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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.
The year 2018 marked the centenary of an event that was to have a great impact on cinema and theatre history: the birth of Ingmar Bergman in Uppsala, Sweden, on 14 July 1918. In honour of the occasion, celebrations were held around the world to commemorate Bergman’s achievements as a prolific filmmaker and theatre director. From the 1930s until his death in 2007, Bergman wrote and directed many classic works, from the films Sawdust and Tinsel (1953) and Winter Light (1963) to the television series
: Well, then. And how do I begin? You are very attractive. Most attractive. 1 So begins Ingmar Bergman’s screenplay Trolösa ( Faithless , directed by Liv Ullmann, 2000). This dialogue, which is a prologue to the story, is a playful depiction of the author’s creative process in developing a fictional character. Step by step, ‘the voice’ in the scene is given a body, name, and characteristics. In time, she becomes the character named Marianne. How faithfully does this scene
Few Scandinavian artists, among them Ibsen, Strindberg, and Sibelius, have achieved an international renown as great as that of Ingmar Bergman. Victor Sjöström, Mauritz Stiller, and to a lesser degree Georg af Klercker established Sweden in the forefront of the silent cinema, but during an era without television, without air travel, and when films were released only in the ‘civilized’ countries of Western Europe and North America. Admittedly, both Sjöström and Stiller had the courage to take up
In recent years, scholars have been devoting more and more discussion to Ingmar Bergman’s films from a musical perspective. 1 Considering that Bergman himself had a heartfelt love of music, and worked meticulously on the soundtrack of his films where music was often foregrounded as an essential conveyor of narrative information and the character’s emotions, it is odd that his film music has not come in for greater attention before. Of course, this circumstance has also been noticed by other writers. Per F
4.1 The end of conversation: Anna Fromm and Andreas Winkelman (Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow) in The Passion of Anna (Ingmar Bergman, 1969) Smiles of a Summer Night stands out among Bergman's films as a light, farcical chamber comedy. It stands out because to a large
3.1 ‘How can a woman ever love a man?’ Desirée Armfeldt and Fredrik Egerman (Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstand) in Smiles of a Summer Night (Ingmar Bergman, 1955) The terrain charted by the previous chapter, on Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game , placed love at the intersection between what I
‘Ingmar Bergman: 100 Years’ for their helpful responses to the original version of this chapter. It was truly a career highlight to finally meet so many of my academic heroes in Bergman Studies and hear their new work, all in the space of a few too-short days at the University of Lund. Special thanks go to Linda Haverty Rugg, Jan Holmberg, and, of course, the estimable organizer of the conference, Erik Hedling. I am also grateful for the help of John Kirk, formerly of MGM Studios, who provided me with more information on
When I started a PhD on the films of Ingmar Bergman in 2003, I had to select a methodology. I became interested in the theoretical work of Melanie Klein and her followers, not because this theory did away with the complexity of the films, but because of the shared themes and concerns. In particular, there is the shared focus on a bleak view of human nature, coupled with an exploration of the individual’s inner world, and ultimately the possibility of an affirmative path based on the release and
Swedish readers of this book will be familiar with Ingmar Bergman’s last major radio appearance, the 18 July 2004 edition of the talk show Sommar [‘Summer’]. 1 For those to whom this broadcast institution is unknown, Sommar is a long-running Swedish radio show that is aired during the summer months and features a daily almost two-hour broadcast, in which notable Swedes muse over life and select music for the programme, as typically more than half of the programme consists of music