Sylvia Ingemarsdotter
Born 1949
Sylvia Ingemarsdotter (sometimes credited as Sylvia Ingemarsson) is a Swedish editor who began working as an assistant at age eighteen on international productions like Sidney Lumet’s The Sea Gull and Susan Sontag’s Dust for Cannibals. Her first theatrical editing credit was on Bo Widerberg’s Man on the Roof, which brought her to the attention of Ingmar Bergman. Ingemarsdotter edited thirteen of Bergman’s films, including , Fanny and Alexander, Autumn Sonata and After the Rehearsal. She has also worked for other directors such as Liv Ullman (Faithless), Lasse Åberg (Sällskapsresan eller Finns det svenskt kaffe på grisfesten), Dusan Makaveyev (Montenegro), Per Berglund (Den demokratiske terroristen), Gunnel Lindblom (Sally and Freedom), and Stig Björkman (Behind the Shutters).
In addition to editing many landmark, popular Swedish films, Ingemarsdotter spearheaded the founding of Sveriges Filmklippare (SFK – the Swedish Film Editors’s guild).
(Ulla Ryghe, who has her own page on this website, edited numerous other films for Bergman, including Through a Glass Darkly, The Silence, and Persona.)
“The editing room was small, miserable and disorganized as it usually gets when different people pass through it in various stages of stressful work and nobody has time to make it comfortable. Since I cannot work in disarray I tried to make the room nicer with the help of a couple of red chairs, a table and cloth and a framed poster from the silent screen. This really made a difference.”
“In my opinion it is seldom you can tell who edited a film because it is a co-operation, but sometimes the director chooses his editor and it works well the first time and so it happens that they continue working together. It has a lot to do with the chemistry between people. It is important that an editor is patient, meticulous, has imagination and intuition. Therefore I believe that a good editor is both born and created through experience.”
-Two excerpts from “Fine Cuts: The Art of European Film Editing” by Roger Crittenden. The full text can be found in the Appendix.
