Admiring Bergman, and staring back

In this centenary of Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish director’s admirers — both professional and personal — have been traveling the world, bringing him to life by telling tales etched in their memories.

He wasn’t exactly an easygoing man, said Katinka Faragó, who has been described as his “right hand.” Faragó has been in the Bay Area since late last week, speaking and being interviewed at Bergman-centric events hosted by the California Film Institute, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive and San Francisco State. She worked with the filmmaker for more than 30 years, beginning in a menial role while she was a teenager and serving eventually as script supervisor, production manager and producer.

The first event on her busy Bay Area agenda was dinner on Friday, Nov. 2, at the home of Honorable Consul General of Sweden Barbro Osher and Bernard Osher.

Place cards indicated we were dinner partners, and as we sat down and said hello, I asked how she had met Bergman. “Is this an interview?” she asked. From the tone, it sounded as though she wasn’t exactly ready for that, so I closed the cover of my notebook, which was in my lap.

But after what seemed like a rebuff, she described going to meet him, and the advice she’d been given by other staffers who’d known him well. “If he stares at you, you stare back. If he spits at you, you spit back.” I opened my notebook and started scribbling, as the conversation lurched forward.

In 1960, five years after she came to work with Bergman, she recalled, James Baldwin went to Sweden to interview Bergman for Esquire magazine. “He had a cold,” she said. “Bergman said, ‘I am not going to see him.’ ” (Almost 60 years later, she said, she still feels uneasy — worried about her boss’ disapproval — when she has to cough.)

So Bergman “didn’t do the interview the day they had said. Absolutely not.” Instead, he asked Faragó to take Baldwin to a projection room in the studio and show him the 1913 silent movie “Ingeborg Holm,” and to translate into English its titles, which were, of course, in Swedish. The movie, a tragic tale about the misery of a poor family, was so moving, she said, that she started to cry. Overcome with emotion, she was unable to translate, she said. “I am sorry,” said Baldwin, “could you please tell me what’s going on?”

The Baldwin profile that came out of their initial conversation was forwarded to me by Amanda Doxtater, a Scandinavian scholar at the University of Washington, who was at the dinner, too. Baldwin paints a vivid picture of Bergman. When the writer and subject meet, Bergman is solicitous about Baldwin’s flu, and then gets right to the point: “Well, are you for me or against me?”

The writer also quoted an unnamed woman he describes as having worked with the filmmaker for several years. “He’s improved,” she says of Bergman, “but he was impossible. He could say the most terrible things, he could make you wish you were dead. Especially if you were a woman.”

In conversation, Faragó described watching Bergman and the director Andrei Tarkovsky (for whom she worked later in her career), walking past each other at the Filmstaden, where they were both working. Bergman had expressed an eagerness to meet Tarkovsky, who had moved to Sweden from his native Russia. But walking by each other, neither so much as acknowledged each other’s presence.

It was a lavish dinner on an enclosed patio high up in an apartment near downtown. All around us was the glimmer of lighted windows, and a bit farther away, silhouettes flickering around the Jim Campbell sculpture atop the Salesforce Tower.

Near its end, Faragó clinked on a glass to call the guests to attention. “I am just trying to prove that I am not mute,” she said, “by saying thank you. I’ve been so well taken care of.” And then, it was that time when the guests stand up, collect themselves and prepare to go home and put on their pajamas.

“You must be jet-lagged,” I said to the guest of honor, who’d arrived from Europe the day before. Definitely not, she said.

Woman at a yoga and music festival in Squaw Valley, overheard by Rick Sylvester “I visited all the booths and engaged in several superficial conversations, my favorite type.”