The movie Ingmar Bergman wanted to delete from history: “Complete torture”
Ingmar Bergman’s legacy has reverberated throughout decades of filmmaking, with his influence being felt today through his deeply personal and existentialist style. Often grappling with matters most innate to human suffering and the soul, the director created a body of work that examines all aspects of what it means to be alive, looking at damaged psyches, marriages and those experiencing a crisis of faith.
From the mysterious power of Persona and The Seventh Seal to the devastating dissolution of a relationship in Scenes From a Marriage, Bergman has achieved something that so few directors have come close to, adding a surrealist edge to his films by merging the exploration of complex human dilemmas with dream-like sequences. But like many creatives, Bergman is no stranger to the throes of failure and the act of creating something that doesn’t quite land, perhaps with a harsher perception of his work than anyone else and trying to bury one project that he didn’t want to see the light of day.
There are many lost films that cinephiles would sacrifice their first-born child for the chance to see, from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Mountain Eagle to the almost creation of Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon. However, a lesser-known addition to this lost universe is Bergman’s 1950 film High Tension, with the director himself insisting that it should never be screened.
While the director is known for his extremely meditative and introspective style, offering profound ruminations on the human experience and our infallibilities, he branched out in a surprising way with High Tension by trying his hand at the spy thriller.
The director attempted to make what would now be described as a blockbuster, reaching for a high-profit project to boost the Swedish film industry and their financial crisis at the time. While he was known for an opposite style of filmmaking, Bergman apparently had nothing against commercial cinema and was glad to collaborate with the screenwriter Herbert Grevenius.
However, the film’s subject matter concerned itself with the tension of the Cold War, something that Bergman soon found trivial in comparison to the more interior and emotionally complex stories he had previously gravitated towards. The director later wrote in his book, “I met the exiled Baltic actors who were going to participate. The encounter was a shock. Suddenly I realised which film we ought to be making. Among these exiled actors I discovered such a richness of lives and experiences that the unevenly developed intrigue in This Can’t Happen Here seemed almost obscene.”
Soon after, the director begged the head of the Swedish Film Institute to stop the shoot, and much to his dismay, his request was denied. As a result, Bergman’s heart was not in the project, and it was a complete flop at the box office, described as “complete torture from beginning to end”. He was described as doing everything in his power to stop the film from being seen, despite the fact that it was recently uncovered and revealed during a retrospective of his work at the British Film Institute.
As artists, we are often our own worst critics, and it seems as though Bergman’s harsh perception of the film did not match up with the actual quality of the story, but there is no doubt that he is turning in his grave at the prospect of audiences lining up to see it on the big screen again.
