This weekend Anna and I traveled back to St. Louis to visit families and see a friend off to Great Britain. We had the opportunity to celebrate our anniversary and my graduation with many friends.
We also watched Wild Strawberries, “A film by Ingmar Bergman.” I’ve been reading recently about how film directors and writers were on equal footing until a transition through the 1920s/30s to directors being auteurs of the film making process, leaving screenwriters to only care about “the pitch” to producers. After that, their job was done. The change involved the expansion of Hollywood into a global model, bringing along with it a standardization of script format as per Hollywood’s methods. This left less creative work to the screenwriters because they had fewer ways of conveying their script and what it meant. Earlier, for example, a screenwriter could write a script with poetry or use the space of the page differently.
One of the signs of the transition, Jean-Pierre Geuens points out, was when directors began crediting their films as “A film by [director],” which screenwriters were outraged by, because the directors were claiming the creative vision and purpose of the film was determined by the director, when screenwriters, naturally, would claim they were at least the catalyst, and likely the most important part of a film’s meaning and existence. Earlier, though, it was the opposite; screenwriters of the Hollywood studio model were the only creative talent, and directors simply ported the screenplay into visual images. Directors were mechanical devices. I would say the director is only the last person to position the artistic purpose begun by the screenwriter. In any case, this change of directors into masters of their films left screenwriters little care beyond their script being bought, and pushed screenplays to be action- and dialog-driven in order to sell, instead of walking through the script and working with directors to “make their dream a reality,” as they say.
But Wild Strawberries is a film by Ingmar Bergman. Written and directed.
