VII

		Chapter Five Staging

		I

		To shoot a film is not easy. Even a dedicated professional like Ingmar Bergman can experience the vicious aspect of the process. "For me," he writes, "shooting a film represents days of inhumanly restless work, stiffness of the joints, eyes full of dust, the odors of makeup, sweat and lamps, an indefinite series of tensions and relaxations, an uninterrupted battle between volition and duty, between visions and reality, conscience and laziness." 1 Day after day, a director must move the film along. Actors need cajoling. Crew members need to be instructed so as to produce the desired effect. Thousands of details, some very important, some mere routine, have to be addressed. Decisions must be taken quickly and, inevitably, there are times when the wrong choices are made, when one decides to compromise rather than fight for something, when the body and the mind are simply too exhausted to see clearly and one falls back on automatic for a while. In these conditions, any success at all is taken as a great achievement, a personal triumph one need not be modest about. In any event victory or defeat shooting is more than simply another moment in the construction of a film. It is its very life, its heartbeat, its sculpting. It is a performance that gives birth to an entirely new set of figures. Sergei Eisenstein expressed this very well when he suggested that the screenwriter and the director should not duplicate each other's work, that when "the scriptwriter puts: 'Deathly silence.' The director uses: still