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I hav e o nce or twice in my l ife toyed with the idea of commi tting suicide. - Ingmar Berg ma n, The Magic Lantern (1988)
This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. -James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son" (1955)
In 1959, James Baldwin traveled to the studios of AB Svensk Filmindustri (or Svensk Filmindustri), outside Stockholm, Sweden, to interview the acclaimed filmmaker Ingmar Bergman for Esquire. The fr uit of that visit was published as "The Precarious Vogue of Ingmar Bergman" in April 1960. T he profile was reprinted in 1961 in his collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, as "The Northern Protestant."
Baldwin-by then no stranger to Europe-was deeply impressed by the legacy of the Svensk Film Industr y, as he calls the company in the piece, which he notes as one of the oldest in the world. In particular he was impressed by how the Scandinavian setup afforded Bergman so much liberty. "[Bergman] is one of the ver y few genuine artists now working in films. He is also, beyond doubt, the freest" (Nobody 164). Unlike American directors, and unlike Baldwin, so much was already made available for Bergman; no one second-guessed the auteur's casting; the money was there, even though "most of his twenty-odd movies were not successful when they were made" (165). Other directors brought in the money, while Bergman brought in the prizes and the prestige. Hence the "Vogue" of Baldwin's original title.
At the time, Ingmar Bergman was for ty-one, James Baldwin thirty-five. T he two artists seemed to get along well, and although Baldwin suffered from a cold and Bergman therefore acted solicitously toward him ("Can I do anything? . . . I know what it is like to be ill and alone in a strange city" [167]), with the economy of a good fiction writer Baldwin makes it abundantly clear that there was something a bit aloof and distant and locked inside about the grand master, something for which he had acquired a reputation. Indeed, his temper was as internationally famous as was he. Later in life, Bergman himself would joke about his...