Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Egil Törnqvist: 1932-2015
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 B & Co.
- 2 William Shakespeare, King Lear
- 3 August Strindberg, Miss Julie
- 4 August Strindberg, A Dream Play
- 5 William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- 6 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
- 7 Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade
- 8 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
- 9 Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt
- 10 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
- 11 J.B.P. Molière, The Misanthrope
- 12 Euripides, The Bacchae
- 13 August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata
- 14 Friedrich von Schiller, Mary Stuart
- 15 Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts
- 16 The Serious Game
- Production Data
- Bibliography
- DVD list
- Index
- Also by Egil Törnqvist
- Frontmatter
- Egil Törnqvist: 1932-2015
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 B & Co.
- 2 William Shakespeare, King Lear
- 3 August Strindberg, Miss Julie
- 4 August Strindberg, A Dream Play
- 5 William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- 6 Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
- 7 Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade
- 8 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House
- 9 Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt
- 10 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
- 11 J.B.P. Molière, The Misanthrope
- 12 Euripides, The Bacchae
- 13 August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata
- 14 Friedrich von Schiller, Mary Stuart
- 15 Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts
- 16 The Serious Game
- Production Data
- Bibliography
- DVD list
- Index
- Also by Egil Törnqvist
Summary
Most directors have opted for one or a few artistic media: theatre, film, radio, television, opera. B opted for them all. But two of them took precedence: theatre and film. His comparison of the former to his wife, the latter to his mistress, has become legendary. There was always a close connection between the two, between his work for the stage and his work for the screen:
My films are only a distillation of what I do in the theatre. Theatre work is sixty percent…. Not even considering the connection between The Seventh Seal and my production of Ur-Faust (although they came about in the reverse order). Not even considering the connection between The Face [The Magician in the U.S.] and my production of Six Characters in Search of an Author in Malmö. (B in Sjöman, 1963: 102)
Seven years later, he declared: “Between my job at the theater and my job in the film studio it has always been a very short step indeed. Sometimes it has paid off, and sometimes it has been a drawback. But it has always been a short step between” (B, 1973: 99).
As a stage director B was living with a particular play in heart and mind for long periods. Many of these plays left traces in the films. The Seventh Seal grew out of a play, Wood Painting. Smiles of a Summer Night “is constructed like a piece by Marivaux – in the classical 18th century manner” (B, 1973: 66f.). Through a Glass Darkly is “a surreptitious stage-play” (ib. 163). Winter Light took shape in his mind as “a medieval play” (B, 1994b: 258). B himself made a stage version of his TV series Scenes from a Marriage and many of his films have later been adapted into stage plays.
As a film maker, Marianne Höök claimed, B “is always primarily the man of the theater who distrusts technical shortcuts, relying solely on the human being and the spoken word” (Cowie, 1992: 300). There is much to be said for the view that “no other film director after the breakthrough of the sound film has been so influenced by the theatre” (Zern, 1993: 59). B's theatrical orientation is further corroborated by his frequent use of stage or stage-like performances in his films (Koskinen, 1993: 155-262).
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- The Serious GameIngmar Bergman as Stage Director, pp. 13 - 24Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2015