He also wrote another autobiography,
in 1886. He called it that because his wifesorry, Freudian sliphis
had been his father's housekeeper. She had given illegitimate birth to the first couple of children before Strindberg was born in wedlock. Part of the film will be based on his writing about his childhood. I'm going to illustrate his life from his birth up to 1875 when he first meets Siri von Essen, which is fantastically romantic. That is where the film will stop. The film will
start when he
Siri von Essen and, based on
will wend a certain course. And I'm also going to center on the period when he wrote
. It's going to be so tremendously complex, and not knitted togetherI'm not looking for the bridges. I've done a script. I just wrote letting things come, jumping backward and forwards between the three periods just to see what fell against what. I've deliberately forced only one meeting of the structures during the body of the film: when he divorces Siri von Essen, his mother dies in his childhood. But the other events will come where they come. It's really exciting; it means that in the editing, when the stuff starts to drop together, there'll be all kinds of complex relationships.
There's another layer I haven't told you about yet. It's an important part of all this, the sociological part. I'm going to trace the development of the increasing rigidity of Stockholm as a city. Now
I'm expert on!
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A really fantastic historian is helping me trace the development of the Stockholm press and the way the structure of information
settled into a pattern by the 1860s, and had become completely commercialized by the 1880s. I'm indirectly laying that against a social tracing of the increasing rigidity of the social pattern of Stockholm, which was never a free city. It was a city ruled by the king. Kings have played an extremely autonomous role in the Swedish society, and the Swedes have rarely looked at that. They always go goo goo over the king, like we do in England. Well, in the film the king is going to emerge as something of a tyrant. Swedish kings interfered strongly in politics, and several were really reactionary.
Stockholm was an agricultural city dominated by the court; there was a large underprivileged class. Very rapidly it was hauled into the industrial eraprobably more rapidly than any other city in the Western world. Within fifteen years, heavy production came in, and so on. And the Swedish soul began to developunfortunately, the modern soul. The city became more and more rigid. The police force developed. By 1879, the city was broken up into zones of control, which interestingly is just about when the press had become spatially systematized. Each zone contained ten thousand people, and there was a guy in charge of registering the population. This was seen as a more sophisticated censor processoops, sorry, another slip
process; they registered the birth, death, and occupation of every person within each district. They also listed prison sentences, and other reported irregularities in moral behavior. From this time on, you can look at the way juvenile delinquents are treated, the increasing stress on more penal sentences. I won't bore you, but there are so many things that you can see are part of the development of 'modern civilization.' The town is architecturally destroyed. Stockholm is a fantastic model for how our society's completely fucked itself up with more and more structures and blocks. And, of course, there's also what the words of the news stories are
which will add other complexities.
I'm even going to try and talk about cutting rhythms at a certain point in the film. I may try and cut a sequence one way, and then cut it another waynot just for the didactic hell of that, but to try and flow a bit with Strindberg's own decentralization as a person. Do we need a center inside ourselves or don't we? Strindberg was so all over the place that one could theorize that he never really had an internal center to his psyche, which was both a strength and, unfortunately, a weakness for him. He suffered all his life, and he could never really flow with his relationship with Siri von Essen. At the same time, he was always trying to break out of conventional structures, particularly in his plays. He made highly condensed, highly charged pieces, where a lot is done just
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with looks or one short sentence. He does in a few sentences what people had spent pages doing before. So he's breaking out of convention, but he's trapped by it, because he's quite a bourgeois man in many ways. He's very trapped by money, although he never had much.
This film will be far less syrupy than the Munch film. I don't identify with Strindberg the way I did with Munch, and there's no point in doing the same film again anyway. I've done a lot of developing since I made the Munch film; that was in 1973. And I really want to work with all this media stuff now. I want to create abysses into which people can fall and tumble where they want; if I can ever do that in a film, then I'll stop making filmsI'll have arrived. I do think there's a self-terminating point. I'm not in love with film anymore, and that's one of the most liberating things that's happened to me. I don't need it as a means of expression. In fact, if I could be a professional researcher for the rest of my life, I'd probably do that. I love doing research. Film is not my 'high' anymore.
I would hate to see you out of film. Your films are some of the few that are based on serious research. The Munch film is as powerful as it is, partly because you clearly know as much about Munch as anybody alive. The film is not a fantasy about Munch, it's an attempt to deal with material that took a tremendous effort to compile.
But, you understand the trap there, which is the trap we've been talking about. The more I become an 'expert,' the more I am creating for people their image of Edvard Munch. A well-known historian of Strindberg (he's a very nice guy who's been very helpful) said to me, 'Well, I must say'and he meant this as a compliment'I must say, your
is what Edvard Munch is to me now.'' I was really happy that he said that, but I thought to myself afterwards, 'Ugh! God!'
