsessive-compulsive readers get lost in reading this article, I broke the norm once and wrote a review for each chapter of the script. If you think this engagement is underestimating your wisdom, please ignore the following text.
Act I: John and Marianne represent a fixed way of thinking and an ideal life of carefree food and clothing, and they never feel any sense of oppression or hypocrisy in their petty bourgeois life, nor do they have the heart to change the long-established pattern of life. This does not contradict their experience of participating in political movements in their youth, but further confirms their habitual lifestyle.
The film opens with a near-perfect picture of an ideal marriage, the opposite of the married life in hell, but there is a connection between the two. On the surface, John and Marianne were like guests, their eyes always flashing with happy smiles, compared to the other crazy poor couple, Peter and Caterina, John and Marianne are the most beautiful and happy couple in the world. Near the end of the scene, there is a little friction between the two, forcing them to make a choice. This little friction seems inconsequential, the wound will soon scab, but the scab began to infect under the skin. This is my understanding, and it doesn't matter if you don't agree.
Act II: The appearance of a perfect marriage continues to flourish and become even more spectacular. All unpleasantness is resolved by the sympathetic Wan'er. Here is an explanation of the protagonist's occupation and working environment. Marianne showed a hint of apprehension, she couldn't define what was upsetting her, but intuition made her feel that something huge was going on between her and John, and she tried in vain to make up for the cracking, invisible gap. John began to answer some mysterious phone calls, and in the evening the couple went to see Ibsen's Doll's House. (What else can they see together?) The unspoken resentment between the two intensified, and they both tried to break the window paper, but in the end they rushed to collect the troops and avoid talking about it.
Act Three: The Cutter Finally Falls, and John mercilessly confesses to Marianne that he has fallen in love with another woman and that the perfect marriage has broken down. The fresh love of dopamine makes John decisive and confident, and Marianne is like being knocked down by a thunderbolt on a sunny day, unprepared and helpless. We watched as she was instantly bloodied in humiliation and confusion.
Act 4: A long goodbye reunion. John's new life begins to be in crisis, but he is completely unaware of it. Marianne is finally beginning to recover, but not yet fully out of the inertia of her old life: she is still attached to John, attached to the fragile loneliness, and she hopes that everything will return to the past. The meeting between the two was mixed with the goodwill of reconciliation and the malice of the attack, painful and embarrassing. The moment of avoidance from each other is the moment of approaching each other, and everything seems so fragile, vulnerable, and vulnerable. I must admit that this scene is particularly tragic.
Act 5: The Great Explosion. Marianne began to move toward normal, but John became more and more lost in reality. The two came up with a brilliant idea, and they filed for divorce with the same lawyer. One evening in early summer, John and Marianne met in John's office to sign the divorce papers. Suddenly, like a torrential rain, the hatred accumulated over the years, the suppressed anger, and the pain that tormented both sides all erupted. Little by little, the two decent intellectuals stripped off their human coats and became two madmen who attacked each other, leaving the only target in their minds to torture each other physically and spiritually. Driven by anger, the quarrel between the two of them beats that of Peter and Caterina in the first act, after all, these two have cultivated into immortals in the marriage hell, and can be said to be more professional in treating each other harshly, and this technique John and Marianne have not yet mastered. Their only goal was to destroy each other, and sometimes they almost succeeded.
Act VI: Here I decided to have two new people born in the ruins of destruction, perhaps a little overly optimistic, but I still did not hold back. John and Marianne had been baptized in blood and had earned enough tears, and now they began to explore new areas of knowledge, including how to treat love. The first time Marianne sat down to listen to her mother's nagging, John was able to introspect herself and began to treat Marianne like an adult. Everything is still chaotic, the intertwined relationships are still complicated, and life is built on a bunch of compromises with each other, but I think at least the psychological state of the two of them is more in tune with reality than before. However, life is unsolvable, and the story ends here without a big reunion. But I really wanted to end with a big reunion, if nothing else, just to ridicule the tasteful artistic elite. They looked down on the play, saying it was too everyday, too popular, and as early as the first scene of the first act they issued a dry mouth of aesthetic criticism.
What else is there to say? It took me three months to write this play, but I spent most of my life experiencing it all, and I really don't know if it would be better if I reversed this order, at least it would seem more advanced. I often empathize with my characters in my writing, who are full of contradictions, sometimes like impatient children, sometimes very mature. They talk nonsense, but from time to time there are golden sentences. They are anxious, happy, selfish, stupid, kind, intelligent, selfless, submissive, gentle, sensitive, intolerable and loving. It's such a mess, now let's see how they are.
(This article is an excerpt from the book We Are All Circuses: The Bergman Papers, published with permission from CITIC Publishing Group.) ）
| of Humanities and Social Sciences Translate | A collection of essays
We Are All Circus: The Bergman Anthology
[Sweden] by Ingmar Bergman
Translated by Wang Kaimei
CITIC Publishing Group
January 2022
Bergman: My fear is about the emotions that are consumed, the unspoken suffering that people in silence hide. I believe — at least I do — that the greatest mission of cinema is to put up a mirror for the audience, to see themselves and others in it, to see the most intimate emotions of human nature, the emotions that those who stand in a strong position in our society try to deny.
Collecting more than 80 essays published by Bergman from the 1930s to the 1990s, this collection includes essays, personal letters, diaries, film criticism, literary criticism, lecture notes, etc., and presents a comprehensive picture of how a young man who was interested in film and theater, read a lot of books, and had a dream of being a writer became a heavyweight film master and dramatist in history.
In the book, Bergman easily wanders through different themes with sharp philosophical speculation, whether it is summarizing the essence of art, explaining the front and backstage of film work, or pinning down social issues, he can use vivid and vivid language to show what he thinks and thinks in front of the reader's eyes; laughing and cursing at the film critics and audiences, questioning and mocking himself, but also vividly showing Bergman's little-known side.
Duty Editor | Little Fairy
Duty Editor-in-Chief | Zhang Ying
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