A Companion to Ingmar Bergman
"This collective project brilliantly launches Bergman studies forward at least a generation or two. The 35 contributors comprise a Who's Who of prominent and rising-star Bergman scholars diversely and globally."
- Arne Lunde, UCLA, author of Nordic Exposures: Scandinavian Identities in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2010)
"Bergman’s films are not static. They changed dramatically over the filmmaker’s lifetime, and so too our ways of critically analysing them. This superb Companion lays out the tracks of understanding Bergman today."
- Adrian Martin, Film Critic, author of Mysteries of Cinema (2018)
The first book in English to address Ingmar Bergman's cinema through a broad array of classical and contemporary approaches.
A Companion to Ingmar Bergman brings together 32 original essays by established scholars and exciting new voices in the field. Representing a uniquely wide range of approaches in academic film studies and beyond, the chapters that make up the volume illuminate a body of work that changed the way cinema is created, defined, experienced, understood, and interpreted.
Thematically organized into four parts, the Companion discusses gender exploration and self-representation in Bergman's cinema, draws evolutionary insights from The Seventh Seal, explores existential feelings and religious iconography in the early 1960s trilogy, journeys through the filmmaker’s island landscape in the context of cinematic tourism, and much more. Throughout the book, hailing from a range of global contexts and backgrounds, the authors provide fresh insights into a deeply complex and challenging film artist, often from unexpected perspectives.
An innovative mixture of new scholarship and fresh, updated employments of older approaches, A Companion to Ingmar Bergman:
- Examines Bergman's cinema through methodologies as diverse as Film-Philosophy, Star Studies, Bisexual Studies, Tourism Studies, Transgender Studies, and Evolutionary Studies.
- Delves into the director's early period in the late 1940s-1950s through his most challenging modernist period in the 1960s, and into the 1980s.
- Engages with films long considered problematic by commentators plus unproduced Bergman screenplays, including All These Women, "The Petrified Prince", Face to Face, and From the Life of the Marionettes.
A Companion to Ingmar Bergman is a must-read for advanced undergraduate and graduate film students, postgraduate scholars, college and university lecturers and researchers, particularly those interested in the application of classical and modern approaches to the study of twentieth-century cinema, and Bergman fans around the world.
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgements xiv
Introduction
A Companion to Ingmar Bergman: The Second Century 1
Hamish Ford and Daniel Humphrey
Part I Theories Old and New 29
1 To Signify Something for Others: The Hysteric’s Discourse in Bergman’s Persona 31
Anna Backman Rogers
2 The Auteur Quickly Found, Quickly Lost: Jean- Louis Comolli on Bergman 44
Daniel Fairfax 3 The Queer Failure of Ingmar Bergman’s För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor
(All These Women) 59
Amanda Doxtater
4 Uncertainty, Delirium, and a Betrayal of What My Body Knew: Horror in the Films of Ingmar Bergman and Beyond 75
Sharon Jane Mee
5 “One Sees What One Sees, and One Knows What One Knows”: Ingmar Bergman’s Ansiktet (The Magician) and Affect 87
Tracy Cox- Stanton Copyrighted Material
6 Identity Crises and Dreams of Being: Gender Ambiguity and Performance in Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema 101
Page Maitland
7 Evolutionary Insights into Master- Narrative Transitions in Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) 117
Mads Larsen
Part II Methods and Applications 131
8 Ingmar Bergman, Beyond the Walls of Reality 133
Joe McElhaney
9 Existential Feelings in Bergman’s ‘Silence’ Trilogy 144
Robert Sinnerbrink
10 More Than Just a Melancholy Gaze: Birger Malmsten in and beyond the Films of Ingmar Bergman 160
Tytti Soila
11 “I wouldn’t want to live there!” Imagining the Nordics through Ingmar Bergman’s Films 176
Jono Van Belle
12 Bergman’s Temporality in its Relation to Memory, the Imaginary, and Legend 187
Maureen Turim
13 Communicating Persona 203
Anders Marklund
14 Ingmar Bergman and the Importance of Being Superficial: Fashion, Style, and the Auteur as Celebrity 217
Maaret Koskinen and Louise Wallenberg
15 Travelling to Ingmar Bergman Land: Cinematic Tourism and Memories of Modernist Landscapes 230
Anna Sofia Rossholm
16 Bergman and the World: Considering Race and Ethnicity in the Films of Ingmar Bergman 242
Shelleen Greene
Part III New Takes on Individual Films 257
17 “Oh, dear, I’ve grown tubby”: Pregnancy and the Fantasy of the Child in Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika) 259
Soohyun Jeon
18 Cinematic Atmosphere and Bergman’s Jungfrukällan (The Virign Spring) 272
Brendan Dennerley
19 God in a Film about Godlessness: Tystnaden (The Silence) 286
Samuel Robert Dunn
20 “Unborn Sorrow, Ripe in Fortune’s Womb”: Abjection, Gothic Spaces, and The Spectral Mother in Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers) 303
James Bogdanski
21 Following the Forces in Ingmar Bergman’s En Passion 324
Hamish Ford and Daniel Humphrey
22 Islands in the Stream: Fårö documents, 1969 and 1979 348
Bill Nichols
23 Bergman’s Homosexual Surprise 355
D.A. Miller
24 Bisexuality, Neurosis, and Fantasies of the Caribbean in Ansikte mot ansikte (Face to Face) 366
Jacob Engelberg
Part IV Contexts and Influences 383
25 Ingmar Bergman and His Peers 385
Fredrik Gustafsson
26 The Swedish Middle Way and the Cold- War Espionage Thriller: Film Noir, Neorealism, Psychological Defense, and Ingmar Bergman’s Sånt händer inte här (This Can’t Happen Here) 396
Scott MacKenzie and Anna Stenport
27 Kaf kaesque Aesthetics, Politics, and the Crisis of Liberal Individualism: Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf) and Skammen (Shame) 411
Angelos Koutsourakis
28 Art- cinema and Cultural Resistance: Ingmar Bergman’s Reception in Chile during Pinochet’s Dictatorship (1973- 1990) 425
María Paz Peirano
29 Ingmar Bergman Wrote a Porno, or Everything You Always Wanted to Know About ‘Den förstenade prinsen’ (But Were Afraid to Ask) 441
Jan Holmberg
30 The Audacity of Influence: Zetterling and Bergman 455
Mariah Larsson
31 The Ripened Reverend: Ingmar Bergman and Paul Schrader 466
Mikko Tuhkanen
32 Projectile Dysfunctions: Influences on and of Bergman’s Persona 482
Richard R. Ness
Selected Bibliography 496
Index 501
