WASHINGTON — She was Ingmar Bergman’s magnetic muse across a string of masterpieces, including “Persona” (1966), “Cries & Whispers” (1972) and “Scenes from a Marriage” (1974).
This week, Liv Ullmann presents “Private Confessions” from Dec. 6-9 at the Kennedy Center, part of a larger “Bergman 100” centennial marking 100 years since his birth in 1918 Sweden.
“It is absolutely wonderful,” Ullmann told WTOP. “To think of this man who lived 50 years on an island, isolated alone and wrote his masterpieces, 50 years after that the whole world will celebrate him. They will celebrate him by taking words from his films and translating them into stage, opera, radio, TV. The Kennedy Center will be the first to show one of his pieces.”
After directing Max von Sydow in the 1996 film from Bergman’s script, Ullmann now adapts “Private Confessions” into a non-linear series of “confessions” on infidelity, family strife and loneliness. The Kennedy Center marks the U.S. premiere after debuting in her native Norway.
“[There’s] not very much set design because it’s naked, as it should be,” Ullmann said. “People will hear the confession of being unfaithful with subtitles. They’re very close to the audience, so they can see the faces, they can see the bodies, then there will be subtitles and you will see the drama that happens within people when they are confronted with unfaithfulness.”
The show is based on a diary kept by Bergman’s own mother, which revealed her infidelity.
“Ingmar’s mother was married to a priest, she had been unfaithful and loved a man until she died,” Ullmann said. “Nobody knew about it, only her husband, but he didn’t know she kept a diary called ‘My Life Book.’ In there, she said everything deep in her heart: ‘I want to live with this man, I want to be with this man.’ Ingmar found it after her death and made this movie.”
In addition to the mother’s diary, Ullmann also weaves in excerpts from Bergman’s own diary.
“When he wrote ‘Private Confessions,’ he made a diary that he gave to me,” Ullmann said. “In his diary he said, ‘My mother! What did she do? She played theater. She wasn’t the mother I thought.’ That was not very much part of the movie, but I made it part of the [stage play]. … I directed the movie, so I had certain rights. Ingmar loved the movie and gave me his diary. He knows me. If he gives me five diary books, he knows that I’m going to use it sooner or later.”
If anyone knows Bergman it’s Ullmann, sharing 40 years, 12 films and a daughter together.
“[He gets auteur credit] because he’s the creator and a man,” Ullmann said. “But I think us seeing each other and using what we had seen in each other is what made me do all these movies with him. I would say, ‘People always ask about you when they interview me.’ He would say, ‘You don’t understand. You are my Stradivarius.’ I don’t mind being a muse when it’s someone like Ingmar Bergman, but I I know that I gave him and much as he gave me.”
What was Bergman like when the cameras weren’t rolling?
“He was very interested in people, men and women,” Ullmann said. “He saw that I recognized the young person in him. If he hadn’t met me, he would’ve written the scripts for a man. I very often played thoughts, dreams and longings Ingmar had. He’s very childish in a wonderful way. He said, ‘So much of my life, I’m trying to get back to undiscovered places of my youth.'”
This mentality can be seen in his pair of breakthrough works, “The Seventh Seal” (1957), where a medieval knight plays chess with Death, and “Wild Strawberries” (1957), where an aging professor reflects on his life during a nostalgic road trip to receive an honorary degree.
“They say he’s gloomy. He’s not, but sometimes he has a gloomy way of saying what is true,” Ullmann said. “The knight playing chess with Death [is] not so sad, because the knight says, ‘Please just give me a little more time so I can do something really good that’s not about me but about somebody else.’ That’s beautiful. That is Ingmar. Sometimes he used darkness to show his longing to be a real, connected, unique human being, which he believes we all are.”
After his honest “Faith” trilogy of “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), “Winter Light” (1963) and “The Silence” (1963), Bergman delivered his masterpiece “Persona” (1966), starring Ullmann as a mute actress whose identity mysteriously melds with that of her nurse (Bibi Andersson).
“Bibi is my best friend in the world,” Ullmann said. “For us, it was hard to understand what the movie was about, but there was something about that movie that was bigger than life, what art can really be. Suddenly you understand something that you can’t verbalize. It’s for you to come [to] in later years, but somewhere inside yourself, you feel that this is the truth. That’s what ‘Persona’ was for me and Bibi. For [Bergman], it really changed his life. … That’s when people started to see the masterpieces he had done before. He became international.”
For the next half century, critics and academics have dissected the film’s themes of identity (see my review), including such audacious choices as playing the same scene twice from two different perspectives. Ullmann admits these were instinctual answers to happy accidents.
“We did it in one take, one camera was on me, one camera was on Bibi,” Ullmann said. “When Ingmar saw [it], he said, ‘Oh god, I don’t know where I can cut away.’ So he decided, ‘I will show both of them!’ He felt, ‘She is so right and she is so right, you have to see the listener and the one who talks.’ That is genius but it comes down to a [logistical] difficulty. The same where the two faces meld into one. That was also an accident in the editing room. Suddenly two things came on top of each other, half Bibi’s face, half my face, and he thought it was incredible.”
As Bergman wrote in his “Images” memoir: “Today I feel that in ‘Persona’ — and later in ‘Cries & Whispers’ – I had gone as far as I could go. In these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” Indeed, “Cries & Whispers” (1972) was a brilliant study of a cancer-stricken woman visited by her two sisters.
“We had so much fun on ‘Cries & Whispers,'” Ullmann said. “Every night, Ingmar didn’t want us to do parties because we were doing this very serious movie [in] a big castle. He said, ‘After supper, you each go to your room. I want to see you fresh in the morning.’ None of us did. When we knew he’d gone into his room, all of us met and drank and laughed until 4 a.m.”
After such nights of raucous partying, Ullmann was amazed by her co-star Harriet Andersson.
“I’d seen her four hours ago like, ‘Woo hoo! I’m so happy!’ and suddenly, she’s doing the most marvelous acting I’ve ever seen, lying there dying,” Ullman said. “When he said, ‘Camera,’ this woman who couldn’t say her own name four hours ago did the most incredible thing because he touched your soul in a way very few directors do. Like when the person you love looks you in the eye, you look back, and you understand each other, that’s what a genius director does.”
While Ullmann certainly knows both sides of that analogy, she refutes the all-too-common misconception that “Scenes from a Marriage” (1974) was based on their real-life romance.
“Not at all,” Ullmann said. “People always think it’s biographical and say, ‘It’s you! The hitting and the violence!’ … I swear to God I have never done a movie with Ingmar that had anything to do with our life. … I know from Q&As I do for other people’s films, they ask about the film. When I do Q&As for Ingmar’s films, people get up and say something about themselves.”
Either way, the film masterfully depicts the disintegrating marriage of Marianne (Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) through matrimony, infidelity, divorce and subsequent partners. It was first released in 1973 as a television miniseries and then condensed for a 1974 film.
“It was always meant to be a film but also TV, because a lot of the money came from TV, so he made a six-hour thing but always knew it’d be cut down to a movie,” Ullman said. “I felt there for the first time it was a reality. A woman who was insecure in the beginning grows and becomes a wonderful lawyer. She learns how to meet her husband and talk back to him.”
After a prolific career that’s spanned two Oscar nominations (“The Emigrants,” “Face to Face”), five Golden Globe nominations (“40 Carats,” “The Rose Garden”) and a Palme d’Or nomination (“Trolösa”), the 78-year-old Ullmann continually reinvents herself with a warm, creative spirit.
“The human spirit, the arts, that’s what brings us closer to the worth of living,” Ullmann said. “That’s what confessions can be when people talk and listen to each other. … When people suddenly are hearing what they’d like to say themselves, when people suddenly see that somebody else is listening to them. It’s wonderful to be alive when you are not with a robot but with human beings, when people have time to listen to radio, like we are doing right now.”
Click here for more on “Private Confessions.” Listen to our full chat with Liv Ullmann below:
