ADDRESS WRITTEN BY
MR. INGMAR BERGMAN,
READ BY MR. KENNE FANT,
DIRECTOR OF THE
SVENSKA FILM1NDUSTRI
IN THE ABSENCE OF MR. BERGMAN
FOR REASONS OF ILLNESS
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Excel-
lencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The artistic creation has to me always mani-
fested itself as hunger. I have acknowledged
this need with a certain satisfaction, but during
my conscious life I have never asked myself,
why this hunger has come about and craved
for appeasement. For the latest years when
the hunger is diminishing and has been trans-
formed into something else, I am anxious to
find out the reasons for my artistic activity".
A very early memory from my childhood is my
want to exhibit my achievements: proficiency
in drawing, the art of playing bail against the
wall, the first swimstrokes.
I remember that I feit a very strong need to
draw the attention of the grown-ups to these
manifestations of my presence in the external
world. I never feit that my fellow-mortals took
enough interest in me. Therefore, when rea-
lity was not sufficiënt any longer, I started to
imagine, I entertained my friends of the same
age as I with tremendous stories of my secret
exploits. They were embarassing lies, which
failed hopelesly when confronted with the
level-headed scepticism of the world around
me. Finally I withdrew from community and
kept my dream world to myself. A child looking
for human contact, obsessed by its imagina-
tion had very soon been transformed into a
hurt, cunning and suspicious daydreamer.
But a daydreamer is not artist but in his
dreams.
The need to get people to listen, to corres-
pond, to live in the warmth of a community
was still there. It grew stronger the more the
prison walls of loneliness closed around me.
It goes without saying that the cinema be-
comes my means of expression. I made my
self understood in a language which went past
words, which I missed, music, which I did
not master, painting, which left me indifferent.
I had suddenly a possibility to correspond
with the world around me in a language, which
is spoken literally from soul to soul in phrases,
which escape the control of the intellect in an
almost voluptuous way.
With the whole stunted hunger of a child I
seized upon my medium and for twenty years
I supplied indefatigably and in a kind of
frenzy dreams, mental excitements, imagina-
tions, fits of lunacy, neuroses, religious con-
troversies and sheer lies. My hunger has been
eternally new. Money, fame and success have
been amazing, but at bottom insignificant se-
quels of my rampagings.
In saying this I do not underestimate what I
may perchance have achieved. I think that it
has been and perhaps is of importance. What
is security enough for me is that I can see
the past in a new and less romantic light. Art
as self-satisfaction may of course have its im
portance - above all for the artist.
To-day the situation is less complicated, less
interesting, above all less glamorous.
If I then want to be completely frank, I expe-
rience art (not only filmatic art) as insignifi
cant in our time. By insignificant I mean that
art no longer has the power and the possibility
to influence the development of our life.
Literature, painting, music, film and theatre
beget and bring forth themselves. New muta-
tions, new combinations arise and are annihi-
lated, the movement seems seen from the
outside - nervously vital, the artists' magnifi-
cent zeal to project to themselves and to a
more and more distracted public pictures of
a world that no longer minds what they like or
think. In some few reservations artists are
punished, art is considered dangerous and
worth stifling and directing. On the whole
however, art is free, shameless, irresponsible
and as I said before: the movement is intense,
almost feverish, it seems to me like a snake's
skin full of ants. The snake is long since
dead, eaten, deprived of his poison, but the
skin is full of meddlesome life.
If I now find that I happen to be one of these
ants, I must ask myself if there is any reason
to continue the activity.
The answer is in the affirmative. Although I
think that the stage is an old beloved kept
woman, who has seen better days. Although
I and many other people find the Wild West
more stimulating than Antonioni and Bergman.
Although the new music gives us the suffoca-
ting feelings of mathematical air rarefaction,
although painting and sculpture are sterilized
and decline in their own paralysing freedom.
Although literature has been transformed into
a cairn of words without any message or dan
gerous qualities.
There are poets, who never write poems, be-
cause they form lives as poems, actors, who
never appear on the stage, but act their lives
as wonderful dramas. There are painters, who
never paint, because they shut their eyse and
create on the inside of the eyelid the most
beautiful paintings. There are filmmakers,
who live their films and who would never
misuse their talents to materialize them in
reality.
I think that people of to-day can dispense
with theatre, because they exist in the middle
of a drama, the different phases of which in-
cessantly produce local tragedies. They do
not need music, because every minute they
are exposed to veritable sound hurricanes,
which have reached and passed beyond endu-
rance. They do not need poetry, because the
new idea of the universe has transformed them
into functional animals, confined to interesting
but from a poetical point of view unusable
problems of metabolic disturbances.
Man (as I experience myself and the world
around me) has made himself free, terribly
and dizzyingly free. Religion and art are kept
alive for sentimental reasons, as a conven-
tional politeness towards the past, as benign
democratie solicitude on behalf of the nervous
citizens enjoying more and more leisure time.
This is of course my own subjective point of
view. I hope and I am convinced that others
have a more balanced and objective opinion.
If I now consider all these troubles and still
maintain that in spite of all I want to continue
to work in the artistic field, this is due to a
very simple reason. (I disregard the purely
material one.)
The reasons is curiosity. A boundless, insa-
tiable curiosity, that is always new and that
pushes me onwards - a curiosity that never
leaves me alone and that completely replaces
the craving for community of the past time.
I feel like a prisoner who - after serving a
longterm - suddenly is confronted with tur
bulent life. I am seized by an ungovernable
curiosity. I note, I observe, I keep my eyes
open, everything is unreal, fantastic, frighte-
ning or ridiculous. I catch a flying grain of
dust, maybe it is a film - what importance
does it have: none at all, but I find it inte
resting and consequently it is a film. I walk
around with the grain of dust that I have
caught with my own hands, I am happy or
sad. I jostle the other ants, together we ac-
complish an enormous task. The snake's skin
moves.
This and only this is my truth. I do not re-
quest that should be valid for someone else
and as a consolation for eternity it is of
course rather meagre. As a basis for artistic
activity during some future years it is comple
tely sufficiënt at least for me.
To devote oneself to artistic creation for one's
own satisfaction is not always agreable. But
it has one great advantage: the artist lives
exactly like every other living creature that
only exists for its own sake. This makes a
rather numerous brotherhood living together
egotistically on the hot dirty earth under a
cold and empty sky.
ADDRESS BY PETER USTINOV:
„FILM AND SOCIETY"
Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, Your
Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am grateful for having been invited here on
this important occasion in order to pay ho-
mage to two very celebrated artists. In prai-
sing the great it is habitual to concentrate
more on the gifts they were born with than
on any qualities they may have acquired
through conviction or belief - and so perhaps
I may be forgiven for ignoring what is common
property, the art of Charlie Chaplin and of
Ingmar Bergman - and of concentrating on
two aspects of their very different personali-
ties which must strike all those who bother
to penetrate a little deeper than the surface.
I refer to independence and courage. One is
naturally a consequence of the other.
We live in an epoch of almost inconceivable
physical courage. All over the world men and
women are hurtling around outer and inner
space, performing callisthenics up there for
the benefit of science, and for the benefit of
the television camera. People of sedate cha-
racter spend their weekends away from the
office sky-diving with expressions of almost
erotic elation on their faces expressions
which would invite dismissal during the week
- while everywhere we find the intrepid pho-
tographers immortalizing this by now routine
romance with violent death which goes on
around us by the minute. However.physical
and moral courage rarely go hand in hand.
There are no total heroes, there are no total
cowards. Such a solution would be too easy.
There have been exceptions, such as mar-
tyrs who were willing to go to the flames, or
indeed, to the cross for their convictions. But
on the whole, the two kinds of courage are
as incompatible as the elements.
How often have we seen the military hero,
habitually decorated for his bravery in the
field, crumble with embarrassing servility and
indeed, incoherence, when confronted by a
decision involving morality or ethics. Under
circumstance such as the Army MacCarty
hearings in America most of the military con
fronted by the notorious senator testified in a
manner so timorous as to amaze and embar-
rass those of tougher moral fibre I refer,
of course, to the civilians.
It is likewise the habit of countries in the
throes of political turmoil to appeal to some
great military figure half-midden by the sha-
dows, and yet already half-illuminated by the
light of history, to come back from his gathe-
ring dreams into a harsh reality, and seem to
take over the reins of government. Pétain,
Hindenburg, Badoglio were merely a few of
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