NCERT Book Class 12 English (kaleidoscope) Non Fiction 3 Film-making

149/FILM- MAKING

3
Film-making
Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of
films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black
and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity
of their content, and a certain brooding presence that
seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is
long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957),
Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960),
The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of
Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last
film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings.
In the following selection, the Introduction to Four
Ingmar Bergman Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman
1918-2007 discusses how he views the art of film-making.

During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the
northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in
the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there
is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in
the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from
time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, rain-
dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety
of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater
jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes.
Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail
over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were
all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, make-
up men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm.
Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky.
Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and
then another, and then several cranes floating majestically