by
Liv Ullmann
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I am furious at Ingmar, who lets me go through this, and when the bell sounds for lunch I race out of the studio. To his wife in the corridor I shout in passing that I hate her husband.
Later that afternoon I go to find Erland, a cherished colleague and confidant. I march into his room without knocking, the anger and humiliation still raging within me. Full of aggression, I tell him secrets about Ingmar, lies about him. Reveal that the truth about Ingmar’s solitary lunches is a heap of tabloids he doesn’t want to be caught reading.
Erland has such a strange expression on his face; doesn’t look at me, doesn’t answer me. There is an abrupt silence, and I turn and look in the direction where Erland’s eyes are focused. Ingmar is sitting in a corner wearing a strange little smile, and looking sad.
Standing there, I die a little and exclaim, “This I can’t handle!” I bolt from the room, out of the Film Institute, far out into the courtyard until I see a small crate with a lid. I crawl into it, although I am much too big, pull the lid down over me and decide to stay there for the rest of my life.
Cilla arrives, peers down at me and asks me to come out.
Erland tries to persuade me. But I never want to reappear. I will have to sit where I am forever.
Finally—after a long, long time—Ingmar comes and knocks on the lid.
He waits to open it until I whisper, “Come in.” He asks me, “Do you want to be friends again?” and his face is kind.
Ullmann crawls out and work can continue.
<3
Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences.
I scream with Jenny in front of the camera and feel tremendously relieved afterward.
Think what experience one could bring to one’s work after death, not to speak of the experience it would bring to living.
heh
Jenny has a daughter fourteen years old. Today it is her scene.
The young actress is soft and delicate, with a clear voice. It is easy to recognize Linn in her a few years hence, to discover this with tenderness and wistfulness.
I try to picture to myself how I was when I was that young, but I find that my recollection doesn’t go back that far.
Sometimes I feel an anger that I shall never be her again, soft again, have all life’s potential within me. And before me.
How strange it is to sit looking at her and know that I am close to middle age, to see in her eyes that she doesn’t understand that I, too, am fourteen, and wish only for a short time to be her.
Years pass by so quickly and already form a cleft of time that cannot be recrossed between me and what I once was.
Two little girls are sitting and talking together—but one of them is not seen by the other.
Above all, I had to let go of my objection to the love tribulations of women. The story of Janie's progress through three marriages confronts the reader with the significant idea that the choice one makes between partners, between one man and another (or one woman and another) stretches beyond romance. Is it, in the end, the choice between values, possibilities, futures, hopes, arguments (shared concepts that fit the world as you experience it), languages (shared words that fit the world as you believe it to be) and lives. [...]
[...] It is not the Black Female Literary Tradition that makes Hurston great. It is Hurston herself. Zora Neale Hurston--capable of expressing human vulnerability as well as its strength, lyrical without sentiment, romantic and yet rigorous and one of the few truly eloquent writers of sex--is as exceptional among black women writers as Tolstoy is among white male writers.
[...] one wants to make a neutral and solid case for her greatnes, to say something more substantial than "She is my sister and I love her." As a reader, I want to claim fellowship with "good writing" without limits; to be able to say that Hurston is my sister and Baldwin is my brother, and so is Kafka my brother, and Nabokov, and Woolf my sister, and Eliot and Ozick. Like all readers, I want my limits to be drawn by my sensibilities, not by my melanin count. [...]
[...] "Blackness", as she understood it and wrote about it, is as natural and inevitable and complete to her as, say, "Frenchness" is to Flaubert. It is also as complicated, as full of blessings and curses. One can be no more removed from it than from one's arm, but it is no more the total measure of one's being than an arm is.
on Zora Neale Hurston
[...] In the high style, one's loves never seem partial or personal, or even like "loves", because white novelists are not white novelists but simply "novelists," and white characters are not white characters but simply "human," and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of aesthetics. Such critics will always sound like the neutral universal, and the black woman who have championed Their Eyes Were Watching God in the past, and the one doing so now, will seem like black women talking about a black book. When I began this piece, it felt important to distance myself from that idea. By doing so, I misrepresent a vital aspect of my response to this book, one that is entirely personal, as any response to a novel shall be. Fact is, I am a black woman, and a slither of this book goes straight into my soul, I suspect, for that reason. And though it is, to me, a mistake to say, "Unless you are a black woman, you will never fully comprehend this novel," it is also disingenous to claim that many black women do not respond to this book in a particularly powerful manner that would seem "extraliterary." Those aspects of Their Eyes Were Watching God that plumb so profoundly the ancient buildup of cultural residue that is (for convenience's sake) called "Blackness" are the parts that my own "Blackness," as far as it goes, cannot help but respond to personally. At fourteen I couldn't find words (or words I liked) for the marvelous feeling of recognition that came with these characters who had my hair, my eyes, my skin, even the ancestors of the rhythm of my speech. These forms of identification are so natural to white readers--(Of course Rabbit Angstrom is like me! Of course Madame Bovary is like me!)--that they believe themselves above personal identification, or at least believe that they are identifying only at the highest, existential levels (His soul is like my soul. He is human; I am human). White readers often believe they are colorbind. I always thought I was a colorblind reader--until I read this novel, and that ultimate cliché of black life that is inscribed in the word soulful took on new weight and sense for me. [...]
[...] not having read Wordsworth, yet grasps the soul of that poet as he listens to Forster recount a visit to the Lake District, Wordsworth country: "Grey sheets of rain trailed in front of the mountains, waterfalls slid down them and shone in the sun, and the sky was always sending shafts of light into the valleys." [...]
just a beautiful quote by Forster
[...] It's a cliché to think liking Keats makes you cultured (Larkin and Amis defaced their college copy of The Eves of St. Agnes) [...]
from footnote 4: not sure who this anecdote relates to, but apparently next to the phrase "into her dream he melted" was written "You mean he fucked her, do you?" probably larkin tbh
The young Eliot could exult only in the perfect truths we glean from certain books in our libraries; the mature Eliot had learned to have sympathy for the stumbling errors of human beings. [...]
this fits perfectly into my theories about being an adult! also into killing your heroes
about George Eliot