День рождения Бергмана

Пусть здесь будет пост-поздравление Бергмана: как и писала раньше, буду потихоньку складывать сюда и мои английские фейсбучные тексты.

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I suppose I can call myself a true cinephile, but only two filmmakers have a special place in my life, and they are Tarkovsky and Bergman. I’ve written about both of them endlessly; I was lucky enough in my life to work with people who knew everything (and even slightly more) about cinema, and we made a good book about that once.

I grew up with Tarkovsky: my parents loved him and Buñuel. Dad told me the story of him and Mum catching Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie almost from the beginning at a hotel in East Berlin: they couldn’t stop watching it till the very end and talked about it long afterwards. 

I grew up with The Mirror and Solaris; as a teen, I saw Nostalgia, Andrei Rublev, and Ivan’s Childhood, but Solaris — with its long shots of empty spaces of the half-abandoned station, its rain and fog and tragedies — was my compendium.

As a student, I started watching Bergman and Pasolini with my then boyfriend and later husband, who was too serious and smart to be just a nice random boy. My reflections on Bergman’s films—The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage—were meditations on my own life that suddenly became more complex and contemplative. I felt like I became for a moment Knight Block and Victor Sjöström’s character, old Professor Borg, all the sisters from Cries and Whispers, Liv Ullman’s restless soul from all her impersonations—they all were me, all my faces and masks.

Bergman knew everything about the fear of the unknown, which HP Lovecraft defined as the most powerful human emotion: that is why Bergman’s magnum opus, Fanny and Alexander, is an encyclopedia of questioning fear, accepting fear, dealing with fear on regular basis. Fear without love and death is motionless, Bergman says. Fear mixed with love is mystery, he continues. Fear without death is useless, he insists.

And I agree, I do.

Once, while Bergman was still alive, I wanted to write him a letter. Not an e-mail: I wasn’t even sure whether he or his secretary (did he even have a secretary? I don’t know) used email—but a physical letter.

Sasha smiled and asked, “Ok, good, do you want to send it just like that? Like Chehkov’s Vanka with the address “To grandfather in the village, Konstantin Makaritch”?”

I laughed and told him that I didn’t know. But that was actually a brilliant idea, to write something like, “To Ingmar Bergman, Fårö.”

Would he get it? Who knows? He died right after I bought his “Laterna Magica” (since then, it’s travelled with me everywhere), and now I can ask him about everything directly: through his films, in my head.

And congratulate him with his birthday, too. 

Happy Birthday, Ingmar Bergman.