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lngmar Bergman's screenplays are remarkable for their extraordinary vitality and curiously suggestive atmosphere. Reading like short stories and plays, their extensive stage directions are replete with qualitative adjectives and verbs, metaphors, similes, examples of personification, interior monologues, and other non-cinematic features which are not normally found in a genre noted mostly for its terse language, technical information, and line-by-line dialogue. While most directors use cinematic tools such as lighting, camera angle, and soundtrack as a matter of course to emphasize the points of view in their films, Bergman's screenplays, with their exact language and original verbal images, offer an additional, new angle from which to observe his work. Unless the carefully chosen words and phrases of the stage directions are injected into the dialogue of the films, only the reading public will benefit from their information. Therefore, the Bergman film viewer who is also armed with his screenplays may be better alerted to the precise tone and message of the work than the film viewer alone.
The fact that a visual artist like lngmar Bergman spends much creative energy on literary descriptions which will rarely be transferred to the screen raises some intriguing questions about his working methods. Why is the literary aspect of Bergman's work of such great importance to him that he embellishes the screenplays at length and in astonishing detail, even though the writing causes him much agony?1 What is the function of this type of dramatic literature, and how has it arisen? After an outline of Bergman's use of personification and olfactory detail outside of the dialogue, and a discussion of the development of his screenplays over the years, my analysis will focus on two factors which can explain the raison d'être for this unusual kind of screenplay: Bergman's close relationship with his actors, and his philosophy of films as "consumer articles."
Two non-visual devices favored by Bergman, yet largely unobserved by the critics,2 are personification and olfactory information. By endowing nature and objects with human qualities and by specifying the scents that surround many situations, Bergman's screenplays manage to create a haunting atmosphere that exactly reflects the psychological dilemmas of the characters and the oppressive nature of various parts of their lives. The characters and their surroundings appear to be...