The theme at this years Bergman Week at Fårö was Remaking Bergman and soon Hagai Levi's version of Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage will open on HBO. Adaptations for the stage has been a success for many years and now the time has come for moving images.

Hagai Levi's adaption of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage has its premiere at the film festival in Venice that starts the 1 of September.  The series opens on HBO later the same month.

Mia Hansen-Løve arthouse-hommage Bergman Island opened in Cannes in July and was reviewed in international press. In cinemas this autumn!

Today marks Ingmar Bergmans 102nd birthday. Apart from his films being regularly shown, his work lives on through book releases and adaptations for the stage. And now, initiated by Daniel Bergman, a new version of Ingmar Bergman’s groundbreaking series for television, Scenes from a Marriage (1973), will premiere on HBO next year, starring Michelle Williams and Oscar Isaac.

Hagai Levi, creator of Be’Tipul 
and its US version In Treatment as well as the award-winning The Affair, and more recently Our Boys, has adapted Bergman’s original script. He will also be directing the drama.

“Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage was a pioneering television series in 1973; it’s now part of the international canon. As all classics, it lends itself to new interpretations. Hagai Levi has made a brilliant update of the drama, that will surely bring new audiences to the work,” says Ingmar Bergman Foundation CEO Jan Holmberg.

Hagai Levi is also joint executive producer, together with Michael Ellenberg, Blair Breard, Amy Herzog, the leading actors Michelle Williams and Oscar Isaac as well as Swedish producer Lars Blomgren and director Daniel Bergman. The series is produced by Media Res and Endeavor.

Daniel Bergman on how it all began:
In February 2013, I approached Hagai Levi to ask him whether he would be interested in creating an updated, international version of my father’s forty-year-old television drama Scenes from a Marriage. I was deeply touched by Levi’s In Treatment, and I realized that Scenes must have been very important to him at the time.

I was delighted when Hagai jumped at the offer with great enthusiasm – and some trepidation. Nevertheless, he took on the project there and then, and he has been working on it ever since. He has managed to overcome his understandable respect and fear of surpassing the original by instead creating a very personal, independent teleplay that has in some peculiar way retained the DNA of the original script. I feel that we in Hagai Levi, have succeeded in attracting an important artist in his own right.
We were soon in need of a Swedish producer, so I contacted Lars Blomgren, at the time head of Filmlance. Lars has long experience of international projects, and his strategic, wise decisions have been crucial during an occasionally rather bumpy ride. Hagai, Lars and I formed a troika that has been driving this project forward.

I am more than delighted that we are now able to embark on this production with our international partners and the HBO hallmark, starring Michelle Williams and Oscar Isaac, and with Hagai as the director. All that remains is to begin shooting, so the audience can enjoy this timeless drama.

“It took two and a half months to write these scenes, it took half an adult life to experience them.” Ingmar Bergman
Scenes from a Marriage was Bergman’s first television series. The six episodes are: “Innocence and Panic”, “The Art of Sweeping Things under the Rug”, “Paula”, “The Vale of Tears”, “The Illiterates” and “In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World”. Rumour has it that after the first episod in 1973, the demand for family counselling services peaked across Sweden.

In Bergman’s original screenplay, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson played the married couple in a 1970s, Swedish context. Hagai Levi’s version will be exploring love, hate, desire, fidelity and divorce through the experiences of an American couple in the 2020s. Much has happened in terms of gender equality and human relations in the past fifty years – at the same time, almost nothing has changed.

Actor and director Gunnel Lindblom on filming The Seventh Seal surrounded by modern buildings.

Bergman Anecdotes is a compilation of stories about Ingmar Bergman, interviews with people who were close to the director.

More Anecdotes.

Actor Kristina Adolphson on Ingmar Bergman as instructor and master of sceneries.

Bergman Anecdotes is a compilation of stories about Ingmar Bergman, interviews with people who were close to the director.

More Anecdotes.

Actress Inga Landgré on working with a troublesome Ingmar Bergman on his very first film.

Bergman Anecdotes is a compilation of stories about Ingmar Bergman, interviews with people who were close to the director.

More Anecdotes.

P. O. Enquist is dead. A great deal has already been said about this extraordinary author; here follows a few words about his collaborative work with Ingmar Bergman and the way the two artists drew inspiration from one another.

There were similarities between the two Swedish cultural giants even before they met. A Protestant upbringing was to have a profound impact on the life and work of both. There were also thematic similarities: the conditions for creativity, issues of guilt, family relationships. Both were also important protagonists in the post-war political project in Sweden. Bergman did keep a low profile in this respect, but he was still very much part of it. As to Enquist, he played an active role in cultural politics, for example as a member of the government Film Agreement committee in 1998.

However, the potentially most important common denominator before they began to work together, was a third person – August Strindberg. The Night of the Tribades (1975) was Enquist’s debut for the stage. It portrayed the triangle drama between Strindberg, his wife Siri von Essen and her alleged lover, Marie David. The play was a major success, and Enquist became one of Sweden’s most performed playwrights at home and abroad. He later wrote the screenplay for the major 1980s TV production Strindberg: Ett liv (Strindberg: A Life). (You can read more about Bergman’s relationship to his hero here.)

As a result, P. O. Enquist and Ingmar Bergman shared common ground by the time they began their first collaborative project, which took place outside their native Sweden. Enquist’s play Rain Snakes was premiered at Det Kongelige Teater in Copenhagen in September 1981. According to Expressen’s Björn Nilsson, it was his best play so far: “The work of a clearly brilliant playwright who is beginning to gain control of his full range.” The premiere at Dramaten in Stockholm occurred only a month later, and soon on a string of European stages, before Bergman directed it at the Residenztheater in Munich in 1984.

The play is the story of an (imagined) encounter between H. C. Andersen and Hanne and Johan Ludvig Heiberg; she a principal actress at the aforementioned Det Kongelige Teater and her husband the theatre’s director. H. C. Andersen, already famous for his fairytales, wants to achieve recognition from the cultural establishment, for example by having his plays performed at Det Kongelige …

In the play, Andersen is a regnorm (a “rain snake”), the Danish word for an earthworm that has made its way to the surface. It is easy to see why Enquist and Bergman were fascinated by such a tragic figure. They were both well acquainted with the archetype for a failed social climber – Jean in Strindberg’s Miss Julie. New characters in the work of both authors would represent a desire to make a name within a brutal cultural establishment and to exceed people’s expectations. Interestingly, these characters are often based on real people: Selma Lagerlöf in Enquist’s The Image Makers and Georg af Klercker in Bergman’s The Last Gasp – both more or less celebrated, yet disillusioned artists.

Rainsnakes is testament to how thin the bourgeois veneer can be, as Bergman well knew. He had scraped on it before, especially in Fanny and Alexander, which he had just completed when he began to work on Enquist’s play.

The production of Rain Snakes in 1984 meant a return to the Residenztheater for Bergman. He had not yet moved back to Sweden, but he had spent most of his time there during the shooting of Fanny and Alexander, when he had found time to also direct After the Rehearsal for Swedish Television and King Lear at Dramaten. Now he was back in Munich, where he had been living since 1976, employed by the Bavarian State Theatre. In a letter to Enquist dated on 6 November 1983, Bergman wrote:

I read in the newspaper that RAIN SNAKES is coming to Paris. God protect you from the French critics, they are arrogant, parochial and astonishingly incompetent. Commercial success is what matters, money is a good thing, it settles the nerves. […] As usual, there have been many problems at the Rezidensteater [sic], an astonishing amount of scheming, friction and all kinds of devilish plots. For a while, it looked as if neither I nor RAIN SNAKES would be produced in the spring. But now the air has been temporarily cleared and we begin rehearsals in mid-March. I’m reading H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales, Johanna Luise Heiberg’s memoirs, Enquist’s Sekonden and other nourishing and good books. I’m also struggling with one of your older colleagues, a certain Mr. Shakespeare, who has written an uncommonly tricky piece entitled King Lear.

In Germany, Bergman had previously mostly directed classics such as Ibsen, Molière, Strindberg and Chekhov, but now, he revealed in an interview, he thought it would be “fun to stage a play by a living Swedish playwright,” and he concluded that, “I was delighted, this was about something I have always been interested in: art, love, life and death”. However, he did not expect much from the reception: “I have just read Süddeutsche Zeitung’s positive treatment of Rain Snakes in Zurich, but I will not get my hopes up. I rarely get good reviews in Munich,” which was true. Perhaps this experience allowed Bergman to better understand Andersen in Enquist’s play.

The first night looked promising. Christine Buchegger made an outstanding comeback as Hanne after having been away from the stage for a few years due to severe illness. According to a Swedish observer, the ensemble, Bergman the director and the author, Enquist, were called back in to take a bow “at least 15 times by the enthusiastic premiere audience”. It meant little to the critics, however, the reviews were as unenthusiastic as ever. One critic wrote that, “historically, it is of course completely without interest […] The Heibergs have been forgotten, and there must be better analyses of Andersen”. So it goes.

Fifteen years passed before they worked together again, but Bergman and Enquist stayed in touch. By telephone, we have to assume, and in writing. The letters are kept in the Ingmar Bergman Archive. Bergman’s memoir The Magic Lantern was published in September 1987. Enquist read it soon afterwards, and wrote the following to Bergman:

Dear Ingmar, I finished your book this morning. You have had a hell of a lot of praise by now, so you don’t need any more. I just want to tell you that it’s a masterpiece. It’s so damned well written, and it says so much about what life can be like, and it’s so touching, and so mean in such a funny way that I close it and think about whether that bastard is perhaps a better author than filmmaker? On the other hand, you would never have been able to make such good films if you hadn’t been such a good author.

When Private Confessions was about to be published in 1995, Enquist could not wait until it had been printed. He grabs a copy of the manuscript from Norstedts, his and Bergman’s publisher, and pens another letter: “You seldom get to read a novel – this is how I see it – that covers so much experience, despair and truth. I think it’s perhaps the best you have ever written, so it’s a shame that you have stopped making films yourself.”

A few years later, in 1997, it is time for Bergman to direct a new play by Enquist, which will premiere at Dramaten. It is entitled The Image Makers. If the topic and the characters in Rain Snakes were in the director’s taste, this came even closer, it was personal. The Image Makers portrays the shooting of the film The Phantom Carriage, in which the film’s director, Victor Sjöström, has invited the author, Selma Lagerlöf, to Filmstaden studios in order to watch some raw footage. The photographer, Julius Jaenzon, and Sjöström’s mistress, the actress Tora Teje, are joining them.

Bergman repeatedly emphasized that The Phantom Carriage was the film that meant most to him. He had also directed two films that featured Sjöström: To Joy and, most memorably, Wild Strawberries.

Bergman read the play in his office at Dramaten. These were his thoughts:

I believed that this is something I can do, I know about this, I have known all these people, some of them intimately, and I know better than anyone what Filmstaden actually looked like. Moreover, The Phantom Carriage is one of my most important cinematographic experiences. I grabbed the play, went down to Ingrid Dahlberg and told her: “I’m the only one who knows how to do this,” so I got the cast I wanted.

This time, the critics were more obliging. Leif Zern wrote in Dagens Nyheter that Enquist had developed into a supremely gifted engineer, and that he in Bergman had been given a director who knew how to give weight to the qualities of the text. This may well have been true, but perhaps the excellent result was not entirely a good thing in terms of the play. Bergman’s unique understanding of the text, his authoritarian direction and, not least, the marketing of his production turned The Image Makers into a work by Bergman, rather than by Enquist. It started even before the premiere with more interviews with the director about the new play than with the author, and it continued on the day the reviews were published: a number of critics wrote more about the direction than they did about the play. For example, in her review in Expressen, Margareta Sörenson analysed the performance against the background of Bergman’s, rather than Enquist’s, body of work. “There is less confrontation and energy from Ingmar Bergman than in all his previous productions. He turns the gaze outwards and to the past, discussing both with himself – I imagine – and with the actors about the actor’s work, about the role of art.”

The Image Makers became more closely associated with Bergman than with Enquist. It was unfair, regardless of how brilliantly the director approached the text – although, perhaps, congenial! The Image Makers is after all about a celebrated film director who engages with the work of a famous author and makes it his own. In the play, Tora Teje in fact complains to Selma Lagerlöf about the tendency of the director to take possession of the text: “They want to tinker without you interfering, they know that the soul of the book is your doing, and they want to tinker with it on their own.”

This may well be true. However, while The Night of the Tribades, Rain Snakes, The Hour of the Lynx and other plays by Enquist are regularly staged throughout Europe, The Image Makers has hardly been performed at all after Bergman’s version. This will hopefully change, but for now, the result of the after all extraordinary Bergman–Enquist collaboration can still be enjoyed in the form of the television drama, which, according to some, is even better than Dramaten’s staging of the play.

P. O. Enquist is one of the foremost Swedish authors of the 20th century. He had a great deal in common with Ingmar Bergman. With both having passed, we can only hope that their conversation will continue; but on the other hand, we have to admit that Enquist was right when he in The March of the Musicians wrote that, “there is always something better than death.”

Jan Holmberg, Director of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation

Actor Jörgen Lindström on The Silence (Tystnaden), life on set, and doing homework with Ingmar Bergman.

Bergman Anecdotes is a compilation of stories about Ingmar Bergman, interviews with people who were close to the director.

More Anecdotes.

Åse Kleveland, former CEO at the Swedish Film Institute, on Bergman, FIAF and the love of cinema.

Bergman Anecdotes is a compilation of stories about Ingmar Bergman, interviews with people who were close to the director.

More Bergman Anecdotes.