Latest news with #IngmarBergman
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Dive into the best literary fiction out now; GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann, THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann, ALLEGRO PASTEL by Leif Randt
Girl, 1983 is available now from the Mail Bookshop GIRL, 1983 by Linn Ullmann (Hamish Hamilton £18.99, 272pp) LINN Ullmann comes from impressive stock: she's the daughter of Liv Ullmann and the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman, and she wrote beautifully about both in her 2015 memoir Unquiet. She writes more directly about herself in this novelised work of memory, which pivots on an encounter between a 16-year-old girl (a barely disguised Ullmann) and a much older photographer in Paris in 1983. Sex took place, but Ullmann picks at the event like an angry sore, with her inability to remember precisely what happened as much the book's subject as the event itself. A startling, restless, discomforting piece of work that carefully teases apart rigid ideas about experience and truth, predator and victim. THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus £22, 352pp) THE Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, acclaimed for Westfront 1918 (1930) and The Threepenny Opera (1931) has fallen from popular memory, but Daniel Kehlmann mines fascinating territory in this fictionalised biographical portrait of a communist-leaning artist, who found himself cosying up to the Nazis in order to keep his career afloat during the Second World War. Quite how Pabst regarded the propaganda films he produced is a floating question in this hallucinatory novel, which features walk-on parts for Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks (and a brilliantly chilling, loosely disguised Goebbels) alongside fictionalised aspects of Pabst's life (including a floundering, excruciatingly awful period in Hollywood). Throughout, Kehlmann sustains a pervading sickly sense of reality sliding perilously close to nightmare, which is quite possibly how the very private, principled Pabst came to regard his own life. ALLEGRO PASTEL by Leif Randt (Granta Magazine Editions £12.99, 320pp) 'JEROME didn't want to schedule too much during the day. He had noticed with relief very early on in their relationship that, like him, Tanja felt the strong need to regularly withdraw silently to her laptop.' I chose this quote by opening the book at random, but it sums up pretty well both the style and content of this lauded German novel about the relationship between a Berlin-based writer and a website designer living the painstakingly curated lives of your standard globalised millennial. The toneless deadpan sentences take on a strange comic energy as Randt details the relentless self-absorption of two people who paradoxically appear to have no meaningful inner life at all. Its tough to read, like being forced to stare for hours at an achingly po-faced, self-aware and extended Instagram post – no wonder it's being called a novel to capture the voice of a generation.
New York Times
7 days ago
- Politics
- New York Times
What Is Swedish Culture? An Attempt to Answer Stirs Debate.
What is Swedish culture? Some obvious answers might spring to mind: Abba, the films of Ingmar Bergman, Pippi Longstocking, Ikea. It's an almost impossibly broad question — but one that Sweden's government is trying to answer. In 2023, the government began an initiative called the Culture Canon, with two streams: an 'experts' canon and a 'people's canon.' The first involves academics, journalists, historians and other authorities who will decide on 100 works or other items of cultural importance that have played a key role in shaping Swedish culture. The second will be made up of suggestions submitted by the Swedish public to the Culture Canon website, which can be drawn from the arts or can include everyday activities like the daily 'fika' coffee and cake break or ideas like 'Allemansrätten,' the Swedish right explore nature, even on private land. So far, suggestions include saunas and the plays of August Strindberg, the 1361 Battle of Visby and Björn Borg's five straight Wimbledon victories. A government committee will present a report to the two canons in the summer. Yet even the suggestion of such a definitive list is dividing opinion in Sweden. The Culture Cannon is a pet project of a party with far-right roots that supports, but is not part of the government. Many in the arts scene fear that the results will project a narrow view of Swedish culture, glorifying an imagined past and shutting out the cultural contributions of minorities. Lars Trägårdh, a historian whom the government appointed to lead the project, said in an interview that the Culture Canon would be particularly useful for helping immigrants integrate. Sweden combined a 'wonderful openness to immigration with a complete lack of policies that have been able to bring all these people into Swedish society,' he said. A canon, he added, would provide new arrivals 'with a map and a compass.' The project has its origins in a 2022 agreement between parties that allowed them to form a coalition government after elections held that year. The Sweden Democrats, once considered an extremist right-wing party, came second in the popular vote, and although it is not part of the coalition, it used its electoral success to leverage concessions from the governing parties, including an agreement to set up the Culture Canon. 'Most of the culture world is against the idea of a canon,' said Ida Ölmedal, the culture editor of the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet: 'It's being used as a populist tool to point out what is Swedish and not, and to exclude some people from the concept of Swedishness.' 'But even if it wasn't nationalist, it would still be wrong for politicians to point out what is important culture,' Olmedal added. 'We have a proud tradition of the government financing culture without trying to govern culture — and this is an exception.' Martí Manen, the director of Index, a contemporary art foundation in Stockholm, said the Culture Cannon was 'a tool for a specific political agenda.' In the interview, Trägårdh rebuffed such objections. 'They are not real arguments,' he said, adding that he had no cultural loyalty to the left or the right. 'I joke sometimes, I'm barely cultural at all,' he said, adding that he was brought in because he is a historian who works on issues of Swedish identity, such as in his 2006 book 'Is the Swede a Human Being?', which he cowrote with Henrik Berggren. 'My appointment is predicated on a complete autonomy,' he said. Trägårdh also rejected the idea that a cultural canon would exclude minorities from the concept of Swedishness. 'I don't do representation,' he said, 'I don't give a hoot in that sense, if there are the right number of women or minorities — the important thing is what has actually mattered for shaping Sweden.' Parisa Liljestrand, a member of the Moderate Party who is Sweden's culture minister, said the project had been set up to be independent from government influence and was now 'in the hands of the committee.' It was the committee's job, she added, 'to find out what fields we should have a canon in, and also to establish criteria for selection of works.' One criteria the committee has set for the expert part of the canon is that it can only include entries that are at least 50 years old. This has stirred fears that the results will downplay the importance of cultural output by immigrants, most of whom arrived in Sweden after 1975. 'It's a retrotopia thing,' said Mattias Andersson, the artistic director of the Royal Dramatic Theater, Sweden's national playhouse. 'It's about trying to speak about the Sweden from the '40s, or the '50s, when everyone had the same God, the same impression of what the family is, of how to live your life.' Trägårdh dismissed these objections, too. 'We can argue about whether it should have been 30 years, or 42 years, but the point is that a certain amount of time has to pass,' he said, 'because otherwise we will include things that, four years later, would make us look like idiots.' For all the Culture Canon's critics in the arts scene, there are also those who say it is too soon judge. Victor Malm, the culture editor of the Expressen newspaper, said he was reserving his judgment until he read the final report. If done properly, a defined canon could be a way to 'redistribute the knowledge of Swedish culture throughout society,' he said, by drawing attention to great works of art that bring 'cultural capital' and 'make your life easier.' Sweden is not the only country to attempt such a project: Denmark and the Netherlands, for instance, each established an official cultural cannon in 2006. In both countries, the proposition prompted similar debates as in Sweden about inclusion and the influence of right-wing parties. The canons are now part of the school curriculums there and their origins are not discussed much these days. Despite all the debate over Sweden's Culture Canon in the news media, the public does not seem very engaged. The canon website has received around 9,000 suggestions — a small number in a country of more than 10 million people. In a dozen interviews on the streets of Stockholm, many people had not heard of the project. Those who had said they took a dim view of it, either because they did not understand its purpose or because they viewed it as an initiative of the far right. Trägårdh said he hoped that the upcoming report would be something people could enjoy, rather than fight about. He pointed to a lighthearted promotional campaign from Sweden's national train company, SJ, suggesting places to visit based on suggestions already submitted to the Culture Canon website. 'I'm not bothered what the politicians say, and nor am I particularly bothered by what's going on in the cultural elite,' he said. 'I'm much more excited about this stuff.' 'It's also just kind of fun, right?' he added. 'And we have underemphasized that.'
Telegraph
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Ingmar Bergman's daughter, Linn Ullmann: ‘I am not a traumatised person'
At the offices of her publisher in Oslo, Linn Ullmann is grumbling about the recent trend for 'trauma literature'. It's strange, says Ullmann – the 58-year-old daughter of the great Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman and the Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann – that we seem to have reached a point where 'the only thing that matters about a book is what happened to [the author]. It's turning us all into Victorian virgins and dangerous bogeymen. And that's a very uninteresting way to talk about gender and sexuality.' Ullmann, who is a respected author and journalist in her native Norway, is referring to the kind of book she was determined her latest, a lightly novelised memoir called Girl, 1983, would not be. Slipping between the first and third person, Girl, 1983 is a splintered, elliptical account of the week Ullmann spent in Paris as a 16-year-old girl at the invitation of a 'strung out... in demand, unpredictable' fashion photographer she had met in a lift in New York, and to whom she refers only as K. K had idly promised to introduce her to some of the most prestigious modelling agencies in Paris; when she gets there, in her new blue coat and red bobble hat, she finds herself in the company of other girls, drugs, and several shadowy, threatening men. On her first night in the French capital, she gets lost after a party and, unable to recall the name of her hotel, winds up at K's flat at two in the morning. And yet the book is less about that night – which involves sex, and afterwards, the girl wrapping herself in white towels on the bathroom floor, having just vomited – than about the difficulty of forming an account, so many decades later, of what really happened. Ullmann (who previously touched on the episode in Unquiet, her 2015 autobiographical novel about her father) remains unsure of the extent to which she can trust her memories. 'The girl unravels,' she writes, 'whenever I draw near.' When she first came up against her inability to write about what happened in Paris with any absolute certainty, Ullmann was, she tells me 'so angry with myself! I thought, 'If you are going to write about it, you should remember more.' But once I realised it was OK to write about forgetting, it was no longer a problem.' A former literary critic and something of a public intellectual in Norway, where she lives with her second husband, the writer Niels Dahl, Ullmann peppers our conversation with literary references. These, too, frame her perspective on the events of Girl, 1983, which has shifted over time. 'In a strange way, it followed my experience of reading The Lover, which I've read several times throughout my life,' she says, referring to Marguerite Duras's 1984 novel. 'When I read it in my 30s, I thought it was about a sensual affair. When I read it again recently, I thought, for the first time, 'My God! This is about a destructive sexual relationship between a 15-year-old girl and a much older adult!' To a modern reader, Girl, 1983 is unquestionably about a coercive relationship – K is cruel and controlling – though Ullmann takes care to give the girl her own power. Meanwhile, in the background, an ugly male figure hovers: Z, who many years later will be accused by several women of sexual assault and rape while running a model agency in Paris during the 1980s. Ullmann is quick to point out that she never had anything to do with Z – 'I only found out what had happened after I had nearly finished the book,' she tells me – and refuses either to confirm or deny his identity. Her wariness is partly ethical, but she's also uneasy about her book being packaged as a tidy story of victim and predator. 'My object was not to tell a victim story,' she says. 'I was much more interested – and still am – in the girl. I used myself. I was interested in her desire and her rage. And part of the delight of writing the book was giving her agency. When she sits up at night and he's sleeping, naked, and she compares a part of his anatomy to a snail without a shell – that was fun to write, because it's giving her agency. I'm not sure if that was mine at 16, but now I can give it to her.' She was keen, too, to capture the complexity and contradictions of adolescent longing. 'I wanted to evoke that feeling of being young and being so incredibly full of desire, and wanting him with every fibre of her body – and then the desire goes – and the shame of that.' This brings us to the MeToo movement and the impact it has had on the way we talk about sexual relationships between powerful men and younger women. Ullmann is careful to frame such conversations as a complicated topic that's ill-served by oversimplification. 'There can be assault, but the woman can also feel desire, and this is a conversation that also needs to be had. I wanted to write about those ambiguities.' She goes on: 'Toxic masculinity is a horrible expression. It's being misused. There are toxic women and toxic men, but I don't think it's toxic masculinity when a man opens a door for me or disagrees with something I've said. It's a word that's lazily applied, like 'trauma'. That's a very serious thing. I've never experienced it – I'm not a traumatised person. But some people have three traumas a day... I didn't write a trauma novel and I can't stand it when a 29-year-old says, 'I'm so traumatised because...'' Ullmann looks frustrated. 'It's a very lazy way of thinking. Because of course there's assault. But stupid or rude behaviour isn't necessarily assault.' Ullmann doesn't like speaking much about her parents in interviews beyond what she is prepared to put down in her books. Her mother appeared in 10 of Bergman's films in the 1960s, before the couple split amicably in 1970. Ullmann was brought up by her mother, mostly in America, but she would spend each summer with her father at his holiday home on the island of Fårö, off Sweden's southeastern coast. She and Bergman had planned Unquiet together as a book about getting old, but illness consumed Bergman before they could write it, and it ultimately became Ullmann's homage to him. Like Girl, 1983, it is concerned with the fallibility of memory. 'When we finally sat down with the tape recorder so that I could record him, he already was in the borderland between imagination and fiction and dream,' she says. 'He was the genre I ended up writing in.' She's interested, too, in the ethics of writing about family members. Her mother is a strong presence in Girl, 1983: initially, she refuses to let her daughter travel to Paris, but later agrees, reluctantly. Liv Ullmann is now 86. In the book, part of which is set over lockdown, we see her contact her daughter from her then home in Massachusetts via fax, which is apparently her preferred means of communication. 'My mother and father are public people and I've been in their stuff, so they can be in my stuff,' says Ullmann, both of whose parents wrote books about their lives. 'My mother would always say the female characters she played in [Bergman's] films were versions of him. She has also said that she wished I had portrayed her a little differently [in Girl, 1983], but she knows, she's smart. She's still the most beautiful woman in the world. I'm still a little bit in love with my mother.' Does she think that her mother, during her many years working in the film industry, might have had experiences similar to those her daughter was exposed to in Paris? 'Oh, absolutely,' she says, but refrains from offering further details. She's similarly circumspect about her father, saying only that 'both my parents were raw, wild storytellers. They had that in common. Growing up around people so immersed in storytelling – and in film particularly – was an education in the power dynamic between the seer and the seen.' And so when she wrote Girl, 1983, Ullmann was keen to restore 'the gaze' as much as she possibly could to the girl. 'I don't think K remembers me... and that is a great freedom,' she says. 'He owned this story back then. I own it now.'
Washington Post
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Armand,' a noteworthy debut, dramatizes the school conference from hell
Is 'Armand' getting an international theatrical release solely because Swedish writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel is the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann? On the basis of the movie itself, the answer is … mmmmaybe. Tondel's first feature film (after two earlier shorts) is promisingly weird and provocatively disturbing, but it's made up of disparate stylistic parts that don't always hang together. There's definitely more than nepo-grandbaby gold dust to this debut, which won the Caméra d'Or for best new filmmaker at last year's Cannes, but it may take a few more projects to fully reveal itself.
