The Mirror is Broken

Bergman in his work diaries for Winter Light:

There are times when self-discipline, which is a good thing, becomes self-compulsion, which is totally harmful.

Peter, from Bergman’s film From the Life of the Marionettes, when he discovers his wife lying murdered: ‘The mirror is broken, but what do the fragments reflect?’

From the notebooks to Persona:

The only thing is, she refuses to speak. In fact, she doesn’t want to lie.

I am unable to grasp the large catastrophes. They leave my heart untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of greed – a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into something indifferent, meaningless. The question is whether art has any possibility of surviving except as an alternative to other leisure activities: these inflections, these circus tricks, all this nonsense, this puffed-up self-satisfaction.

From the notebooks to Cries and Whispers:

I believe that the film – or whatever it is – consists of this poem: a human being dies but, as in a nightmare, gets stuck halfway through and pleads for tenderness, mercy, deliverance, something.

From Images:

I love and admire the filmmaker Tarkovsky and believe him to be one of the greatest of all time. My admiration for Fellini is limitless. But I also feel that Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Fellini began to make Fellini films. Yet Kurosawa has never made a Kurosawa film.

[Of The Serpent’s Egg] The movie does not tire for a moment; rather the opposite. It is overstimulated, as if it had taken anabolic steroids. But its vitality is powerful on a superficial plane; the failure is hidden underneath.

From Bergman on Bergman:

The people in my films are exactly like myself – creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they’re talking. Mostly they’re body, with a little hollow from the soul. My films draw on my own experience; however inadequately based logically and intellectually.

Sunlight gives me claustrophobia. My nightmares are always saturated in sunshine. I hate the south, where I’m exposed to incessant sunlight. It’s like a threat, something nightmarish, terrifying.

– In some way the sunlight goes right through your people and their actions
– Yes, they’re eaten out.