NCERT Textbook: Non-Fiction: Film-making | Class 12 English Kaleidoscope - Humanities/Arts PDF Download

 Page 1


149/FILM-MAKING
Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making
Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of
films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black
and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity
of their content, and a certain brooding presence that
seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is
long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957),
Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960),
The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of
Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last
film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings.
In the following selection, the Introduction to Four
Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman
discusses how he views the art of film-making.
During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the
northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in
the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there
is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in
the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from
time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, rain-
dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety
of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater
jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes.
Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail
over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were
all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, make-
up men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm.
Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky.
Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and
then another, and then several cranes floating majestically
3 3
3 3 3
Ingmar Bergman
1918-2007
2024-25
Page 2


149/FILM-MAKING
Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making
Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of
films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black
and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity
of their content, and a certain brooding presence that
seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is
long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957),
Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960),
The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of
Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last
film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings.
In the following selection, the Introduction to Four
Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman
discusses how he views the art of film-making.
During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the
northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in
the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there
is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in
the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from
time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, rain-
dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety
of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater
jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes.
Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail
over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were
all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, make-
up men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm.
Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky.
Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and
then another, and then several cranes floating majestically
3 3
3 3 3
Ingmar Bergman
1918-2007
2024-25
150/KALEIDOSCOPE
in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing
and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better.
We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward
and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought:
this is what it means to make a movie in Sweden. This is
what can happen, this is how we work together with our
old equipment and little money, and this is how we can
suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating
above the tree tops.
Childhood Foretells Future
My association with film goes back to the world of
childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment
in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining-room table there,
‘listening’ to the sunshine which came in through the
gigantic windows. The cathedral bells went ding-dong, and
the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way.
One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was
five years old, a piano was being played in the next
apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the
wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved
across the picture the water in the canal began to flow,
the pigeons flew up from the square, people talked and
gesticulated. Bells sounded, not those of Uppsala Cathedral
but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came
from that remarkable picture of Venice.
A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage
acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind
the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages,
baptisms, gave advice and prepared sermons. The devil
was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there
was a need to personify him. This is where my magic
lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a
carbide lamp—I can still remember the smell of the hot
metal—and coloured glass slides: Red Riding Hood and
the Wolf, and all the others. And the wolf was the Devil,
without horns but with a tail and a gaping red mouth,
strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness
and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.
2024-25
Page 3


149/FILM-MAKING
Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making
Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of
films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black
and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity
of their content, and a certain brooding presence that
seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is
long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957),
Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960),
The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of
Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last
film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings.
In the following selection, the Introduction to Four
Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman
discusses how he views the art of film-making.
During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the
northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in
the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there
is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in
the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from
time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, rain-
dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety
of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater
jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes.
Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail
over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were
all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, make-
up men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm.
Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky.
Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and
then another, and then several cranes floating majestically
3 3
3 3 3
Ingmar Bergman
1918-2007
2024-25
150/KALEIDOSCOPE
in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing
and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better.
We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward
and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought:
this is what it means to make a movie in Sweden. This is
what can happen, this is how we work together with our
old equipment and little money, and this is how we can
suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating
above the tree tops.
Childhood Foretells Future
My association with film goes back to the world of
childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment
in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining-room table there,
‘listening’ to the sunshine which came in through the
gigantic windows. The cathedral bells went ding-dong, and
the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way.
One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was
five years old, a piano was being played in the next
apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the
wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved
across the picture the water in the canal began to flow,
the pigeons flew up from the square, people talked and
gesticulated. Bells sounded, not those of Uppsala Cathedral
but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came
from that remarkable picture of Venice.
A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage
acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind
the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages,
baptisms, gave advice and prepared sermons. The devil
was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there
was a need to personify him. This is where my magic
lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a
carbide lamp—I can still remember the smell of the hot
metal—and coloured glass slides: Red Riding Hood and
the Wolf, and all the others. And the wolf was the Devil,
without horns but with a tail and a gaping red mouth,
strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness
and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.
2024-25
151/FILM-MAKING
When I was ten years old I received my first, rattling
film projector, with its chimney and lamp. I found it both
mystifying and fascinating. The first film I had was nine
feet long and brown in colour. It showed a girl lying asleep
in a meadow, who woke up and stretched out her arms,
then disappeared to the right. That was all there was to it.
The film was a great success and was projected every night
until it broke and could not be mended any more.
This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set.
And even today I remind myself with childish excitement
that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based
on deception of the human eye. I have worked it out that if
I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit
through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness—the
blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty
of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take
advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus
with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional
manner—make them laugh, scream with fright, smile,
believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked,
charmed, deeply moved or perhaps yawn with boredom.
Thus I am either an impostor or, when the audience is
willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks
with apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any
entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.
Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think
1. What childhood memories does the author recollect
that had a bearing on his later involvement with film-
making?
2. What connection does the author draw between film-
making and conjuring?
Split Second Impressions
A film for me begins with something very vague—a
chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable
event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few
bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes
2024-25
Page 4


149/FILM-MAKING
Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making
Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of
films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black
and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity
of their content, and a certain brooding presence that
seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is
long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957),
Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960),
The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of
Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last
film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings.
In the following selection, the Introduction to Four
Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman
discusses how he views the art of film-making.
During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the
northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in
the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there
is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in
the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from
time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, rain-
dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety
of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater
jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes.
Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail
over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were
all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, make-
up men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm.
Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky.
Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and
then another, and then several cranes floating majestically
3 3
3 3 3
Ingmar Bergman
1918-2007
2024-25
150/KALEIDOSCOPE
in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing
and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better.
We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward
and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought:
this is what it means to make a movie in Sweden. This is
what can happen, this is how we work together with our
old equipment and little money, and this is how we can
suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating
above the tree tops.
Childhood Foretells Future
My association with film goes back to the world of
childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment
in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining-room table there,
‘listening’ to the sunshine which came in through the
gigantic windows. The cathedral bells went ding-dong, and
the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way.
One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was
five years old, a piano was being played in the next
apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the
wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved
across the picture the water in the canal began to flow,
the pigeons flew up from the square, people talked and
gesticulated. Bells sounded, not those of Uppsala Cathedral
but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came
from that remarkable picture of Venice.
A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage
acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind
the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages,
baptisms, gave advice and prepared sermons. The devil
was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there
was a need to personify him. This is where my magic
lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a
carbide lamp—I can still remember the smell of the hot
metal—and coloured glass slides: Red Riding Hood and
the Wolf, and all the others. And the wolf was the Devil,
without horns but with a tail and a gaping red mouth,
strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness
and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.
2024-25
151/FILM-MAKING
When I was ten years old I received my first, rattling
film projector, with its chimney and lamp. I found it both
mystifying and fascinating. The first film I had was nine
feet long and brown in colour. It showed a girl lying asleep
in a meadow, who woke up and stretched out her arms,
then disappeared to the right. That was all there was to it.
The film was a great success and was projected every night
until it broke and could not be mended any more.
This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set.
And even today I remind myself with childish excitement
that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based
on deception of the human eye. I have worked it out that if
I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit
through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness—the
blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty
of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take
advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus
with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional
manner—make them laugh, scream with fright, smile,
believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked,
charmed, deeply moved or perhaps yawn with boredom.
Thus I am either an impostor or, when the audience is
willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks
with apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any
entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.
Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think
1. What childhood memories does the author recollect
that had a bearing on his later involvement with film-
making?
2. What connection does the author draw between film-
making and conjuring?
Split Second Impressions
A film for me begins with something very vague—a
chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable
event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few
bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes
2024-25
152/KALEIDOSCOPE
in my work at the theatre I have envisioned actors made
up for yet unplayed roles.
These are split second impressions that disappear as
quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood—like
pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story,
but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most
of all, it is a brightly coloured thread sticking out of the
dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this
thread, and do it carefully, a complete film will emerge.
This primitive nucleus strives to achieve definite form,
moving in a way that may be lazy and half asleep at first.
Its stirring is accompanied by vibrations and rhythms
which are very special and unique to each film. The picture
sequences then assume a pattern in accordance with these
rhythms, obeying laws born out of and conditioned by my
original stimulus.
If that embryonic substance seems to have enough
strength to be made into a film, I decide to materialise it.
Then comes something very complicated and difficult: the
2024-25
Page 5


149/FILM-MAKING
Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making Film-making
Ingmar Bergman is a well known Swedish director of
films noted for their starkness, their subtle use of black
and white and ‘shades’ of those extremes, the ambiguity
of their content, and a certain brooding presence that
seems to pervade them all. The list of Bergman films is
long; his best known include The Seventh Seal (1957),
Wild Strawberries (1958), The Virgin Spring (1960),
The Silence (1963), Persona (1967), The Passion of
Anna (1970), and Cries and Whispers (1973)—this last
film in colour, though emphasising red in all its shadings.
In the following selection, the Introduction to Four
Screen-plays by Ingmar Bergman (1960), Bergman
discusses how he views the art of film-making.
During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the
northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early in
the morning, about half past seven. The landscape there
is rugged, and our company was working by a little lake in
the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from
time to time a few snowflakes fell through the grey, rain-
dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety
of clothing—raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweater
jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes.
Our men had laid some ninety feet of rusty, buckling rail
over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were
all helping with the equipment—actors, electricians, make-
up men, script girl, sound crew—mainly to keep warm.
Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky.
Then we saw a crane floating high above the fir trees, and
then another, and then several cranes floating majestically
3 3
3 3 3
Ingmar Bergman
1918-2007
2024-25
150/KALEIDOSCOPE
in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing
and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better.
We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward
and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought:
this is what it means to make a movie in Sweden. This is
what can happen, this is how we work together with our
old equipment and little money, and this is how we can
suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating
above the tree tops.
Childhood Foretells Future
My association with film goes back to the world of
childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment
in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining-room table there,
‘listening’ to the sunshine which came in through the
gigantic windows. The cathedral bells went ding-dong, and
the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way.
One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was
five years old, a piano was being played in the next
apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the
wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved
across the picture the water in the canal began to flow,
the pigeons flew up from the square, people talked and
gesticulated. Bells sounded, not those of Uppsala Cathedral
but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came
from that remarkable picture of Venice.
A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage
acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind
the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages,
baptisms, gave advice and prepared sermons. The devil
was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there
was a need to personify him. This is where my magic
lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a
carbide lamp—I can still remember the smell of the hot
metal—and coloured glass slides: Red Riding Hood and
the Wolf, and all the others. And the wolf was the Devil,
without horns but with a tail and a gaping red mouth,
strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness
and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.
2024-25
151/FILM-MAKING
When I was ten years old I received my first, rattling
film projector, with its chimney and lamp. I found it both
mystifying and fascinating. The first film I had was nine
feet long and brown in colour. It showed a girl lying asleep
in a meadow, who woke up and stretched out her arms,
then disappeared to the right. That was all there was to it.
The film was a great success and was projected every night
until it broke and could not be mended any more.
This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set.
And even today I remind myself with childish excitement
that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based
on deception of the human eye. I have worked it out that if
I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit
through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness—the
blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty
of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take
advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus
with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional
manner—make them laugh, scream with fright, smile,
believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked,
charmed, deeply moved or perhaps yawn with boredom.
Thus I am either an impostor or, when the audience is
willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks
with apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any
entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.
Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think Stop and Think
1. What childhood memories does the author recollect
that had a bearing on his later involvement with film-
making?
2. What connection does the author draw between film-
making and conjuring?
Split Second Impressions
A film for me begins with something very vague—a
chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable
event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few
bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes
2024-25
152/KALEIDOSCOPE
in my work at the theatre I have envisioned actors made
up for yet unplayed roles.
These are split second impressions that disappear as
quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood—like
pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story,
but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most
of all, it is a brightly coloured thread sticking out of the
dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this
thread, and do it carefully, a complete film will emerge.
This primitive nucleus strives to achieve definite form,
moving in a way that may be lazy and half asleep at first.
Its stirring is accompanied by vibrations and rhythms
which are very special and unique to each film. The picture
sequences then assume a pattern in accordance with these
rhythms, obeying laws born out of and conditioned by my
original stimulus.
If that embryonic substance seems to have enough
strength to be made into a film, I decide to materialise it.
Then comes something very complicated and difficult: the
2024-25
153/FILM-MAKING
transformation of rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions,
sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences,
into an understandable screenplay.
This is an almost impossible task. The only thing that
can be satisfactorily transferred from that original complex
of rhythms and moods is the dialogue, and even dialogue is
a sensitive substance which may offer resistance. Written
dialogue is like a musical score, almost incomprehensible
to the average person. Its interpretation demands a technical
knack plus a certain kind of imagination and feeling—
qualities which are so often lacking, even among actors.
One can write dialogue, but how it should be delivered, its
rhythm and tempo, what is to take place between lines—all
this must be omitted for practical reasons. Such a detailed
script would be unreadable. I try to squeeze instructions as
to location, characterisation and atmosphere into my
screenplays in understandable terms, but the success of
this depends on my writing ability and the perceptiveness
of the reader, which are not always predictable.
The Rhythm of a Film
Now we come to essentials, by which I mean montage,
rhythm and the relation of one picture to another—the
vital third dimension without which the film is merely a
dead product from a factory. Here I cannot clearly give a
key, as in a musical score, nor a specific idea of the tempo
which determines the relationship of the elements involved.
It is quite impossible for me to indicate the way in which
the film ‘breathes’ and pulsates.
I have often wished for a kind of notation which would
enable me to put on paper all the shades and tones of my
vision, to record distinctly the inner structure of a film.
For when I stand in the artistically devastating atmosphere
of the studio, my hands and head full of all the trivial and
irritating details that go with motion-picture production,
it often takes a tremendous effort to remember how I
originally saw and thought out this or that sequence, or
what was the relation between the scene of four weeks ago
and that of today. If I could express myself clearly, in
2024-25