By Arindam Ghatak • Aug 3rd, 2007 • Filed under: Thought, Tribute, World Cinema

I watched Cries and Whispers last night on DVD, for the nth time. Needless to say, I wept during the same moments I have always wept, write Arindam Ghatak remembering Ingmar Bergman

A moment of heart-stopping joy… A moment of sharp-shooting pain… These two often visit you hand-in-hand, they can rarely do without each other in intense human ‘dealings’ and in emotionally naked moments… in life and in the films of Ingmar Bergman. Honestly and truly. That is why it almost seems petty to dwell only on the craft of filmmaking in the works of Bergman. Of course they are assiduously crafted, the labour in every department glaring in the films’ seamlessness. Whether you take Persona or Cries and Whispers (two of my favourite Bergmans), or The Seventh Seal or Wild Strawberries (two of his most renowned films internationally), or Through a glass darkly, The Silence, Winter Light or Fanny and Alexander. However, what strikes me in his films is that the obsessive labour in the craft of each of his films is not an end in itself. His personal angst, his dark forces have a way of popping out in situations and have a way of transforming them into a force that highlights the exceptional human endeavors that embrace life in all its positive and negative glory, in life and in death.

I saw my first Bergman in 1997 when I was 20 and in my first year in college in Pune. I have always wanted to join the FTII (Film and Television Institute of India, Pune), to make films someday, but it would be in 2002 that I would become a student of film-editing there. In July 1997, I was assisting on a diploma film shoot at the FTII and after a 12-hour grueling shoot, I was dead tired and sleepy but they were screening Persona at the main theatre at the institute that night at 9 pm. I had vaguely heard of Bergman by then and walked in, the film buff that I am. 15 minutes into the film,

I was wide awake, charged up, all my tiredness gone. The world of the actress Elisabeth Vogler who falls silent during a stage performance (played by Liv Ullman) and the world of nurse Alma (played by Bibi Andersson) who is sent to ‘restore her health’. But how can the nurse who is carrying her own demons, her own baggage’ ‘restore back to normalcy’ the health of someone who merely does not want to speak, in short, partake of the tangle of words in a human world that she believes only heightens the apathy in the pathetic. The fact that she is an actress, whose voice is her instrument, creates the drama and a sense of foreboding, in that, what will happen to her career, her life now- that she is got to be suffering from some affliction if she suddenly stops speaking while on stage. But Bergman’s concerns are larger. He brings a nondescript nurse into the actress’s world and turns the nurse’s world upside down instead. It is the nurse who needs the human warmth, the human touch; it is she who needs to speak, to pour out her heart about her work, her first brush with love, sex and the joy of it all; it is she who is lonely and needs solace. How can she ‘cure’ the actress. Very soon their identities change, intermingle, each becomes a part of the other, as literally as possible- the ‘power game’ topples, changes side, topples again, as it does in life all the time. Which is to say, who is to account for who can cure who, who is to account for who is the ‘ill’, who is to account for the deep recesses of the human mind, and the provocation owing to the senses. These are truths, emotional truths if I may put it, and Bergman seemed to derive great satisfaction, almost seemed to have fun probing as unflinchingly into them as filmmaking logistics and variables would allow.

When I stepped out of the theatre (MT- Main Theatre as we FTIIans fondly call it), I was stupefied. I cannot describe it completely in words. Something happened in me. I walked back to the hostel I was staying in then (a one-hour walk), and I did not feel I was all there. And I am not exaggerating. Films before Persona happened to me had provoked me, ranging from Ritwik Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara, Satyajit Ray’s Charulata to even many Hollywood and Bollywood fare. But Persona silenced me. And a mere film can’t do this.

In the book Images- My Life in Film by Ingmar Bergman, Bergman mentions (on page 65)- “Today, I feel that in Persona (1966) – and later in Cries and Whispers (1972) – I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.”

When I heard about Bergman’s death on the 30^th of July (2007), I fitted my first experience of watching a Bergman film into a SMS and sent it to several of my friends and acquaintances. Many responded with their Bergman-feelings, some hadn’t seen a single Bergman and expressed a desire to do so and of course, some kept quiet. But the underlying response I received mostly hinted at the pain of realization when it hits you, of what is, can be or has never been and it’s not just a feeling after having watched a film. It’s suddenly realizing that ‘this is the emotional truth’- of course, how each one construes it depends on his or her personal history and experiences but the nature of the ‘essential truth’ remains. A few responses were – “I remember coming out of Cries and Whispers… with my pulse gone to sleep”; “Persona was the most painful for me”; “Bergman made me cry”; “The word ‘great’ so overused, really applied to him” etc…

I watched Cries and Whispers last night on DVD, for the nth time. Needless to say, I wept during the same moments I have always wept; felt a sense of overwhelming joy during the last scene (of such extreme beauty) and a sense of sadness by the end of the film that stayed with me for awhile, at how the world of these four women, the three sisters Agnes, Karin and Maria (played respectively by Harriet Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullman) and the maid Anna (played by Kari Sylvan) crumbled totally with little scope for ever blossoming again. Yet, there are moments of such pure joy, love, faith and selflessness in the film, and in their worlds that Cries and Whispers in spite of its apparent ‘gruesomeness’ can only be seen as life-affirmative, as a spirit as alive in life as also in death. However, at this point, I must quote from Bergman again to state that to arrive at such a cinematic endeavour, the strive was total- physically, emotionally, intellectually.

From Images-My Life in Film (page 102)- “When the filming began in the fall of 1971, we had found an ideal location, Taxinge castle, outside of Mariefred. Inside it was totally dilapidated, but there was ample space for everything we needed: dining room, storage area, technical spaces, location sites, and administration offices. We stayed at the hotel in Mariefred. We didn’t show the dailies in a movie theatre but at the editing table that had been adjusted and arranged for that purpose.

The colour had been carefully tested. When Sven Sykvist (cinematographer) and I began to shoot in colour, we had tested everything that possible could be tested; not only the make-up, the hair, the costumes, but every object, wall-covering, the upholstery, every inch of carpeting. Everything had been controlled down to the last detail. Everything we planned to use for exterior shots had been tested. The same was true for the make-up for the exteriors. There was not one detail that in the course of our preparations had not been presented to the camera.

When four extraordinary actresses are brought together, fatal emotional collisions can easily result. But the women were good, loyal, and helpful. Besides, most important, they were all incredibly talented. I have absolutely no reason to complain. And I’m happy to report that I did not.”

There is one reason for me to quote this passage. We often believe that if we forever leave things to chance and in the process avoid that extra striving, something will happen - a magic will result. But all magicians will tell you how hard they work at getting a trick right. Serendipity and spontaneity result only from sheer, grounded, relentless hard work. That is from where the realization of the ‘truths’ result. When we watch Cries and Whispers it shows. And the works of Bergman reiterate and inspire this ‘truth’ in us. Thank god for people like him!!…

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