Film-making – Class 12 English Chapter 16 Notes & NCERT PDF

About the Author

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) was a Swedish film director. His films are known for their "starkness", their subtle use of black and white, the ambiguity of their content and "a certain brooding presence". They include The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960), Persona (1967) and Cries and Whispers (1973). This piece is his Introduction to Four Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960).

The unit also includes an interview with Umberto Eco by Mukund Padmanabhan. Eco was an Italian semiotician, a professor at Bologna and the author of The Name of the Rose (1980), which sold over ten million copies.

Summary

The cranes. While shooting The Virgin Spring in Dalarna one cold May morning, the crew had laid "some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail" for the camera. Suddenly cranes appeared "floating majestically in a circle above us". Everyone dropped their work and ran up a hill to watch. Bergman thought: "this is what it means to make a movie in Sweden... we can suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating above the tree tops."

Childhood foretells future. In his grandmother's apartment in Uppsala he sat under the dining table "'listening' to the sunshine". At five, sunlight moving across a picture of Venice seemed to make the water flow and the pigeons fly, while a neighbour's waltzes seemed to come from the picture. As a vicar's son he knew "life and death behind the scenes". His magic lantern showed Red Riding Hood's wolf, which he took for the Devil. At ten he got his first "rattling film projector". His first film was nine feet long and brown, and showed a girl waking in a meadow. It was shown every night until it broke.

The conjurer. "Cinematography is based on deception of the human eye." In an hour-long film we sit through "twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness", the blankness between frames. So the film-maker is "either an impostor or, when the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer".

Split-second impressions. A film begins with something vague: "a chance remark... a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street". It is "a mental state, not an actual story", "a brightly coloured thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious". Carefully wound up, the thread becomes a film.

Script and rhythm. Turning rhythms, moods and "scents" into a screenplay is "an almost impossible task". Only dialogue transfers, and written dialogue "is like a musical score". The essentials are montage, rhythm and the relation of one picture to another, "the vital third dimension". Without it a film is "merely a dead product from a factory". Bergman wishes he had a notation for this.

Film versus literature. "Film has nothing to do with literature." We read with "will and intellect". We watch a film by priming ourselves for illusion, so pictures play "directly on our feelings". The art closest to film is music, because both work on emotions directly. "Film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation." Therefore "we should avoid making films out of books". A book's "irrational dimension" is untranslatable. "I am a film-maker, not an author."

Audience and critics. The public's wishes are "imperative", yet audiences respond "with surprising sensitivity" to unconventional work. Critics may interpret his films freely. "A film is made to create reaction." Originality at any price is foolish; artists borrow from one another. His great literary influence was Strindberg.

Significant persons. His strict parents gave him "a wall to pound on" and bourgeois virtues: efficiency, punctuality and financial responsibility. Several people shaped his career:

"My only significance in the world of film lies in the freedom of my creativity."

The tightrope. The film-maker walks "a tightrope without a net". If the public does not pay, the conjurer loses his wand. The industry is a "ruthlessly efficient sausage machine". Religion is an intellectual problem for him, and Eino Kaila's idea that man lives by his needs shaped him.

Cathedral-building. Chartres cathedral burned down and was rebuilt by thousands of anonymous workers, "master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests". Art, Bergman says, lost its creative drive when separated from worship, and today's artists "bleat about our loneliness". His aim is to be "one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain", carving "a dragon's head, an angel, a devil—or perhaps a saint" anonymously.

The Eco interview. Eco is not puzzled that a difficult novel sold 10–15 million copies. Some readers "don't want easy experiences", though he too enjoys Miami Vice after dinner. His U.S. publisher expected 3,000 sales and got two or three million, which he calls "a mystery". His novel is "a club sandwich" of layers, and a film "cannot select all the layers". Learning that 80 per cent of readers read the book after the film, he stopped selling film rights. So Stanley Kubrick never made Foucault's Pendulum. "The only enviable position is that of Homer", whose film came 2000 years later.

Themes & Arguments

Style

Bergman's piece is autobiographical and conversational. He chooses episodes linked to his pursuit of excellence and uses vivid sensory images: listening to sunshine, the smell of the hot metal lantern, the cranes. Metaphors carry his argument: conjurer, thread from the sack, tightrope, sausage machine, cathedral.

Eco's style is informal, witty and anecdotal: "I often tell stories like a Chinese wise man".

Word Power

Board Exam Focus

Language work from the exercises:

Common Mistakes