Four Screenplays Of Ingmar Bergman

Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman collects four occasions on which the Swedish master peered into the human soul, found it badly lit and decided that Max von Sydow ought to stand somewhere nearby looking concerned. Published in 1960, this first edition brings together Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and The Magician: romance, death, memory and deception, or roughly the normal emotional itinerary of a Scandinavian weekend.

These are not novelisations assembled afterwards by someone who saw the films once and remembered most of the important hats. They are Bergman’s own screenplays, translated from the Swedish by Lars Malmstrom and David Kushner, offering the dialogue, action and dramatic architecture from which four of his defining films were constructed. Reading them is rather like being admitted behind the scenery while God, Death and an unusually troubled professor wait for their cues.

Smiles of a Summer Night is the apparently cheerful one, although with Bergman this is a comparative term rather than a guarantee. Set among romantically entangled couples during a country-house weekend, it is elegant, witty and surprisingly light on spiritual annihilation. Husbands pursue unsuitable women, wives reconsider unsuitable husbands and desire circulates through the garden with greater efficiency than the servants. It proves Bergman could make a sophisticated romantic comedy, provided nobody expected uncomplicated happiness to last beyond breakfast.

The Seventh Seal supplies the image even people who have never knowingly watched a Swedish film recognise: a medieval knight playing chess with Death. Returning from the Crusades to a country ravaged by plague, Antonius Block attempts to postpone the inevitable while asking why God remains silent. Death, who has presumably heard this question before, concentrates on the board. Philosophical despair, religious doubt, flagellants, witch-burning and pestilence follow, making it ideal reading for anyone who finds ordinary historical drama insufficiently cheerful.

Wild Strawberries turns inward, following the elderly Professor Isak Borg on a journey to receive an honorary degree. Accompanied by memories, dreams, regrets and relatives with inconvenient powers of observation, he is forced to review the emotional wreckage accumulated during a long and outwardly respectable life. It is a road movie in which the principal hazard is self-knowledge, and no breakdown service is available.

The Magician concerns Vogler’s Magnetic Health Theatre, a travelling troupe of performers whose mixture of illusion, medicine and theatrical mystery attracts the attention of smug officials determined to expose them as frauds. The resulting confrontation between rational authority and theatrical deception becomes increasingly strange, particularly when the supposedly gullible begin to look wiser than the sceptics. Bergman naturally makes room for humiliation, resurrection, erotic tension and the possibility that the charlatan may understand reality better than the people investigating him.

Together, the four screenplays show Bergman moving effortlessly from comedy to metaphysics, from romantic games to the Black Death, and from childhood memory to the questionable professional standards of nineteenth-century mesmerists. His characters talk about love, mortality, faith, loneliness, identity and whether anyone is actually listening—subjects that would later sustain several decades of European cinema and countless grave discussions in university cafés.

The volume also includes an introductory discussion of filmmaking, a preface by Bergman’s producer Carl Anders Dymling, and supporting material placing the works within Bergman’s rapidly distinguished career. It is consequently useful not only to admirers of the films but to students of cinema, screenwriting and directing, particularly those wishing to discover how much existential dread can be conveyed before the camera has even been switched on.

The dust jacket is one of the great examples of austere film-book design: acres of grey, uncompromising black lettering and the famous Dance of Death strung along the bottom like an unusually pessimistic conga line. This particular jacket has undergone a drama of its own. It is chipped, rubbed, torn and decidedly tatty around the extremities, but remains substantially present and continues doing its job with the stoicism of a Bergman heroine trapped in a loveless marriage.

The book itself is in Good condition, while the dust jacket is Fair to tatty. This is a first edition and therefore retains genuine interest despite the jacket’s long confrontation with shelves, hands, gravity and possibly Death himself. The latter appears to have won several pieces but has not yet taken the book.

An excellent acquisition for Bergman devotees, film students, screenwriters, collectors of modern cinema and anyone who considers a comedy insufficient unless it is shelved beside plague, spiritual doubt and the collapse of human certainty.

From Crappy Old Books—where all sales are final, God remains silent, and Death accepts PayPal but keeps forgetting his password.

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