“To feel. To trust the feeling. I long for that”
Source: Face to Face: A Film
Ingmar Bergman: Quotes about feelings
Ingmar Bergman was Swedish filmmaker. Explore interesting quotes on feeling.
Ingmar Bergman:
150
quotes
9
likes
On Winter Light, Jonas Sima interview <!-- pages 173-174 -->
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: We drove about, looking for churches, my father and I. My father, as you probably know, was a clergyman — he knew all the Uppland churches like the back of his hand. We went to morning services in variouis places and were deeply impressed by the spiritual poverty of these churches, by the lack of any congregation and the miserable spiritual status of the clergy, the poverty of their sermons, and the nonchalance and indifference of the ritual.
In one church, I remember — and I think it has a great deal to do with the end of the film — Father and I were sitting together. My father had already been retired for many years, and was old and frail.... Just before the bell begins to toll, we hear a car outside, a shining Volvo: the clergyman climbs out hurriedly, and there is a faint buzz from the vestry, and then the clergyman appears before he ought to — when the bell stops, that is — and says he feels very poorly and that he's talked to the rector and the rector has said he can use an abbrviated form of the service and drop the part at the altar. So there would be just one psalm and a sermon and another psalm. And goes out. Whereon my father, furious, began hammering on the pew, got to his feet and marched out into the vestry, where a long mumbled conversation ensued; after which the churchwarden also went in, then someone ran up the organ gallery to fetch the organist, after which the churchwarden came out and announced that there would be a complete service after all. My father took the service at the altar, but at the beginning and the end.
In some way I feel the end of the play was influenced by my father's intervention — that at all costs one must do what it is one's duty to do, particularly in spiritual contexts. Even if it can seem meaningless.
Torsten Manns interview <!-- pages 80-81 -->
Bergman on Bergman (1970)
Context: One of the strongest feelings I remember from my childhood is, precisely, of being humiliated; of being knocked about by words, acts, or situations.
Isn't it a fact that children are always feeling deeply humiliated in their relations with grown-ups and each other? I have a feeling children spend a good deal of their time humiliating one another. Our whole education is just one long humiliation, and it was even more so when I was a child. One of the wounds I've found hardest to bear in my adult life has been the fear of humiliation, and the sense of being humiliated... Every time I read a review, for instance — whether laudatory or not — this feeling awakes... To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated. Our bureaucracy, for instance. I regard it as in high degree built up on humiliation, one of the nastiest and most dangerous of all poisons.
But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous.
Images : My Life in Films (1990)
"Martin" (Max von Sydow) in Through a Glass Darkly (1961).
Films
On Michelangelo Antonioni
Variant translation: Antonioni has never properly learnt his craft. He's an aesthete. If, for example, he needs a certain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the houses repainted on the damned street. That is the attitude of an aesthete. He took great care over a single shot, but didn't understand that a film is a rhythmic stream of images, a living, moving process; for him, on the contrary, it was such a shot, then another shot, then yet another. So, sure, there are some brilliant bits in his films... I can't understand why Antonioni is held in such high esteem.
Jan Aghed interview (2002)
Interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (1971).
Laterna Magica (1987); The Magic Lantern : An Autobiography as translated by Joan Tate (1988).
Variant translation: Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
As quoted in "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" by John Berger, Sight and Sound (June 1991).