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about manipulating, and he doesn't go as far in his analysis as I might have liked. But he does talk about writers being parasites.
Strindberg married three times, but the first marriage was the main one. His first wife's name was Siri von Essen. She was Swedish-Finnish, and they were married for about fourteen years, though the marriage was breaking up after about ten. He wrote two autobiographies. One was written in 1886; it's called, in English,
A Madman's Defense
. It's this incredible story about his marriage. Strindberg is attacked by feminists as the greatest sexist, but in fact he isn't, if you really think about it. He does really attack his wife, and it's awfulno doubt about it. He's calling her a whore and he's having really paranoid fantasies that she's having affairs with other people, which as far as I've been able to learn, she was not. She put up with murder being with this guy.
They had married in 1876, after a fantastic love affair. She was married to a royal guards' officer who gave her over to Strindberg because he himself wanted a flirtation with his cousin. Strindberg was the knight in shining armor to this woman, also because via him she could get to be an actress, which she couldn't do while married to a guards' officer. A fantastic love affair. The first part of
Madman's Defense
is full of the most amazing lyricism and tenderness, but at the same time, it was
written
when the marriage was falling apart. That in itself sets you thinking. What complex forces were underneath in him?
He also wrote another autobiography,
The Son of a Servant,
in 1886. He called it that because his wifesorry, Freudian sliphis
mother
had been his father's housekeeper. She had given illegitimate birth to the first couple of children before Strindberg was born in wedlock. Part of the film will be based on his writing about his childhood. I'm going to illustrate his life from his birth up to 1875 when he first meets Siri von Essen, which is fantastically romantic. That is where the film will stop. The film will
also
start when he
meets
Siri von Essen and, based on
A Madman's Defense,
will wend a certain course. And I'm also going to center on the period when he wrote
A Madman's Defense
. It's going to be so tremendously complex, and not knitted togetherI'm not looking for the bridges. I've done a script. I just wrote letting things come, jumping backward and forwards between the three periods just to see what fell against what. I've deliberately forced only one meeting of the structures during the body of the film: when he divorces Siri von Essen, his mother dies in his childhood. But the other events will come where they come. It's really exciting; it means that in the editing, when the stuff starts to drop together, there'll be all kinds of complex relationships.
There's another layer I haven't told you about yet. It's an important part of all this, the sociological part. I'm going to trace the development of the increasing rigidity of Stockholm as a city. Now
this
I'm expert on!