Recently I've been trying to watch, or re-watch, as many Bergman films as I can obtain at the library in Rotterdam. The actresses are all so beautiful in his films. If I could turn the clock back twenty years I would start taking acting classes. Tom Hank's talent agent once asked me if I were an actress and gave me his card. I was eighteen. It took me a few weeks, but I called him and he told me that if I didn't know by then that I wanted to act then I wasn't an actor. I was looking at Max von Sydow playing an emotionally isolated man in The Passion of Anna, and I realized how fully an art acting is. While I sit here in my little house and identify with many of the emotions in his films, and the revelations the actors make, I realize that they are playing a role. It might sound simplistic, but Liv Ullman isn't the sad, conflicted woman she portrays on screen. They play their roles so convincingly I am under their influence, realizing at the same time that they have both led personally fulfilling, artistically rich lives. How marvelous it must be to create such great works of art. To use your face, body, beauty in artistic expression. Perhaps I'm too shy, but my current mood is that acting would be the ultimate for me. If only I'd been more assertive with Mr Maslow. I could have told him about the music video I directed and played in at Mountain View High School in Orem, Utah at 15. Is that young enough? ;-) How remarkable to play a person in anguish, but not to be that person in daily life. Sometimes I think that my life resembles a Bergman film without the opulence, but this isn't a fair comparison, either. Anguish is also a performance you can play for yourself. It can be just as easy to shed it and play a titteringly happy person on the verge of gushing joy.
