A Day on the Bergmanstrasse

Sweden's most prominent citizen fled into exile last April. "1 was on the edge of madness," says Director Ingmar Bergman. "For the first time in my life, the movie theater in my mind dimmed its lights. I slept without dreams. I was choking ... gasping for air. I had no choice but to flee." Harassed by Swedish tax authorities, Bergman and his wife Ingrid settled in Munich, where he began working on his first non-Swedish film.

The Serpent's Egg is the costliest ($4 million) and most audacious movie Bergman has attempted. It is the story of a Jewish trapeze artist from Philadelphia (David Carradine) who is trapped in the Berlin of 1923, when Nazism was metastasizing. "I am making a horror film," says Bergman.

Last week TIME Correspondent Leo Janos observed the master at work. His report:

At 58, Ingmar Bergman looks like a Levine caricature of himself. His face is a series of exaggerated downward thrusts--from the sloping hooded lids of his gray eyes to the long beaked nose and long chin. Although usually smiling and pleasant, he demands exact preparation and painstaking orderliness. He is on a first-name basis with each member of his German crew, and they with him. Hand-picked as the best film technicians in Germany, they both fear and adore the Swedish director.

Bergman is Teutonically punctual: he begins filming precisely at 9 and stops for lunch exactly at noon; resumes filming exactly at 1 and pauses for a 30-minute coffee break precisely at 2:30. Except for night shooting on the outdoor set, the day ends at 4:30. "I am obsessive about films," he says. "I feel a lust while I'm directing, a definite sexual feeling, but I must always struggle to keep my obsession in control."

Bergman had wanted to make his film in black and white. When the producers resisted, he and his habitual partner, Cameraman Sven Nykvist, found a compromise. Says Nykvist: "Ingmar and I agreed to shoot color in black and white." Although most of the film captures the dark, gray quality of drab Berlin, Bergman has punctuated the gloom with bright and often zany scenes. "After years of crying for him," says Liv Ullmann, who plays Manuela, the nightclub entertainer whom Carradine loves, "Ingmar has finally allowed me to sing and dance." Wearing the scantiest of costumes, Ullmann was ordered to perform badly a bawdy German ballad called I Have a Sweet Bonbon for the audience of the sleazy cabaret called the Blue Mule.

Another sequence takes place in a nightclub lighted by naked bulbs. Here marcelled flappers dance with their tuxedoed escorts. They are the last few who have hard currency from other countries. "They drank fast, danced fast and made love fast," Bergman told the extras, "so have a merry time of it."

The Germans learned quickly about Bergman's need for privacy while filming. Special locks were installed on the doors to the sound stages, with keys supplied to only cast and crew. Behind locked doors, a Bergman set is a calm and quiet place of intense concentration. "On the first day of shooting," reports Carradine, "Ingmar walked me through the scene where I discover my brother's dead body. To dramatize my dazed condition, I was ordered to walk into a closet and sit down. That's when I realized I was in a Bergman picture."

The personification of the actor's director, Bergman will clear the set and spend an entire day in rehearsal if he feels his cast is unsure of a scene On closeups, he stands only inches from the actors' faces, mimicking the gestures and expressions he wants. "He choreographs all my moves," says Carradine, "but he can tell from my eyes or expression if I disagree. Then it is a matter of give-and-take, and he is wide open."

Bergman contends that The Serpent's Egg "was a strange foreshadowing of my future A year before I wrote it, I began to feel that Faroe [his beloved island in the Baltic Sea] was not mine any more. I had always thought that I'd live out my life there. But suddenly I felt that it and my possessions no longer belonged to me. I sensed that I would have to leave. A year later I wrote the script. Two months after I finished it, I was arrested [for tax evasion]. Looking back, I think I knew instinctively that the film would have to be made in Germany and nowhere else. Subconsciously, it was my script of departure."

As a teenager, Bergman, the son of a Lutheran minister, spent summers in Germany with the family of a minister who was a dedicated Nazi. In 1935 Bergman went with his hosts to a party rally in Weimar. Caught up in the frenzy that greeted Hitler's arrival, he shouted "Heil Hitler!" along with the rest. He admits: "I was a real little Nazi when I returned to Sweden after that summer, but the infatuation was short-lived. The period fascinates me; I knew I'd do a film about it some day."

Bergman drew on his youthful experiences for the film's biggest scene, a parade down a re-created Berlin street of 1923 --jokingly called the Bergmanstrasse. The day began dreadfully because the sun was shining for the first time in nearly a week, casting dark shadows over the mock buildings. "We are merely facing a catastrophe," the director said through clenched teeth. Some 450 extras clogged the streets, many crammed uncomfortably aboard antique buses.

In the afternoon, the Bavarian sky finally clouded and the light seemed right. Because it was so late, two scenes were shot simultaneously, Nykvist filming from one end of the street and Bergman from the other. "We don't have to even talk any more on the set," Bergman says of Nykvist, who has worked with him on 18 films. "We instinctively know what we want." Nykvist is hard of hearing in his left ear and Bergman in his right. "When we talk," says the jolly Nykvist, "we look like a pair of geese doing a mating dance."

Finally Bergman's crowd scene got into motion. Using dusk light for dawn, he shot tired Berliners plodding to work at the first light of morning--normality amid pending catastrophe --while buses, trolleys, cars and carts clattered around the curving street. At the other end of the set, Nykvist shot Carradine pushing through the crowds to arrive at Manuela's cabaret at twilight. The realism was enhanced by a cold rain that began to splash on cars and pedestrians. Soon the street lights were turned on and the final take of the parade was in the can. "We did it," said Nykvist. "We did here what we've often done in our Swedish films: we've captured the magical moment, the time when the camera can still record sufficient light to make an audience aware that day has not quite departed. It's the moment when the street lights come on in a city."

Bergman arched the fatigue out of his shoulders and watched the street quickly clear of frozen extras and old cars. He never goes out during filming. He is a television addict who keeps logs on programs (his favorite is the latest Upstairs, Downstairs). "At the end of a shooting day," he says, "I'm often so tired you could put me into a black box. And yet, going home to my family seems a kind of intrusion. I have an urge to stay right here at the studio, sleep on a cot and stay with the project."

He does not in fact do that. He even entertains his cast and crew with movie screenings. Liv Ullmann laughs as she recalls how much Bergman enjoyed Jaws: "We teased him, telling him how a young director like Steven Spielberg worked so hard on the open seas trying to get a mechanical fish to work, while he, ever the lazy director, liked to sit in a room with two women and watch them cry."

One of Bergman's recent screenings was of Nickelodeon, a story about the very earliest days of film making. At the point when Ryan O'Neal, playing an inexperienced director, walks onto a set, confronts dubious actors and crew members and mutters, "What do I do now?" Bergman howled with laughter and shouted, "That's it exactly! That's exactly how I feel'"

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