It fell to the beauteous Ingrid Thulin to do all the dirtiest work in Ingmar Bergman movies, from their first collaboration, Wild Strawberries (1957), all the way to their last, After the Rehearsal (1984). By the time she first worked for Bergman on film, Thulin was married to Harry Schein, the head of the Swedish Film Institute and a harsh critic of Bergman’s work, particularly his work in the theater. It could be said that Bergman had Thulin do so many daring and crazy and self-destructive and abject and disgusting things on screen as a way of getting back at or taunting Schein, yet that is probably too simplistic a view.
There is a sense in their collaboration, almost from the beginning, that it is Thulin herself who is leading Bergman into areas of the utmost morbidity, that she has sensed this strain in his creative character and is challenging him, as if to say, “Oh, you want to go there with this? I can go much further.” There is also a sense, sometimes, as in their most characteristic work, Winter Light and The Silence, both released in 1963, that Bergman has given up on whatever sadistic intentions he had and is allowing Thulin to go so far with her own creative masochism that he has gradually started to concede control to her, particularly in the famous long take in Winter Light where her clinging, repulsively loving schoolteacher character Märta commands the camera and talks about the eczema on her hands. The most unsettling thing about this scene is that Thulin is set up to stare directly into the camera, yet she chooses to have Märta look inward as she speaks, so that her eyes reflect nothing but her own hideous inner life and do not reach out either to the audience or to the man she is addressing (Gunnar Björnstrand).
Thulin said in interviews that she always worked lightly with Bergman, even when they were staging the most grotesque or upsetting scenes, and there is a kind of bleak humor in Winter Light if you look for it. How you view Thulin’s Märta might depend on where you are in life. When I saw this movie in my youth, Märta seemed like everything you might want to avoid, but in watching it recently, I really don’t think she’s all that bad, and Björnstrand’s pastor criticizes her unfairly. (When he says she is imitating his dead wife, poor Märta cries, “But I never even met her!”) Bergman movies are filled with people ripping each other apart verbally, and we are likely meant to take most of what they say seriously, but that doesn’t mean we can’t question some of their gleefully mean condemnations of each other.
In 1982, Thulin wrote and directed an autobiographical film about her youth called Brusten himmel, or Broken Sky, and she portrays herself at age 13 as voyeuristic, worldly, and stoic, drawn to her irresponsible and sexy drunk of a father (Thommy Berggren), but aware already that he is useless. There is a scene here where the young Erika (Susanna Käll) asks her father for his best piece of knowledge, and he tells her, “Life is meaningless.” Unimpressed, the very mature Erika replies, “That’s not really knowledge.” The little-seen Brusten himmel is very revealing in that Thulin is showing us that her father was a man much like Bergman, her most famous collaborator, and she was drawn to his anti-social nihilism but also critical of it.
Thulin had large features: big eyes, a big, wide mouth, a large jaw, a large nose, a perfectly sculpted forehead, and a big-boned, commanding body, everything outsized. Bergman reveled in this physical abundance of hers, yet when she went to Hollywood to make Vincente Minnelli’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), Thulin said she was relentlessly worked over by the make-up people who complained of all these large features and tried to obliterate them. Even worse, the studio decided to dub her voice throughout with the voice of Angela Lansbury; it is hard to imagine a situation where an actor from Europe was more thoroughly reduced by a Hollywood job, and Thulin mainly avoided English-speaking roles thereafter, staying within the Bergman troupe as Lead Masochist and making films in Italy, a country she lived in and loved.
When we first see Thulin in Wild Strawberries, she smiles sweetly as she greets her father-in-law Isak (Victor Sjöström), but once she gets in a car with him to travel to an awards ceremony, Thulin’s dark eyes get sadistic as she tells Isak how much his own son hates him: “Shall I be frank?” she asks, smiling at him. Yet when they visit Isak’s very aged mother, Thulin lets us see in silent reaction shots that the woman she is playing is sensitive and open-minded, and this very much feels like her decision, since nothing in Bergman’s screenplay allows for this sort of complexity for her character; she stares inward, as only Thulin can, as her character considers the things this old woman is telling her about life. In moments like these, Thulin shares with us the sense of her consciousness being a kind of hell, which explains but does not excuse the moments when her characters lash out.
She had a bloody miscarriage on screen in the first scene of Bergman’s So Close to Life (1958), and Bergman keeps her face in extreme close-up so that every pore of her skin is visible as he greedily eats up her despair. Thulin dressed in male drag for most of Bergman’s The Magician (1958), and she makes for a convincing and very beautiful boy as she strides across rooms with confidence as a strolling player who is on the run with her husband (Max von Sydow).
Thulin happily obliterated her own beauty for Märta in Winter Light, wearing glasses and an unflattering bulky coat and hat, and she gave her all to the role of the dying lesbian translator in The Silence, both dying of the heat and actually dying, in love with her own sister, betrayed by her own body but taking a moment to try for the pleasure of masturbation, a scene that was shocking in 1963. Even more shocking was her appearance in Mai Zetterling’s very controversial Night Games (1966), in which she did a sexual scene with a young boy playing her son that appalled former child star Shirley Temple, who denounced the film as “pornography for profit.”
Thulin went fully nude for the role of the haunting Veronica Vogler in Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (1968), but she took on maybe her most demanding lead role for Bergman the following year in a frightening TV film called The Rite in which she played an absolute mess of a variety performer under some kind of interrogation, neurotic, frightened, prone to lewd outbursts and hyperventilation, spreading her legs and taking her panties off for the interrogator almost by rote, and then presiding over his own humiliation with her husband and her lover. This Thulin woman has an open face and beseeching eyes, and she couldn’t be more different from Märta in Winter Light, even though she says that she, like Märta, suffered from a maddening physical ailment that left her skin itching for years on end. We don’t even find out if her name is Thea Winkelmann or Claudia Monteverdi, because she is both, and neither.
Thulin seemed more than ready to take on the challenge of shifting and unstable identities that pre-occupied Bergman from Persona (1966) on and led him into a series of masterpieces that culminated in Cries and Whispers (1972), in which Thulin played the ultra-repressed sister in black who cuts her own vagina with a piece of glass just to be able to feel something and then smears the resulting blood on her face to shock her husband. At this point, audiences were aware that if Thulin appeared on screen she was very likely to smash some taboo or scandalize some notion of morality, and it seemed clear that Bergman was aroused in every sense by Thulin’s propensity for exploring the subjects of self-loathing and perversity to their lowest depths.
Thulin did two Nazi sexploitation movies, one tony (Luchino Visconti’s The Damned {1969}, where she is raped by her own son {Helmut Berger}), and one trashy to such an extent that it set new standards for extreme filth on screen, the large-scale Tinto Brass picture Salon Kitty (1976), where she performed a cabaret number with one side of her face made up as a man and one side as a woman. Finally, she appeared one more time for Bergman on television in After the Rehearsal as a mess of an aging actress named Rakel who asks her former lover and director (Erland Josephson), “Why do you force me to take a part with only two lines?”
“I rot little by little,” says Thulin’s Rakel, gloatingly, before displaying her thighs and naked breasts and crying over her aging face. Rakel speaks of masturbation and claims that her skin now “pours out some moisture that smells like shit,” and so this is a small movie where she is allowed to dominate with a sort of “Thulin’s Greatest Hits” approach that is both characteristic and repellant, but just try to look away. She was semi-retired after that and died in 2004 in Sweden at the age of 77.
In a 1969 interview in French to promote The Damned, Thulin admitted, “I don’t exist, because I’m an image in the mind of an actor, you know? I already have the sensation that I’m not there. But I’m a bit crazy.” So it sounds like Thulin had much in common with Bergman and his notions about reality and character and how it can come to seem unconvincing, which is maybe why she had to do so many violent things to herself on screen just in order to feel something, anything.
Sometimes people do the worst things in life in order to prove that such bad things still exist, that they themselves exist, and that their suffering has some meaning. It took Thulin’s daring to make all this happen, so that it is easy to imagine, say, Isabelle Huppert looking at Thulin’s collected works and thinking, “Yes…that’s right…and I can take it even further.”
PS: Here is Sheila O’Malley’s very sensitive video essay about Thulin for The Criterion Collection: