Image My Life in Film

by Marianne Ruuth

  My main goal was to portray as intimately as possible the characters in the fairy tale. The magic and the scenic details happening as if only in passing: Suddenly they’re in a palace courtyard; suddenly it is snowing; suddenly there is a prison wall; suddenly it’s spring.

  While we were filming, I noted how much the project benefited from its long gestation period. Never has a production unfolded with so few hindrances. The solutions lined up and announced themselves one by one. In no case was there even a shadow of forced efforts, nor did any idea arise merely to give me a chance to prove my cleverness as a director. It was a highly creative time, carried along, day and night, by Mozart’s music.

  “The two guards with the fiery helmets sing the chorus.” Preparations and scene.

  In the introduction to Tamino’s and Pamina’s three trials lies one of the most central scenes of the drama. It was Käbi Laretei’s piano teacher, Andrea Vogler-Corelli, who drew my attention to its indisputable significance. In The Magic Lantern I wrote:

  Daniel Sebastian was born by cesarean on September 7, 1962. Käabi and Andrea Vogler worked at the piano without stopping until the last minute. The evening following his birth, when Käbi had fallen asleep after nine months of suffering, Andrea took the score of The Magic Flute down from the bookshelf. I told her about my dream of directing it, and Andrea opened it to the part where the two guards with the fiery helmets sing the chorus. She pointed out how remarkable it was that Mozart, a Catholic, had chosen a chorus inspired by Bach for his message and that of Schikaneder. She showed me the score and said: “This must be the keel of the boat. The Magic Flute is difficult to steer. Without a keel, it doesn’t work at all. The Bach chorus is the keel.”

  The film was edited on Fårö. When the work print was ready with a complete sound track, we held our own world premiere in my film studio. Invited to the premiere were all those involved in the film, plus neighbors, children, and grandchildren. It was a hot evening in August with a luminous moon shining on the ocean. We drank champagne, and outside we lit colorful lanterns and sent up a small fireworks. THERE ARE TWO godfathers to Fanny and Alexander. One of them is E. T. A. Hoffmann.

  With Pamina (Irma Urrila) and Papageno (Håkan Hagegård).

  THERE ARE TWO godfathers to Fanny and Alexander. One of them is E.T.A. Hoffmann.

  Toward the end of the 1970s, I was supposed to direct Tales of Hoffmann at the Opera House in Munich. I began to fantasize about the real Hoffmann, who sat in Luther’s wine cellar, sick and nearly dying. I wrote in my notes: “Death is everpresent. The barcarole [a Venetian boat song], the sweetness of death. The Venice scene stinks of decay, raw lust, and heavy perfumes. In the Antonia scene, the mother is intensely frightening. The room is peopled with shadows, dancing, and mouths gaping. The mirror in the mirror aria is small and gleams like a murder weapon.”

  In a short story written by Hoffmann there is a gigantic, magical room. It was that magical room I wanted to re-create on stage. The drama would be played out with that room set in the foreground and the orchestra in the background.

  There is also an illustration from E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories that had haunted me time and time again, a picture from The Nutcracker. Two children are quivering close together in the twilight of Christmas Eve, waiting impatiently for the candles on the tree to be lighted and the doors to the living room to be opened.

  It is that scene that gave me the idea of beginning Fanny and Alexander with a Christmas celebration.

  The second godfather is Dickens: the bishop and his home, the Jew in his boutique of fantasies, the children as victims; the contrast between flourishing outside life and a closed world in black and white. [All of these elements are in Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander.}

  Fanny and Alexander: with Sven Nykvist and Ewa Fröling.

  One could say that it all began during the fall of 1978. I was living in Munich and felt ill at ease. I was still enmeshed in the tax imbroglio, and I didn’t know how or when it would end. On September 27, I wrote in my workbook:

  There is no longer any distinction between my anxiety and the reality that causes it. And yet I think I know what kind of film I want to make next. It is far different from anything I have ever done.

  Anton is eleven years old and Maria is twelve. They act as observers of the reality I wish to depict. The time is the beginning of the First World War; the place is a small town, exceedingly quiet and well-kept. There is a university, a theater, and a hotel some distance away. Life is peaceful.

  Anton and Maria’s mother is director of a theater. When their father died, she took over the management of his theater and now runs it with authority and shrewdness. They live on a quiet street. In the back of the theater lives a Jew, Isak, who owns a toy store. It contains some other interesting and exciting objects as well. A frequent Sunday visitor is an old lady who used to be a missionary in China. She performs Chinese shadow plays. There is also an uncle who is a little crazy but is harmless and who takes certain liberties. The house is well-to-do and extremely bourgeois. The grandmother is an almost mystical figure who lives in the apartment below. She is fabulously wealthy and was in her past a royal mistress and a great actress. Now she has retired, but sometimes she will appear in an occasional part. In either case, it is a world completely dominated by women, from the cook who has been around for a hundred years to the little nanny who is cheerful, freckled, and limps because one leg is shorter than the other, and who smells deliciously of sweat.

  The theater is both a playground for the children and a haven. Sometimes they are allowed to participate in a play, which they find enormously exciting. The children sleep in the same room, and they have many things to keep themselves occupied — their own puppet theater, their own movie projector, toy trains, dollhouses. They are inseparable.

  Maria is the one who takes the most initiative. Anton is rather anxious. Their upbringing is strict, and severe punishment for even the most trivial offenses is not out of the question. The church bells measure the passage of time; the small bell at a nearby castle announces when it is morning and when it is evening. The Vicar is always a welcome guest even at the theater. One might suspect that Mother has a special relationship with the vicar. However, this is difficult to know right away.

  Then Mother decides to marry the vicar. Mother cannot continue to manage her theater; she must become a wife and mother. It is already apparent that her belly is swelling. Maria does not like the vicar; Anton does not like him either. Mother transfers the ownership of the theater to her actors; crying bitterly, she bids her people farewell and moves into the vicarage with Maria and Anton, who are raging with anger.

  Mother is a good wife to the clergyman. She plays her part irreproachably: she gives birth to a child and invites the parishioners in for coffee after the morning service. The church bells ring, and Maria and Anton brood, thinking of revenge. They are no longer allowed to sleep together in the same room, and the cheerful Maj, the nanny, who has become pregnant, is fired and replaced by the vicar’s sister, who is a dragon.

  Three generations: Gunn Wåltgren, Ewa Fröling, and Bertil Guve.

  With my divining rod, I searched the ground for a source and came upon a vein of water. When I began to drill, it gushed out like a geyser. My notes continue:

  Through my playing, I want to master my anxiety, relieve tension, and triumph over my deterioration. I want to depict, finally, the joy that I carry within me in spite of everything, and which I so seldom and so feebly have given attention to in my work. To be able to express the power of action, decisiveness, the vitality, and the kindness. Yes, for once, that would not be a bad idea.

  From the very beginning one can see that with Fanny and Alexander I have landed in the world of my childhood. Here is the university town and Grandmother’s house with the old cook; here is the Jew who lived out back; and here is the school. I am already in the place and beginning to roam around in the familiar environment. My childhood has of course always been my main supp
lier, without my ever having bothered to find out where the deliveries were coming from.

  On November 10, I write in my workbook:

  I often think of Ingrid Bergman. I would like to write something for her that would not be too demanding, and I see a summer porch in rain. She is alone, waiting for her children and grandchildren. It is afternoon. The whole film is set on a veranda. The film will last only as long as the rain. Nature is showing her fairest face; everything is enveloped in this soft unceasing rain. When the film opens, she is speaking on the telephone. Her family is out on an excursion around the lake. She talks with an old friend of hers, who is much older than she. A deep trust exists between the two. She writes a letter. She finds some object. She remembers a theater performance — her big breakthrough. She sees her reflection in the window-panes — and can catch a glimpse of herself as a young woman.

  The reason she has stayed at home is that she has sprained her ankle — it is only a slight sprain; mostly it feels good to be alone. Toward the end of the film, she sees the family returning from their trip; the rain is still falling, but it is now a peaceful, quiet drip.

  Everything should happen in a major key.

  The porch in summer — everything is enveloped in a soft chiaroscuro. In this piece there are no hard edges; everything must be as soft as the rain. A neighbor’s child comes and asks for the other children. She has brought wild strawberries, and she is given a treat. She is wet from the rain and smells sweet. It is a kind life, a good, simple, incredible life. When she sees the child’s hands, the most unusual thoughts come to her, thoughts that she has never had before. The cat purrs, stretched out on the sofa; the clock ticks; the smell of summer pervades over all. She stands in the doorway to the porch and looks out over the meadow with the oak tree, the meadow that leads down to the old bridge and the bay. To her, everything looks both old and familiar and yet new and unexpected. It is strange how longing emanates from sudden solitude.

  Cinematography in Fanny and Alexander.

  This looks like a different film, independent of the first, but the material came to good use in Fanny and Alexander. The decision to depict a life, luminous and happy, was there from the moment I found life truly difficult to bear.

  It was the same with Smiles of a Summer Night, which also burst forth during a time of uncertainty. I think it may be because the creative juices flow faster when the soul is threatened. Sometimes such a state brings luck and insight in its wake, as in Smiles of a Summer Night, Fanny and Alexander, and Persona. Sometimes, as in The Serpent’s Egg, all goes awry.

  I conceived Fanny and Alexander during the fall of 1978, a time when everything around me left me in darkest despair. But I wrote the screenplay during the spring of 1979, and by that time many things had eased up. Autumn Sonata had a successful premiere, and the whole tax business had dissolved into thin air. I found myself liberated suddenly. I think that Fanny and Alexander benefited from my relief. To know that I had what I had.

  Harmony is not a feeling that is totally unusual or foreign to me. If I am just allowed to live quietly and create in a calm environment without being tormented, where I can have a clear perspective of my existence, where it is possible for me to be kind and not need anything or have to keep lots of appointments, then I can function at my best. Such an existence reminds me of the good-natured passive life of my childhood.

  On April 12, 1979, we arrived on Fårö. “It feels like coming home. Everything else is a dream, an unreality.” A few days later I began to write Fanny and Alexander. Wednesday, April 18 I wrote: “I don’t know much about this film. Yet it tempts me more than any other. It is enigmatic and demands reflection, but the most important thing of course is that the desire is there.”

  With Gunn Wdllgren and Erland Josephson. Preparation and scene.

  On April 23 I note: “Today I wrote the first six pages of Fanny and Alexander. I actually enjoyed doing it. Now I am going to write about the theater, the apartment, and the grandmother.”

  Wednesday, May 2:

  I must get away from rushing and straining. I have the entire summer in front of me to do this, more than four months. On the other hand, I should not stay away from my desk too long. But no, it’s all right to walk around a bit! Let the scenes settle themselves down as they please. Let them become what they will. Then they will be on their best behavior!

  Tuesday, June 5:

  It is dangerous to invoke the infernal powers. In Isak’s house lives an idiot with the face of an angel, a thin, fragile body, and colorless eyes that see all. He is able to do evil. He is like a membrane for wishes that quivers with the slightest touch.

  It is Alexander’s experience of the Secret that makes him what he is. The conversation with his dead father. God showing himself to him. His meeting with the dangerous Ismael, who sends the burning woman to annihilate the bishop.

  The manuscript was finished on July 8, not quite three months after I began it. There followed a year of preparation for filming, a long and surprisingly pleasant time.

  Being serious and having fun with the children.

  Then, I suddenly stood there and had to materialize my film.

  On September 9, 1980, before going out, I wrote: “Not an especially good night. At least my worry and tension have left me. And that feels good. Hot and hazy weather. Everyone is bursting with a pulsating eagerness.”

  This is how it always is when you are making films. All it takes is a couple of days for me to get the feeling that I am in the midst of something that has always existed. It becomes like a way of breathing. I described it this way when I summed up the first week: “The first week of filming went better in every way than anyone had expected. Besides, it was much more fun to work than I had remembered. I think it also has to do with working in my own language. It’s been a long time since I have done so. The children are also very good, at ease and funny. Of course, adversity lurks around every corner. Sometimes, a terrible anxiety cuts right through me.”

  Nobody can say that the adversity was content with just lurking. Sven Nykvist and I were nearly crushed one day when we were pacing back and forth in the Film Institute’s large studio. A crossbeam weighing about a ton thundered down to the floor so close to us that we felt the wind whistle past our ears. Our chief electrician fell down into the orchestra pit at the South Theater, and he broke both his legs. Cecilia Drott, who was going to take care of the wigs and masks and who, for a long time, was one of my close associates, displaced a vertebra and was forbidden by her physician to work. She was replaced by two people from the Royal Dramatic Theater who, though very skilled, had never worked on a movie. The man who was supposed to head the costume shop, creating all the imposingly detailed period costumes, died just a few weeks before we began filming.

  Around Christmas time the whole cast and crew came down with a terrible flu. We had to stop working for three weeks. I was bedridden, my teeth chattering. Sven Nykvist was replaced for a few weeks by Tony Forsberg, an underrated but first-class photographer. Young Bertil Guve, who played Alexander, damaged his knee while playing ice hockey. And so it went.

  Mirrored with Jan Malmsjö and Sven Nykvist. In rehearsal with Hamlet and the ghost (Per Mattsson, Allan Edwall).

  And yet I don’t remember during the actual filming ever feeling hit by any serious dissension.

  At the same time I felt that my strength was waning. Every day was a great strain to get through, in spite of my circumstances being inordinately agreeable: I had returned to my own language. I was working with hand-picked actors and a good crew in complete harmony, a perfect organization. And yet, a strong fear haunted me daily: Would I manage to get through another day? Would I find the strength? For two hundred and fifty days of filming?

  Then I began to catch a glimpse of what I needed to do.

  A few weeks after we finished shooting the film, the time came to sift through the enormous amount of footage, more than twenty-five hours of film.

  I wrote down my first rea
ction to this on Wednesday, March 31: “At last I am reviewing the rushes. The first day we sat through four hours of material. The result was indeed a mixed bag. At times I was rather shocked by what I saw. What I had thought worked well, turned out to be bad, uneven, deplorable. Other things, I suppose, were passable. But nothing, except Gunn Wallgren, was really good.”

  The next day: “Hardly any sleep, worrying over what I saw yesterday. We continued today starting with the rushes of the early morning Christmas mass up to the porch scene with Gunn and Pernilla. It was considerably more fun today. But I still see the curious mistakes. I am worried about the size and shape of the film.”

  When we had gone through all the rushes once, we began again from the beginning: “Having had enough time to calm down, I can now view the images as a future continuum. My impression is therefore more positive.”

  After a week, the mood was better, but I was beginning to worry about the extent of the material. “Am watching the rushes. All is going rather smoothly, actually. The weaknesses are obvious, but nothing is irreparable.” The next day: “We watched new material, the last hours. I’m worried about the length. The whole ending is clearly problematic. Must be resolved.”

  In looking over my diary, I sense that people must have become tired of me! I rushed ahead furiously, like a savage beast, nagging everyone over the littlest detail and demanding to know why something turned out that way, and what is this, and what is that. But the trouble that was now beginning to develop had to do with creating two versions. Fanny and Alexander was to be produced two ways: one version intended for television, to be shown in five episodes (not necessarily of equal length); the other for theatrical release, to be of “normal length” — which was vague — and to run for more than two and a half hours.