When Woody met Ingmar

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When Woody met Ingmar

Nearly 50 years ago, Woody Allen saw his first film by Ingmar Bergman and
immediately became a passionate admirer. He tells Mark Kermode why the Swede
remains for him the greatest director
27 December 2002

Everything I know about "high" culture I learnt from "low-brow" art.
Fact. I would never have heard of Heidegger, Kant or Nietzsche if
their names hadn't featured in a rude Monty Python song, which
included the wonderful couplet: "RenÃ© Descartes was a drunken fart,/ I
drink therefore I am." I would never have read TS Eliot's "The Hollow
Men" if Marlon Brando hadn't started slurring his way through it at
the climax of Coppola's Apocalypse Now (ditto Conrad's Heart of
Darkness). And I certainly would not have made an early connection
with the films of the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman were it not for
the fact that my favourite American comedian, Woody Allen, kept
littering his movies and interviews with allusions to the maestro.

Nearly 30 years after first rushing out of a screening of Love and
Death with a burning desire to read The Brothers Karamazov and watch
The Seventh Seal (I achieved one of those two goals), I remain
indebted to Allen for leading me to Bergman. It's a legacy which he's
finding hard to accept. "First of all I can't imagine that my films
would lead anyone to see Bergman's films," he says with trademark
self-deprecating bemusement, a mixture of slightly rattled and gently
amused. "But if I have had some impact in that area, it was in the
fact that in New York City I was a very early devotee of Bergman's
work. I latched onto him in a passionate way at a young age and I did
many interviews in the course of my professional life, as a comedian
and a film-maker, in which I spoke of his work and his genius, and I
told people to go see his films. So in that sense I may have made some
minor publicity contribution."

It's a "contribution" which Allen still honours to this day: in the
middle of interviews to publicise his period romp The Curse of the
Jade Scorpion (now on release in the UK) he agreed to take time out to
talk again about Bergman's films, a season of which are playing on the
big screen at London's National Film Theatre, and on the small screen
on the digital channel Film Four World, where Woody himself can be
found speaking passionately about the maestro's legacy. In an industry
known for its rank self-centredness (an issue which Allen has covered
in some depth in everything from Stardust Memories to Hollywood
Ending), such noble banner-waving may be seen as an act of unusual
good grace, but it's a debt Allen has always been happy to
acknowledge. When Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar back in the
seventies, for example, it was Allen who pointed out that the
uncharacteristic lack of incidental jazz was partly inspired by
Bergman's declaration that film music can be "barbaric".

Significant collaborations with Bergman colleagues followed, from Max
von Sydow, who plays chess with death in The Seventh Seal and gets the
best line in Hannah and her Sisters (re: the Holocaust: "The question
isn't why? The question is, given what we are, why not more often?")
to cameraman Sven Nykvist, whom Allen enlisted to shoot Another Woman
and Crimes and Mis-demeanours after being "knocked out" by his work on
films such as Cries and Whispers ("It's hypnotic; the way the camera
just moves slowly in and out of those rooms, and the clocks tick -
you're just mesmerised.").

Where did this long-standing screen romance begin? "I was a late
teenager when I saw Summer with Monika," Allen remembers with genuine
affection, "and The Naked Night - which was Sawdust and Tinsel in the
original title - and they were just clearly superior to other people's
movies. It's like if a guy's got musical talent, real genius, and he
blows into a trumpet or he plays the piano, he just sounds better than
everyone around him because of that ineffable, indefinable
'greatness'.

"At first, this intense talent of Bergman's was applied to drama
between people, human emotions, and it was gripping and intense and
full of surprise. Then when I saw Wild Strawberries and The Seventh
Seal and The Magician, this enormous dramatic talent was applied not
just to human emotions - he didn't lose that - but also to
philosophical issues that were very meaningful to me. He was
dramatising things that I had read about in Kierkegaard, in Nietzsche:
big questions, existential questions. Here was a director making films
that confronted those issues, that were intellectually stimulating,
not in a pedantic way, but in an entertaining way, as any great murder
mystery, or musical, or lighter film would entertain."

It is this sense of "entertainment" which Allen believes is the great
triumph of Bergman's overtly philosophical films. "The fact that he's
got a mind and an intellect, and the films are about something - that
they are substantive and philosophical and profound on a human level -
that's great. But he's first and foremost an entertainer. So it's not
like doing homework. It's not like going to see some film that you
hear is great and you watch it and you figure, 'Well yes, I'm sure it
is great, but I was bored stiff.' Not at all! You go and watch a
Bergman film and you're gripped like you're watching a suspense movie
or some incredible drama.

"If you're gonna spend your 10 dollars on a movie and you just want to
have a good time, I would recommend forgetting the messages and the
issues that Bergman's dealing with and just watching his films on a
purely entertainment level. I've spoken to people who saw The Magician
years ago, who have never read Kierkegaard in their lives, and have no
idea what the picture was representing, none whatsoever. And they've
said to me, 'Gee, I don't know what it was about, I think he was just
having a good time, but gosh it was so gripping, I was on the edge of
my seat the whole way.' And I think this is perhaps Bergman's greatest
strength."

On the subject of his favourite Bergman film, The Seventh Seal, which
gave the world a scythe-wielding grim reaper who has since been
parodied in everything from Love and Death to Bill and Ted's Bogus
Journey, Allen concludes that the beauty lies in "the simplicity of
it". "People have talked about the confrontation with mortality in so
many different ways. But the effectiveness of his dramatisation, his
sense of theatre, is so good that the minute the film starts you never
take a breath till it's over. You are just sucked up in it.

"It's the ultimate subject matter: this profound existential
discourse: is there a God? Is there no God? If there's no God how do
we live and what do we do? Why isn't everything so terrifying that
we're simply paralysed? All these questions, in all their unanswerable
profundity, are explored with enormous theatricality. So it becomes
like eating a very good meal, and you're left at the end feeling very
fulfilled."

Intriguingly, considering Allen's own screen trajectory from
knockabout romps (Bananas, Take the Money and Run) to more
philosophical musings (Interiors, September, Crimes and
Misdemeanours), the only corner of Bergman's oeuvre about which he is
slightly less than effusive is the maestro's own "early funny ones".
Having read weighty critical comparisons between A Midsummer Night's
Sex Comedy and Smiles of a Summer Night ("I don't see it myself,"),
does Allen think Bergman can do comedy? "Well... if I want comedy I
can find it in better places," he intones in fabulously deadpan
fashion. "Personally, I don't consider Bergman a 'comic master', or at
least that's not what interested me about him. Even Smiles of a Summer
Night, which some consider his 'comic masterpiece', is a very charming
film, it has a warmth to it, but it's not my favourite. What I favour
about Bergman are the dark abysses that he travelled in - the bleak
landscapes and the dark themes. That's where I think he really made
his reputation, and made history."

And what of the now-famous New York summit in which Woody and Ingmar
finally came face to face? "Oh, I had dinner with him one night in New
York at his hotel suite, years ago," says Allen dismissively, "and
I've had a couple of long phone conversations with him. I found him to
be not some kind of exotic, pretentious genius, but like every other
good film maker I've spoken to. He speaks in regular street terms,
workman's terms, about working on films and the problems with
shooting, with the audiences, with the producers, with the grosses,
why something doesn't do well here, but it does well someplace else.
It wasn't like going to visit Fu Manchu where a gong is rung and
somebody comes out in a black robe and you sit there and discuss these
profound silent movies about the inability of people to communicate or
find meaning in life. It's not that at all! He's a very lively,
charming, vital person with amusing things to say and, you know, it
was... a very pleasant experience!"

The Film Four World Bergman Season continues with 'Winter Lights'
today at 4pm ([13]www.filmfour.com).The Ingmar Bergman season at the
National Film Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 starts on 1 January and
runs to the end of February (020-7928 3232; [14]www.bfi.org)

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=364606&host=5&dir (Open in New Window)

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Topic - When Woody met Ingmar - clarkjohnsen 10:47:14 01/04/03 (1)

Re: When Woody met Ingmar - Victor Khomenko 13:54:06 01/07/03 (0)

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