Viskningar och rop (Whisperings and Cries): To describe Ingmar Bergman's latest film as a mere tale is impossible. The story is perfectly clear, to be sure, but elusive nonetheless. Here is what Bergman himself wrote in a letter to his cast before shooting began:

"The period is the turn of the century. The women's dresses are opulent, lavish, concealing, and revealing. (We needn't commit ourselves to a precise year; this is not specifically a beginning century. It can be the 80s or 90s just as well. The important thing is that the dresses be in concert with our demands for sensual suggestion.) The same applies, to the nth degree, to the interiors, which must be so constructed as to afford opportunities to create the lighting conditions we want: dawns that don't look like dusks, soft hearthglow, the mysterious indirect light the day it snows, the mild radiance of the kerosene lamp. The torment of a clear, sunny, autumn day. A solitary light in the darkness of the night and all the fidgeting shadows when someone wrapped in a billowing nightgown hurries through the large rooms.

"At the same time, it is important that our décor never become obvious. It must be pliable, enclosing, elusive, and present—suggestive without being intrusive.

"There is one peculiar thing, however: all our interiors are in different shades of red. Don't ask me why it's to be that way, because I don't know. I've pondered the reason myself and found each explanation more comical than the other. The bluntest but also most tenable is probably that the whole thing is something internal and that ever since childhood I have imagined the soul to be a damp membrane in varying shades of red.

"Furniture, props, and other paraphernalia shall be extremely accurate, but we must be able to use them whimsically and in full accordance with our aims. But it must be beautiful and harmonious. It shall be as in a dream: something exists because we want it or need it, just for the moment.

"The leading characters in the drama are four in number. Four women. I shall provide a hasty rundown on them (without ranking them in the order listed).

"AGNES (Harriet Andersson) is the contemplated owner of the estate. She has remained there since her parents died. She has never got around to moving away: she has belonged there since birth and has allowed her life to flow along quietly and indiscernibly without meaning or misfortune. She has vague artistic ambitions: she paints a little; she plays the piano a little; it's all a bit touching. No man has made his appearance in her life. For her, love has been a shut-in and never-manifested secret. At the age of 37, she has developed cancer of the uterus and is now preparing to vanish from the world as quietly and submissively as she has lived in it. She spends most of the day in her bed, her big bed in her parents' lovely but overdecorated bedroom. But she can still get up now and then, until the pains strike her to the ground. She doesn't complain much, and she doesn't think God is cruel. In her prayers, she turns to Christ in humble expectation. She is severely emaciated, but her abdomen has swelled up as though she were in an advanced state of pregnancy.

"KARIN (Ingrid Thulin), her 2-years-older sister, made a wealthy marriage and moved to another part of the country. She soon recognized that her marriage was a mistake. Her husband (Georg Årlin), who is 20 years older, is physically and psychologically repulsive to her. She is mother to five children, but nevertheless seems untouched by motherhood and marital boredom. She presents an impeccable façade and is regarded as haughty, distant. Her loyalty to her marriage is unshakable. Deep beneath a veneer of self-control, she conceals an impotent hatred of her husband and a continuing rage against life. Her anxiety and desperation never come forth except in her dreams, which every now and then torment her. In the midst of this tumult of bridled fury, she carries within herself a talent for dedication and intimacy and a longing for closeness. This enormous resource lies immovably enclosed and unused.

"MARIA (Liv Ullmann) is the youngest sister; she too has a wealthy and stable marriage, to a handsome and successful man (Henning Moritzen) of suitable social standing. She has a 5-year-old daughter and is herself like a spoiled child: gentle, playful, smiling, with a constantly active curiosity and love of pleasure. She is very fixed upon her own beauty and her body's possibilities for enjoyment. She lacks all conception of the world she lives in; she is sufficient unto herself and is never tormented by her own or others' establishment of moral limits. Her only law is to be attractive.

"ANNA (Kari Sylwan) is the servant in the house. She is about 30 years old. As a young girl, she gave birth to a daughter, and Agnes took care of her and the child. This resulted in Anna's tying herself to Agnes. A tacit, never-expressed friendship was established between the two lonely women. The child died at the age of 3, but the relationship between Anna and Agnes continued. Anna is very quiet, very timid, inaccessible. But she is ever-present; she sees, searches, and listens. Everything about Anna bespeaks weight: her body, her face, her mouth, her look. She doesn't speak. Perhaps she doesn't think, either.

"The basic situation when the film begins is this: Agnes' illness has suddenly worsened, and according to the doctor (Erland Josephson), she cannot live much longer. Her two sisters (her only relatives) have come to her deathbed."

BERGMAN, Ingmar, author, director, was presented in Film in Sweden, No. 2, 1971. Since then he has made Viskningar och rop.

These are excerpts from a diary about Ingmar Bergman's filming of Viskningar och rop. It was written by the editor of Film in Sweden, who followed the production as contact man for the Swedish press.

What is depicted can be regarded as material or immaterial. Bergman is characterized not by his shooting sessions but by his works. But even the surface exhibited by the shooting sessions can perhaps have its significance.

Tuesday, September 7, 1971, a day of preparation

Sven Nykvist, the photographer, is taking a still photo of Liv out in the park; it is to be used as the basis for a painting. The scene has a pastoral beauty: the first red hues of fall are beginning to punctuate the dark green. I am surprised at how thoroughly Ingmar instructs her for the sake of this tiny detail.

"You've got to raise your left eyebrow a little, Liv. Just a little, so...there now. Exactly! Good!" Sven shoots.

"You have to relax first," says Ingmar. "Lean back a while now. Now lean forward. Push up your left shoulder a little, just a little. NOW!"

Up on the slope, Börje Lundh, the makeup man, is standing, looking worried. He has a big, expressive face.

"What's the matter?" I ask.

"She's green in the face."

"Who?"

"Liv."

Liv is sitting in wicker chair, nearly 250 feet away.

"Can you tell that from here?"

"I've been thinking about it. Don't know what I'm going to do about it. There must be an ultraviolet light that the film registers but not our eyes."

He goes down and adjusts her makeup some.

Wednesday, September 8, 1971, shooting

I'm puzzling over how I'm actually going to be able to describe Taxinge Näsby in words when I get there. There is a manor house, large but rundown looking. There are well raked gravel paths, manicured lawns, small grounds cottages, large shady trees. Electrical cables lie strewn about everywhere.

Lake Mälar in the background. Gentle hills all around. Yes, it is lovely—in an oldish sort of way. But it's not lyrical.

The bells in the gray dawn. They all have their own personalities, their own voices. In the uncertain, floating light, they are rather peculiar, almost obtrusive. And then they strike, one after the other, and a few combine their peals. Only the mantel clock in the bedroom, with its flute-playing shepherd, stands silent. The log fire has burned down in the fireplace; the kerosene lamp is blinking and sighing; the eyes of the family portraits stare with round, disinterested eyes at the new day that is hesitantly approaching through the autumnal trees of the park.

Agnes' eyes are bleary with sleeplessness and repressed physical pain. She has lain for an hour or two, struggling with her torment.

(from the filmscript)

The first scene depicts her waking up. Harriet Andersson plays the mortally ill Agnes. It is early morning.

Ingmar sits on the edge of Harriet's bed giving her detailed instructions, although with a remarkable, soft tenderness. She reposes in a warm bath of empathy.

"You resist waking up. Keep lying there a long time with your eyes closed. We know you're awake. We sense it. It's the ghastly waking up you want to ward off—somehow.

Then when you do look up—all at once—with eyes wide open—you stare as though your eyelids had been cut away."

Test.

Then Ingmar snuggles up to Harriet in the bed.

"You cold, old Andersson?"

Laughter.

Ingmar does some filming with his Super-8.

"It's the same old film every time. The same actors. The same scenes. The same problems. The only thing that differentiates the film is that we're older..."

Then serious again.

"You let your fright wash over you. There is no consolation! There is no help! It's the elemental dread of death that awakens her."

Sometimes Bergman speaks of the roles as He and She. Not as You.

An incredible intensification of sounds when he orders a take. Every sound emerges from its anonymity.

A bird, an airplane engine, a squeak, a gust of wind, a leaky faucet somewhere, a camera motor. To me, it sounds like a threshing machine.

Ingmar is the same the whole day through. Precise. Unifying. Playful.

Liv comes down and says:

"There's a circus in Mariefred tonight."

"I'm not going. I'm going to have a breakdown," alleges Bergman.

"Can we come to that instead? It sounds a lot more exciting."

"I'm going to have a strictly private breakdown."

During a pause, I ask Ingmar if the first day is the hardest day.

"It's the day one gives up."

"But of course no one's to notice..."

"But it is noticeable."

A beautiful Ingrid Thulin comes down from the makeup room, dressed all in white, as though drenched in white: virginity or arsenic, perhaps both. She discovers the lace pillow and immediately starts to work on it.

She does so the whole time.

Harriet has fallen asleep on her deathbed, and Liv is reading something by Moravia in the big wicker chair that Ingmar first used in Now About These Women.

In a little group, Ingrid is telling about the time she and Gunnar Björnstrand, both dead-tired from the weight of Winter Light, had gone off together one afternoon. To a little roadside coffee shop. There was a jukebox there.

"We played 'The Last of the Mohicans' and danced. Just the two of us among all the coffee drinkers. People stared. After all, Gunnar was dressed as a priest."

Ingrid tells stories in short phrases, which also demands her very personal tone of voice in order to provide the right mood and more content. It's impertinent to write them down like this; they contain so much more.

Humour, for example.

Details, details, details.

Marik Vos, the set designer, whispers about Ingmar:

"He's a cautious painter. He takes a little paint here and a little there—carefully, carefully. He applies the paints lightly, lightly upon one another. Then, all of a sudden, you have the whole before you."

"Not exactly big daubs," I say.

"No, but there's power in them. One day, you'll experience this film through utterly different eyes."

Tuesday, September 14, 1971, shooting

Man and wife are dining in silence. This silence is loaded with hate—a mutual, almost tangible hate without compassion or pause. Neither of them has taken a deep breath of liberation or relief in the last 15 years. One might almost speak of the loyalty of total hatred.

(from the filmscript)

This is the dinner between Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and her husband (Georg Årlin). There is a very tight atmosphere in the scene, but between the takes, there is the usual gaiety. Almost like at a playground.

Ingmar is sitting like a pasha amid the girls and telling of the perils of smoking and of the perils of birth-control pills. He tells a story, which the girls laugh at. The others haven't heard it, and a few of them are looking a bit envious. The stories Ingmar tells tend to be funny ones.

Årlin is having a little trouble with his lines. There is one sentence. "It's late; I suggest we retire..." But in an otherwise perfect take, he says instead: "It's late; I suggest we go to bed..."

"I was expecting that!" laughs Ingmar.

"You were thinking about it! You're the one who was thinking about it! That's why I said it!" Georg is slightly furious.

"No! Well, yes, maybe I was a little worried it might happen..."

"That's why I said it!"

The dining-room scene is taken in alternating shots of the two of them. When Georg is playing against an Ingrid on camera, he goes through all the motions.

They're eating jellied salmon and he eats the whole time. Little, but he eats. When he's sitting off-camera opposite an Ingrid on-camera, he goes through the motions of eating: from the bringing of food up to his mouth to the actual chewing itself, to the sip of wine, to the glance. He performs just as intensely off camera as on.

As he says afterwards:

"For me, every line has to be felt all the way down into my big toe."

A wayward wasp enters the room.

Ingmar is just about to order a take when things get buzziest. The wasp flits against the klieg lights, but refuses to descend onto any of them and be incinerated.

"You stupid bastard," says Ingmar. It's not a very polished remark, but it says volumes about all the run-of-the-mill deviltry present.

He talks to the actors:

"You show her a light, cold friendliness."

"Everything about him disgusts you. When you look at him, you finally have to lower your gaze. So that he won't see it. You're afraid it will reveal too much."

During a break, Ingmar has a transistor radio booming out popular music. "They go on like that all night, every night."

"Do you have it on then?"

"It's the only way to drift to sleep, away from all thoughts."

Harriet Andersson comes in and discovers there's wine on the table. She sniffs at it.

"I just wanted to know if I should be jealous."

"It's nonalcoholic," explains Gunilla Hagberg, who is in charge of props.

"Ecch!" says Andersson. Andersson, old Andersson, is what Bergman calls her.

"What're you doing?" she asks later. "If you're telling about the big wide world, Ingmar, I'm going to tell about the little, narrow world. Last night..."

Ingmar tells about the scene and Harriet says:

"But that's just like collecting fleas on a sheet."

"You're always in good spirits when the sun is shining," booms the radio, and Ingmar, Harriet and Börje Lundh join in obliquely with their polyphony. In the next instant, a marital hell is captured on film.

Tuesday, September 21, 1971, shooting

The first person I encounter is the set designer, Marik Vos. She is sitting alone in the lunchroom.

"Something pretty remarkable is happening with this film," she says, leaning toward me. "At first I felt it was about human loneliness. Now it's beginning to be about tenderness. Everybody in the film—and outside the film—cares about one another. That's what happens when something's being created. It feels so wonderful."

I rush up to where they're shooting; work is underway on changing the setup for a new take. I greet all those I know, but I don't see Ingmar. But I do hear him calling me.

There he is lying on the deathbed together with Ingrid, Harriet, Kari, and Liv. They're talking about a film Ingrid's considering.

"It's going to have one single actor: Sweden's most exciting man, Ingmar Bergman!"

"Where are you going to make it?"

"In the mangle shed, naturally."

"Do you promise to be in it, Ingmar?"

"Absolutely, sure as hell. I'll be in my element in the mangle shed."

Great, long, happy laughter.

Then they start talking about spiritualist seances. They all agree to arrange one before this location shooting is over.

"I've been to them before," says Ingrid. "I've been levitated. But of course no one in Sweden believes me. They're so materialistic here, you know."

They drift into psychoanalysis from a more comic aspect. Ingmar adds to his reputation as Sweden's most exciting man:

"You can't imagine: there are girls who are unbelievably talkative in bed. Otherwise, they don't say a thing..."

The biggest laugh of all, which spreads through the whole troupe.

A take, in which Harriet's Agnes is about to die. The giggling and horsing around are fantastic.

"It's easy to see this is a serious film we're working on," says Katinka, the script girl. "In them, we're always at our merriest before death."

But the other day, when Harriet's Agnes died, everyone present was deeply moved. Then they shrieked with laughter with Harriet. When at last she had died and Ingmar said "cut!" she sat upright with a spasmodic jerk and shouted: "BOOOOO!"

Tuesday, October 5, 1971, shooting

I ride out with a journalistic lady. She says that I.B. has a charm that can cut through steel plate.

Difficult scenes; that's why we haven't come out till the afternoon. When we arranged the visit a week earlier, Ingmar had said that "a day like this has to be chosen with care. The person who's coming, too. The wrong visitor and the whole thing can go to hell."

It doesn't.

Ingrid Thulin asks Ingmar:

"Shall I scream out my despair or...?"

"Oh, I think you can scream."

It is a very agitated scene with profound despair. But the instant Ingmar says his "cut!" Ingrid explodes into a delightful and long and slightly scatterbrained laugh.

It's liberating.

The four stars have dubbed themselves: "The Taxinge Flibbertigibbets."

Harriet, too—who is lying in her cerements in an adjoining room—joins in the guffaws and follows up the chatter with her comments.

During the preparations for the next take, she falls asleep. Appears to be sleeping peacefully and well. But in exactly the position that the role requires of the dead Agnes.

Ingmar explains to Liv and Ingrid: "What's important here is the rhythm of your movements. And Liv, you've got to be careful with the corners of your mouth."

Last night, there was a game of handball, which Bergman "forbade" the troupe to join in. But many played just the same. They got hurt, but they didn't let on anything.

Stefan, the electrician, is doing a lot of sitting today. He's having a hard time standing on one of his legs. He doesn't let on.

Lasse, the assistant cameraman, has to bind up his arm after the shooting. He's hardly been able to move it. But he's let on nothing.

This concealment, this being fit and able at any price.

One of the electricians says at dinner: "The secret of getting through this is to never listen to what Ingmar has to say to his girls. The trick is to listen to Sven Nykvist and set the lights. I don't give a damn about Bergman's blabber."

Postscript

The filming was completed during the last days of October. I saw Bergman grow more and more tired with every passing day—but not when he was going to take a scene or when he instructed his co-workers.

But when he went off and just sat himself down. He drew his hand across his face and sank away out of things.

One day, I had arranged for a conversation before a microphone between Ingmar, Liv, and myself for Norwegian Radio. It was to take 5 minutes at the most, which is not a long time.

I said nothing; just sat on the couch and waited.

Ingmar came and sat down next to me. For a long time, he didn't say anything either—just looked at his workers, who were getting things ready for the next scene. Then he said, straight out:

"It's absolutely out of the question that you can get me to speak now. I don't want to. I can't."

"What?"

"I can't even stand myself anymore. It's so bad. I don't even want to live."

He was very tired.

The next moment, it was time for the take, and the same alert Ingmar was checking the picture composition and making a few small adjustments.

"That's damned nice," he almost always says about Sven Nykvist's camera setups.

He's one who confidently delegates tasks to others. Many directors are around their cameras like hysterical flies. Bergman no. Clear instructions, a check. And then an amazing ability to survey what happens during the take. An absolutely motionless Bergmanian face—only the eyes moving. He knows precisely.

The actresses during the final days. A few quotes.

Liv:

"Now it's only an hour-and-a-half till there's only one hour left till lunch."

Ingrid:

"I wonder if anyone has a job for an actress with three accomplished expressions now."

On one of the last days, Birgitta Steene, a professor of cinema in the US, gets to come out to the shooting location. She's regarded as one of the world's foremost Ingmar Bergman specialists, but she has never met him before.

She senses an alienage in her situation. "Here I'm supposed to come out and ask him questions. All the questions have been asked; all the answers given. What am I going to ask him about?" But they sit on a stairway and talk rather a long time anyway.

Afterwards, I'm very curious.

"Now what surprised you most about Ingmar Bergman?"

"That he has brown eyes..."