Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words
Jag är Ingrid
Stig Björkman (2016)
Ingrid Bergman in her own words and her own pictures. The words take the form of diary entries and letters to friends, read by Alicia Vikander, as well as excerpts from sound interviews with Bergman herself. The pictures include interview material too, footage from the sets of films she made and clips from the finished products, photographs and home movies. Stig Björkman has done a thoughtful and skilful job of assembling and juxtaposing the various verbal and visual material: the home-movie footage is especially remarkable, both for its abundance and for what that abundance reveals. From an early age, Ingrid Bergman was intent on the creation of a visible record of her life. She, in effect, resumed a project that her father – a photographer and artist, who died when she was thirteen – had begun in his only daughter’s infancy. Bergman’s mother died even earlier, when she was two years old. She had no memory of the woman whom we see with the toddler Ingrid in a few seconds of grainy, poignant home-movie footage.
Bergman was old enough not just to remember her father but to express in her diary the fearful misery she was experiencing in the days before his death. This diary extract, with a montage of family photographs, forms the prologue to Björkman’s documentary. It also sets the tone for what’s to follow but that tone – created and sustained by Alicia Vikander’s readings and Michael Nyman’s plangent music – becomes gradually more puzzling. Vikander, although she gets across the throaty quality of Bergman’s voice, is unvaryingly plaintive – even when the words she’s speaking denote a very different mood. The little girl lost she continues to suggest is sharply at odds with the self-possessed, middle-aged Ingrid Bergman whose own voice we’re also hearing. Nyman’s music is particularly insistent, and seems overused, when Stig Björkman is describing Bergman’s notorious affair with Roberto Rossellini, the excommunication by Hollywood that followed, and the very part-time motherhood Bergman provided to her son and daughters from both her first two marriages. The pathetic strain in the narrative may be meant to underline the children’s situation but you get a sense rather that Björkman wants to present his protagonist as forever ill-starred. Ingrid Bergman experienced terrible loss in her childhood and died rather young, on her sixty-seventh birthday, but it’s hard to accept this conception of her for the years in between.
A frequent and frequently justified criticism of screen dramas which psychoanalyse their subjects is that the eventual explanations of why these people turned out the way they did seem crudely simplistic. It’s an irony of the true story Stig Björkman tells that the psychoanalysis of Ingrid Bergman, although it’s hardly complex, is convincing. You believe the suggestion made that, from childhood, she identified strongly with Joan of Arc – whom Bergman played on screen and on stage – as a solitary young woman with a calling to be special. The theory put forward that she regarded directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Victor Fleming as father figures – that she saw behind the movie camera the man who photographed her in childhood (and who seems to have developed in her a precocious camera awareness) – rings true. And Bergman’s maternal limitations resonate with the early disappearance of her own parents. Pia, the one child of Bergman’s first marriage, to Petter Lindström, notes in a bitterly humorous way that kids aren’t always that ‘interesting’ to adults; but something more particular and disturbing seems to have been going on here. It’s almost as if Bergman grew to envy her children for having parents – and that this intensified her primary emotional bond with the camera, the object to which she was introduced through the father who died too soon.
In Her Own Words contains a fascinating episode about the making of Autumn Sonata – the film on which the two great Bergmans of cinema worked together for the only time, and in which Ingrid gave a memorable performance as a world-famous concert pianist accused by her daughter of always putting career before family. She describes the filming of a sequence in Autumn Sonata in which her character, Charlotte, watches the daughter, Eva (Liv Ullmann), making a fumbling attempt to play a piano piece. Ingmar Bergman asked his star what she felt Charlotte was thinking as she listened to Eva’s efforts. Ingrid replied that Charlotte was experiencing pain and anxiety whenever Eva made a mistake. Ingmar told her this was wrong: Charlotte was too self-centred to be bothered about Eva’s performance at all; she was moved rather by sentimental nostalgia about being with her daughter when Eva was a young child. Ingrid replayed the scene as Ingmar dictated but it’s striking that his interpretation clearly wasn’t one that had occurred to her. Almost needless to say, there’s nothing to suggest that she recognised similarities between Charlotte and herself.
It’s refreshing to watch a documentary biography of a screen actor that isn’t heavily reliant on clips from their movies or talking heads extolling the subject. Other than her four children and a relative through Bergman’s marriage to Rossellini, the only people interviewed by Björkman are the film historian and archivist Jeanine Basinger (very briefly), Liv Ullmann and Sigourney Weaver. The latter had a small part early in her career in a stage production of Somerset Maugham’s The Constant Wife, directed by John Gielgud, in which Bergman starred: Weaver is formally reverential – it’s all ‘Sir John’ and ‘Miss Bergman’. Ullmann’s contribution is more worthwhile: she recounts a difference of opinion between the Bergmans on the Autumn Sonata set more explosive than the one described above (but which had the same result: Ingmar won). Ullmann and Weaver are filmed together in a trio of actresses: they sit either side of Isabella Rossellini.
Among Ingrid’s children, Isabella is by some way the most easily tolerant of her mother’s modus vivendi as they were growing up. The ease may reflect Isabella’s greater experience and confidence in front of a camera, the tolerance the relatively generous attention she says she received as a child while suffering from scoliosis. She is certainly the most vivid physical reminder of her mother but she’s less personal and less convincing than her siblings in much of what she has to say. She claims, for example, that, until she worked with and got to know Jean Renoir in the mid-1950s, Ingrid Bergman had no sense of cinema as a potentially influential form of social comment or critique. Bergman was very intelligent: it seems unlikely she didn’t perceive the socio-political nature of Rome, Open City and Paisan, the mid-1940s films which so bowled her over that she wrote Roberto Rossellini to say she’d love to work with him (and even more unlikely they didn’t discuss these things once they were a couple). The other three children are less self-aware and more penetrating than Isabella. It’s perhaps inevitable that Pia Lindström, who was eleven when Bergman’s relationship with Rossellini began, still finds it difficult to conceal the hurt she felt at her mother’s years-long disappearance from her life. Isabella Rossellini’s twin sister Ingrid and her brother Roberto (he actually resembles Marcello Mastroianni more than he does either of his parents) are acute yet charming contributors. They also make it importantly clear that their father, to a much greater extent than their mother (and unlike Petter Lindström), was conspicuous by his absence. Her children are unanimous that, when they were in her company, they adored Ingrid Bergman because she was such fun to be with. It’s Pia Lindström who insists that a Mommie Dearest-type memoir has always been out of the question.
The form of Stig Björkman’s film means, however, that it’s increasingly dominated by a woman who is hard to like – she upstages a star actress who was often hard to resist. This is reinforced by the fact that the pictures marking the beginning and end of Ingrid Bergman’s years in the Hollywood wilderness – Stromboli and Anastasia – are both, in their different ways, bad enough to ensure that excerpts from them can’t compete with the real-life dramas in Bergman’s life with which these films are connected. (Her own comments on reactions in the USA and Sweden to her relationship with Rossellini are interesting. She acknowledges shock at the ludicrous intensity of America’s moral censure of her behaviour – there were calls for her films to be withdrawn from circulation on the grounds that to show them was to glorify adultery. In a Swedish interview, she claims she was most heavily criticised in her home country, although there’s no other evidence of this.) In Her Own Words is finally impressive because it is what it says on the label. Björkman’s implied view of Ingrid Bergman as a tragic figure isn’t one that I find persuasive but it’s eclipsed anyway by what Bergman has to say for herself. She declares herself satisfied that none of her children suffered lasting damage through her absences during their formative years. There’s no clinching contradiction of this assertion but you don’t need to think like an American reactionary of the early post-war years to feel that Ingrid Bergman, through the confidence of her tone, condemns herself out of her own mouth. Through having Bergman speak continuously, the film is not a piece of self-justification but an unforgiving exposure of her personality.
22 September 2016