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This book on Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman contains eighteen new scholarly chapters on the director’s work, mainly in the cinema. Most of the contributors—some Swedish, others American or British—have written extensively on Bergman before, some for decades. Bergman is one of the most written-about artists in film history and his fame still lingers all over the world, as was seen in the celebrations of his centenary in 2018. The book was specifically conceived at that time with the aim of presenting fresh angles on his work, although several chapters also focus on traditional aspects of Bergman’s art, such as philosophy and psychology. Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy thus addresses a number of essential topics which have not featured in Bergman studies before, such as the director’s relations with Hollywood and transnational film production. It also deals at length with Bergman’s highly sophisticated use of film music and with his prominence as a writer of autobiographical literature, as well as with the intermedial relations to his films that this perspective inevitably entails. Finally, the book addresses Bergman’s complex relations to Swedish politics. Many different approaches and methods are employed in the book in order to show that Bergman remains a relevant and important artist. The analyses generally focus on some of his most memorable films, like Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, and Fanny and Alexander; but some rarer material, including Hour of the Wolf, The Lie, and Autumn Sonata, is discussed as well.
General psychoanalysis has featured prominently in Bergman studies in works by, for instance, Frank Gado, alongside more specific works, such as Don Fredericksen’s study of Jungian dimensions in Bergman’s classic tour de force Persona (1966) and Michael Tapper’s recent study of Arthur Janov’s influence on Bergman. 9 Of course, Bergman’s dark, brooding cinematic style has also been understood and interpreted in religious terms, with Bergman cast as the critical challenger of the Lutheran position that
In The Magic Lantern , Ingmar Bergman reports that when he read Arthur Janov’s The Primal Scream he was ‘extremely stimulated and started developing a television film in four parts along Janov lines’. 1 Bergman also notes that in 1975 he visited Los Angeles and had his agent arrange a meeting with Janov. Bergman remarks that he and Janov were ‘immediately on the same wavelength’ and ‘swiftly tried to get down to essentials’. In light of such facts, it would be unreasonable to doubt that Janov
article on rebirth therapy, explaining the theories of Arthur Janov ( The Primal Scream ) and Frédérick Leboyer ( Birth Without Violence ). 72 The article claimed remarkable advantages for children born using gentler methods: Already children born by Dr Frederick Leboyer’s revolutionary methods, designed to introduce a
became an attraction for intellectuals from various backgrounds. In the mid-2010s, Jitka Vodňanská, a psychologist working in Skála’s team at the Apolinář, recollected that she invited her husband-to-be, the musician Jan Vodňanský, to one of the seminars in 1974. The psychologist Ivan Douda, who later specialised in non-alcoholic addictions, gave a lecture on Arthur Janov’s The Primal Scream , which had been inaccessible at the time in Czechoslovakia. Jan was sitting there with other
this disillusionment with that dimension, which grew in the final year of the Beatles’ career – the final year of the 1960s, after all – fully realised in Lennon’s first solo album, Plastic Ono Band (1970): Lennon’s interest in spirituality bottomed out. An intellectual impulse buyer, by the time of his first solo album in 1970, he had finished with mysticism altogether, his interests taken up with trendy radical politics and a growing heroin habit. In [the song] ‘God’, his consciousness flushed out to a bare minimum by his latest obsession, Arthur Janov’s Primal
. 1.24 Marina Abramović, Freeing the Voice , performance (3 hours). Student Cultural Center, Belgrade, 1975. Only five years earlier, inspired by the American artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz's Self-Destruction performance at the Destruction in Art Symposium in London in 1966, psychologist and psychiatric social worker Arthur Janov published his best-selling book, Primal Scream (1970). 103 Janov