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Conversation with Bibi Anderson

19 mai 1966
03m 02s
Ref. 00038

Information

Summary :

Conversation with Bibi Anderson on Ingmar Bergman's latest film, Persona, and on the influence that this director, with which she shot eight films, has had on her.

Media type :
Vidéo
Broadcast date :
19 mai 1966
Source :
ORTF (Collection: JT 13H )
Personnalité(s) :
Raymond Thevenin / Bibi Andersson / Ingmar Bergman
Themes :
Places :

Context

At the age of 31 years old, Bibi Andersson was already a well known actress in Sweden. But this was especially through the roles of pretty-faced young girls in 1950s films. Vilgot Sjöjman gave Bibi her first serious role in The Mistress, in which she won the Best Actress award at the Berlin Festival. Ingmar Bergman had discovered her when she was 15 years old in a soap commercial, and had hired her for 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night, 1957's The Seventh Seal and even Wild Strawberries, which came out that same year, and also for plays that he staged in Malmö and Stockholm theatres.

In 1965, he trusts her with her first main role in Persona. Her duo with Liv Ullmann is one of the highlights of Swedish cinema. Andersson plays Alma, a nurse in charge of a theatre actress suffering from mutism. Isolated on an island, the two women gradually have an attraction-repulsion relationship. Although she had a diaphanous physique, she was nevertheless cast for the role and won a Guldbagge (Swedish César), which opened up doors to an international career (we saw her work later on with John Huston and Robert Altman).

Charlotte Garson

Transcription

Raymond Thevenin
Bibi Anderson, it's quite unusual to find you here, in Paris, with us. But I think that this time, you've come here for a very very official reason?
Bibi Anderson
Yes. I'm going to speak Swedish with the assistance of... [Swedish] I'm here for a very precise goal which honours me very much. For an exhibit that is perhaps the largest one, which was organised in Sweden.
Raymond Thevenin
So you are the envoy of the king of Sweden but you are also the film actress that we know. Bibi Anderson, you're most notably the star of Ingmar Bergman's very last film entitled Persona. What is Persona?
Bibi Anderson
[Swedish] It's a film that only has two roles, two female roles. I cannot give you any more details on the film. I don't want to do it. In addition, it's very difficult. But it's a film that was very important for me, because it's a film that covers a very important theme: the theme of man's identity, and of the possibility of bringing humans together.
Raymond Thevenin
Between the eight films that you've shot for Bergman, which one stands out the most for you?
Bibi Anderson
[Swedish] It's Persona.
Raymond Thevenin
But Bibi Anderson, don't you get the impression that these roles, most of the roles you've played for Bergman have influenced you a bit as far as acting is concerned?
Bibi Anderson
[Swedish] What do you mean exactly by acting? In theatre? In film?
Raymond Thevenin
The profession of acting.
Bibi Anderson
[Swedish] Of course they have influenced me. [Swedish] What I mean is that I've been influenced by Bergman's ideas on theatre and on cinema even if I haven't been influenced in the human sense, if you will, in all of the roles.