Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema by Linda Haverty Rugg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema by Linda Haverty Rugg Erik Hedling Linda Haverty Rugg. Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Pp. xi + 213. Last year, the Swedish press briefly featured an interesting debate, one of the many that pop up. Journalist Thomas Sjöberg—famous (or infamous, depending on one’s view) for a muckraking and scandalous study of the Swedish King Charles XVI Gustavus—was out with a new book on filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, Ingmar Bergman—en berättelse om kärlek, sex och svek [Ingmar Bergman—A Story of Love, Sex, and Betrayal] (Lind & Co., 2013). The debate concerned Sjöberg’s lament in the book’s introduction that he was denied access to Bergman’s papers held at the Ingmar Bergman Foundation in Stockholm. The director of the foundation had grounded his decision in a clause in Bergman’s deed of gift, which stipulated that the archive was to be reserved for “scholars and writers of good reputation.” Sjöberg, the alleged muckraker, apparently fit neither category. The director of the foundation bolstered his decision with the unanimous opinion of its board. In his defense, Sjöberg referred to the fact that it is widely known that Bergman’s films bristle with autobiographical references (which is completely true). Not too many tears were shed for Sjöberg, although the personal feeling of this writer is that, of course, he should have been given access. Sjöberg’s book got a cool reception, being generally passed off as merely gossip about Bergman’s already well-publicized life. The fact is that the filmmaker’s life is so well known in Sweden that it is virtually impossible to see a Bergman film without the director’s biography being trotted out as a point of reference. For example, students seem incapable of viewing Scener ur ett äktenskap (1973; Scenes from a Marriage) without interpreting a pivotal scene—in which Johan (Erland Josephson) tells his wife Marianne (Liv Ullmann) that he is leaving her—without reference to Bergman’s autobiography, The Magic Lantern (trans. Joan Tate, Penguin, [End Page 299] 1988), in which Bergman recounts his separation from his second wife (of five, in all), Ellen Bergman. Gossip or not, these are definitely facts of the forceful biographical legend that has become Bergman’s: among other things, his legendary sex drive, his self-confessed and relentless womanizing, and his hypochondria. Actually, I think that Sjöberg’s book is a contribution to serious research on Bergman. Here, finally, is a collection of all the received gossip, albeit already known, in a single, easily accessible volume. Since no respected scholar has really dealt with such material, previously we had to look for it ourselves in weeklies, press clippings, various biographies, and memoirs—writing a footnote could take days when you desperately tried to remind yourself where you had initially read some bit of drivel. Linda Haverty Rugg’s new book, Self-Projection: The Director’s Image in Art Cinema, also deals with Bergman and autobiographical references in his films, but from an entirely different and highly theoretical angle. Haverty Rugg also distances herself distinctly from old-fashioned biography by, for example, referring to such traditions regarding Bergman as just a case of “Bergman as the son of Lutheran minister” (p. 73). In reality, this is a fact of the utmost importance for understanding Bergman’s career in the context of Swedish film history. By this, I do not mean that Bergman’s own religious background sheds particularly interesting light on how he addresses religion in his films. The fact that his father was also appointed as a royal chaplain, however, does establish Bergman as a member of the upper middle class at the time, a class background absolutely vital to his successful career as Sweden’s most highly lauded theater director and filmmaker, even during the heyday of egalitarianism in the Swedish-Model welfare state of the 1950s–1960s. Haverty Rugg’s book is certainly not only about the films of Ingmar Bergman, even if they—particularly Bergman’s art-house tour de force Persona (1966)—constitute...