Ingmar Bergman is at the centre of DÄMON. The Swedish director is a recurring reference in your work, already there in Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians…
I discovered Bergman as a teenager on television. My aesthetic and hyper-moral education was made through cinema and painting. By the age of twenty, I had already seen Nagisa Ōshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Federico Fellini’s Feillini Roma, Marci Ferreri’s La Grande bouffe, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, all of Luis Buñuel’s work and—of course—Ingmar Bergman. I did not shape myself through political demands or by referring to moral concepts—what would be “modest” or “proper”—but through confrontation with very free, powerful, and extraordinary works of art. Thanks to 1980s television, my creative spirit was allowed to develop without the slightest hindrance. I must have already been old at twenty because my preoccupations were the same as Ingmar Bergman’s: loneliness, anxiety, ghosts, the fear of death, religion, and the relationship with the mother are things I have carried within me since childhood. Thanks to Bergman, I was able to name them. I think I felt close to his spirit because I went to a school run by nuns: neither the suffering of Christ nor madness were unfamiliar things to me. The first time I used the phrase “pornography of the soul” was when watching one of his films. That idea stuck with me throughout all my creations: the pornography of the soul means talking about what no one talks about at dinner parties. During the Resurrections cycle (Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians; You are my destiny (The Rape of Lucretia); Tandy; and The Gravedigger’s Bride), I would eat breakfast every morning while watching a Bergman film. I heard of his death once again through television, as I was working in Montemor, a small Portuguese village. I started crying. I guess it was love: a love greater than love, like when Johann Sebastian Bach says there exists a joy greater than joy.
Bergman had put to paper every single detail about his own funeral. Do you follow that script in DÄMON?
When I learned that Ingmar Bergman had written the script for his own funeral, I considered it his final work—a work which would remain invisible to us but would embody the same creative force as his stage productions and his films. This script contends with the final demon, which isn’t that of death but of vanity. His final wishes testify to a spiritual strength, an absolute awareness of transience and of the ephemeral, and a complete absence of sentimentality—“all that sentimental magma,” as he put it. The decisions made about his funeral echo the rest of his work. Ingmar Bergman came up with this plan after watching Pope John Paul II’s funeral from his Hammars house on the island of Fårö: a spectacle of great aesthetic intelligence. He then ordered a coffin identical to the Pope’s, but made from poorer material. In the script for his funeral, he went as far as describing how his body should be dressed: brown velvet pants, his red plaid shirt, and a maroon knit vest. No speeches. Ingmar Bergman describes the insignificance of the passage of man in the world. Reconstructing his funeral as a play means inviting the spectators to turn into parishioners, transforming the theatre into a church, giving theatre the power of religion, so that each of us can pray for the salvation of his soul and for our collective salvation. It is to feel pity devoid of sentimentality in the face of the sovereignty of death. It’s an invitation to consider our own insignificance and, at the same time, to contemplate the final work of one of the most influential figures in the history of art.
You say that DÄMON is built not like a tribute to Ingmar Bergman, but like the recognition of the artist’s ghostly presence…
DÄMON means demon in Swedish. Ingmar Bergman used to say that he liked to go on walks in the morning to chase away demons because they do not like fresh air, and that he then put them to work by having them “pull the assault tank.” In the evening, he had no choice but to endure them. The only way to tame them was to put them to work. And even then, he sometimes succumbed to terror. Ingmar Bergman wrote down lists of demons: to be able to identify them, call them by their name, grab them by their genitals, and stick a finger up their ass. One thing that fascinates me about him is his scatology, his obscenity. His memoirs and diaries are essential. To create this play, I decided not to rewatch his films. They are here, in my memory. It’s not about creating a living tableau, but about remembering his films like a dream, a ghost, or a demon who appears and disappears within me. Ingmar Bergman is in me. At this stage in my life, the fear of death has become intolerable. At night, I can feel a knife stabbing into my belly before I fall asleep. I feel that, in a way, I am taking my leave of life, and that soon will begin the exhausting work of extinction. I am terrified of old age, of the degradation of the body and mind. What I most dread is dementia, farewells, being at the mercy of heartless and abusive strangers. Bergman’s demons are my demons. Love means nothing to me anymore, except love beyond love: philosophical or theological love. That is why I want to make DÄMON: because I need to put those demons to work by having them pull the assault tank, because I want to ask a ghost to marry me, because I want to die feeling pity for the human race rather than hate. Like Indra’s daughter in August Strindberg’s A Dream Play: “Poor, poor people!”
For this show, you are working with actresses and actors of the Dramaten, the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden. Why?
Because they are a symbol: a symbol of that “cathedral of Bergman.” One of the actresses—Elin Klinga—even attended Bergman’s funeral when she was younger… One of the actors—Jonas Bergström—whose voice we recorded for the voice-over, witnessed the episode where Bergman struck a critic. One of the costume designers, Erika Hagberg, who often worked on Bergman’s shows, also appears briefly. Nothing looks more like a ghost than a dress: the actors all wear costumes from Bergman’s plays. For myself, I chose a coat worn by one of his actresses. It’s as if we were under the influence of a spell. There are also two young performers. One wears a red costume which, according to what I’ve been told, symbolised the devil for Bergman… The show takes on the air of a grand ceremony, a ritual of witchcraft performed to summon Bergman’s ghost…
Does the youth of those two performers—which contrasts with the idea of ghosts and of a funeral—take on a specific meaning?
Paradoxically, watching young people reminds me of my own death. Ten years from now, I will be seventy. I don’t feel nostalgic for my youth, but when I look at young people, it feels like a dream. I feel terrible compassion for them, thinking about what they will become. Today, my mirror is the elderly, and the image they reflect back to me is terrifying. We all carry on our shoulders friends who have died, who hanged themselves in psychiatric hospitals or threw themselves into the sea. Most have betrayed us. No one has depicted the sad fate of individuals like August Strindberg has. That is why I want those young people to play a scene from A Dream Play, the one play Ingmar Bergman staged most often. In DÄMON, there is a sort of refrain that acts like a hammer blow that punctuates the texts. It is the constant lament of Indra’s daughter, who descends to earth to see what humans are like. Sometimes I feel a bit like her. I was put on the world to experience human misery and tell about it. I am missing a layer of skin. Everything hurts me more, which allows me to see people’s true intentions, the worst that human beings can do. I remember that when we performed Liebestod at the Dramaten in September 2023, I often talked to Bergman’s ghost in the theatre’s hallways.
Interview conducted by Moïra Dalant (March 2024) and translated to English by Gaël Schmidt-Cléach