Screened writing: notes on Bergman’s hand

Abstract

The secret wish of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman to become a writer is evident in at least two ways: (1) his repeated emphatic claims that he did not; (2) his way of sneaking in writing into his films. This article focuses on the latter. Seemingly unrevised and preliminary, textual information takes the shape of letters and notes written and/or read by the characters. When literary passages seemingly do occur (as in, for example, Persona), the quoted text in question is faked. If textual messages are emphasized in Bergman, it is less as literature than as the act of writing, a physical matter of paper, pen, or typewriter. This article investigates Bergman’s writing less in the auteur sense of him writing his own scripts, than in how writing permeates his work to the point where his films could be considered as productive detours. By looking at fictitious acts of writing in his films as well as the author’s own, peculiarly self-reflexive, writing habits insofar they are discernible in the Ingmar Bergman Archives, this article overturns the traditional notion of the screenplay as a kind of half-measure or necessary evil vis-à-vis the film.