Cosy up this weekend with a smattering of Bergman-related musical entertainment! Every Saturday [update: a Saturday every now and then], we offer up a new song that relates to Bergman in some interesting manner. Over time, we plan on building up a pretty-little playlist suitable for any occasion, aptly entitled The Original Ingmar Bergman Spotify Playlist. (For more on Bergman and music, click here.)

Satuday song #5 is:

Franz Schubert, 'Der Leiermann' from Die Winterreise, D 911 (1827)
Klaus Mertens (baritone); Tini Mathot (fortepiano).
Challenge Classics. 2006.

The main character of the television piece In the Presence of a Clown is uncle Carl Åkerblom, engineer and recurring Bergman figure. Set in the early 20th century, the film opens with Åkerblom sitting alone in his hospital room – he is admitted in an asylum – playing the same piece over and over again on a grammophone: the first eight measures of 'Der Leiermann' ('The Organ Grinder'), the last lied of Schubert's cycle Die Winterreise.

Discharged from the hospital, Åkerblom starts working on what is meant to be the world's first talkie, about 'the passionate love story between the genius Franz Schubert and fille de joie Mizzi Veith.'

For this reason, Käbi Laretei and Hanns Rodell perform a number of Schubert pieces in this TV film. Seemingly a bit odd that this very composer should feature so prominently in such a late Bergman production, as only one other Schubert piece is featured in all his other films, when Impromptu Nr. 3 from Theme and Variations in B-Major makes a brief aural appearance in Fanny and Alexander.

Bergmans script is subtitled 'Eight improvisations, with the eighth written as a rondel'.

Hence, and as so many times before, Bergman  thought of his opus not only to be about music, but also being music.

F:150
Hand writings, Drafts, Sketches
[Notebook No 48 / Ingmar Bergman]
[1940]
c:a 55 p., c:a 12 sketches ; 22 x 17 cm
Spiral pad (notes from both directions). Undated. Text on cover: "This is my notebook. My name is Ingmar Bergman" ... Notes from Mäster-Olofsgården, thoughts about theatre, letter drafts, manuscript fragments and sketches.

' – will take whoever nicks this notebook.'

J:069
Biographica
Journals
[Planning calendar 1975]
[120] s. ; 10 x 26 cm
Contains misc. notes, including rehearsal hours for Twelfth Night and shooting of Face to Face and journal entries + drawn devils (28 August).

This day, thirty-eight years ago, Bergman was in New York City. During the day, he had time for a lunch (in a rocking skyscraper) sell the world rights for Face to Face to Dino de Laurentiis and watch Liv Ullmann in her Broadway debut A Doll's House (which, by the way, she now plans to stage her own translation of).

Uncatalogued
Göran Wassberg, set design model, painted cardboard
The Image Makers

The first sketch.
© Göran Wassberg

Floor plan.
© Göran Wassberg

Colour samples.
© Göran Wassberg

The model.
© Göran Wassberg

The scenery.
© Göran Wassberg

Tora Teje (Elin Klinga), Julius Jaenzon (Carl-Magnus Dellow), Selma Lagerlöf (Anita Björk) och Victor Sjöström (Lennart Hjulström).
Foto: Bengt Wanselius © Bengt Wanselius

(Apropos of our new first page picture.)

D:090
Director's script, Stage theatre, 1981
Fräulein Julie : ein naturalistisches Trauerspiel / [von] August Strindberg ; Deutsch von Peter Weiss [with Ingmar Bergman's notes and sceneries]
82 pp. sewn.
Manuscript published by Suhrkampf Verlag 1976. Director's script with IB's notes in Swedish. On page 28 a christmas card with revisions in the text. Scandinavian drama for a German audience.

R:016
Statuette. Gilded bronze lion.

B:041
Shooting script, Feature film
Persona / by Ingmar Bergman [with handwritten notes and sceneries]
90 pp., bound + appendix ; 30 x 22 cm
Typewritten screenplay. Shooting script with photographs. Appendix 1: Tentative shooting schedule, 2 pp.

"Min ensemble" (My cast).

This whole Bergman and fashion thing never seems to go out of style.

Granted, new Dsquared2 spring ad has even stronger references to Alfred Hitchcock, but the nods to Bergman are, as Style.com points out, plain to see as well. Hello, mirrors!

By the way, as the persons before the mirror, we see the Canadian designer twins themselves.

Speaking of the Pope, we’d like to bring your attention to one of our coolest colleagues.

The Vatican Secret Archives is perhaps not that secret: the adjective should be understood as ’private’ (from lat. secretum), since it is owned by the Pope himself. The archives were founded by Paul V in 1612, making it 390 years our senior.

And you don’t need to be a fan of neither Umberto Eco nor Dan Brown to appreciate the suggestive nature of their commercial campaign:

Admit that it's a little hard to comprehend that Victor Sjöström's office glimmered in different shades of brown; that the dress Ingrid Thulin sported for the conferment ball was light blue or that Bibi Andersson's chins took on a becoming reddish hue. Here's an update for you: reality had colour even when black and white films such as Wild Strawberries were shot.

Sigfrid Borg (Per Sjöstrand) and Sara Borg (Bibi Andersson) in Wild Strawberries.
Photo: Louis Huch; © AB Svensk Filmindustri.

But sometimes it happens that we'll get to see a behind-the-scenes colour still, that a preserved costume is on display in a museum or that a colourful prop is found in an archive somewhere – and suddenly we're reminded of the fact that most of reality, including that of the past, comes in colour.

Per Sjöstrand and Bibi Andersson – now in colour.
Photo: Ingmar Bergman. © AB Svensk Filmindustri and Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

Our friends of the Criterion Collection gave us the other day a few remindres of this, where the purple splendour of Last Year in Marienbad was particularly awesome):

From these kind of musings, there is but a small step to counterfactual history speculations: what if e.g. Through a Glass Darkly was in colour! Actually, it was pretty close. In February 1960, Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter announced that Bergman's next film was to be in colour:

'Max von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand are already contracted for parts in the colour film, which only has four parts. The working title for the as yet unwritten film is "The Wallpaper", which is all Ingmar Bergman wants to reveal, except that this wallpaper is green and of importance to the story.'

Karin (Harriet Andersson) hears voices behind the wallpaper in Through a Glass Darkly.
© AB Svensk Filmindustri.

We are happy to be able to confirm this last note! That the wallpaper was green, that is. Because on the very same day Criterion published their colour stills from classical black and white movies, our colleagues of the Swedish Film Institute library stumbled upon an interesting item in their holdings: the wallpaper which would have named the film. Design: the one and only P A Lundgren! As we speak, we're having a small meeting room at Film Institute redecorated into a cozy nervous breakdown space.

Through a Glass Darkly is a nice title, what with the reference to St. Paul and everything. But at least today we wouldn't have minded the title Bergman had in mind when he had jettisoned 'The Wallpaper' (but had to exchange upon discovering a recently published Swedish novel by Olle Hedberg had the same title): 'True Colours'.

PS. Stand-in for Harriet Andersson above is Ola Törjas of the Swedish Film Institute library.