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[...] . The force comes from the stomach, don’t cheat with your posture. There’s no instrument, never will be, that can render the dynamism Beethoven imagined in his silent world. See, now it sounds lovely. You who have so much beauty in you, you must learn to bring it out. Let’s go on then. Here you have a premonition of what will happen to us twenty-nine bars later; you hardly notice it, but it’s important. No padding in Beethoven, he speaks persuasively, furiously, sorrowfully, cheerfully, painfully, never mumbling. You mustn’t mumble, never produce common stuff! You must know what you want even if it’s wrong. Meaning and context. Go ahead now. That doesn’t mean everything has to be emphasized; there’s a differencebetween emphasis and significance. Now let’s go on, be patient, practise patience. When you want to stop, you have to connect up to a special battery that doubles your effort. There’s nothing so awful as a guilty conscience in art. Stop there. A C. My friend Horowitz went to the piano every morning after breakfast and played a number of C-major chords. He said he was washing his ears.’
I listened to Andrea and thought about theatre, about myself and actors, our sloppiness, our ignorance, the damned common stuff we produce in exchange for payment.
A production stretches its tentacle roots a long way down through time and dreams. I like to imagine the roots as dwelling in the special room of the soul, where they lie maturing comfortably like mighty cheeses. Some, reluctantly or quite enthusiastically and quite often, come into view; others do not emerge at all. They see no necessity to take part in this perpetual production.
This store of slow ideas and swift flashes of inspiration begins to ebb away now, but I feel no sense of sadness or loss.
Sometimes I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films. This is natural and it passes. Most of all I miss working with Sven Nykvist, perhaps because we are both utterly captivated by the problems of light, the gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, spring like, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light. Light.
I high-handedly moved to the Savoy Hotel and swore I was prepared to pay whatever it cost. Lord Olivier offered me his pied-a-terre at the top of a high-rise in one of the more genteel areas of the city. He assured me I would not be disturbed. He and his wife, Joan Plowright, lived in Brighton, and he might spend the odd night in London occasionally, but we would not embarrass one another. I thanked him for his thoughtfulness and moved in, to be welcomed by a Dickensian character who was his housekeeper. She was Irish, four feet tall and moved crabwise. In the evenings she read her prayers so loudly, I first thought it was a service being broadcast through a loudspeaker in her room.
im sorry but this is hilarious
On the day of the premiere, I left London, which I had hated with every fibre in my body. It was a light May evening in Stockholm. I stood down by the North Bridge looking at the fishermen in the boats and their green scoop nets. A brass band was playing in Kungstradgarden. I had never seen such beautiful women. The air was clear and easy to breathe, the cherry blossom fragrant and an astringent chill rose from the rushing water.
Suddenly she took off her concealing sunglasses and said, ‘This is what I look like, Mr Bergman.’ Her smile was swift and dazzling, teasing.
It is hard to say whether great myths are unremittingly magical because they are myths or whether the magic is an illusion, created by us consumers; but at that particular instant there was no doubt. In the half-light in that cramped room, her beauty was imperishable. If she had been an angel from one of the gospels, I would have said her beauty floated about her. It existed like a vitality around the big pure features of her face, her forehead, the intersection of her eyes, the nobly-shaped chin, the sensitivity of her nostrils. She immediately registered my reaction, was exhilarated and started talking about her work on Selma Lagerlof’s Gosta Berling’s Saga.
he's very harsh on her later on in this section but i do like this paragraph
The truth in our interpretations is bound by time. Our theatre productions do indeed disappear into merciful obscurity. But individual moments of greatness or misery are still illuminated by a mild light. And the films still exist and bear witness to the cruel fickleness of artistic truth. A few steles rise above the crushed pebbles.
Now I take you by the arm, my dearly beloved friend, and shake you cautiously. Are you listening to me? You’ve now said those words every day several times a day. You should know that those words in particular entail an appeal to your experience. They have been shaped, laboriously or voluptuously, at prodigious speed or at snail’s pace. Now I shake your arm: you see, I see, I understand, the moment is triumphant, the day has not been in vain, our irresolute life has at last been given meaning and colour. The flabby whoring has been transformed into love. Amazing! Bloody marvellous!
[...] Friendship never depends on promises or protestation, nor on time and space. Friendship is absolutely undemanding, except on one point. Friendship demands honesty, the only demand, but difficult.
[...] perhaps this is what the beginning of true ageing is like. More and more, we lose our way in obscure halls and winding unswept corridors. We talk to each other through faulty local telephones and stumble headlong over a reserve hard to detect.