The essays collected in this volume use a variety of methodologies to explore Bergman's Persona.

Persona is a brooding study of personal disintegration, as Elizabeth, an actress recovering from a severe emotional breakdown, is cared for by Alma, her apparently well-balanced and extrovert nurse. Slowly the barriers that separate and define the two women crumble, and their relationship turns into a bewildering reversal and substitution of their respective identities. Shame pitches Jan and Eva, husband and wife and both professional musicians, into a world torn apart by civil war. Completely brutalised by the progressive breakdown of all civilised standards of behaviour, Jan and Eva's fate reflects how superficial culture, good order and morality are when set against the unconcern of an arbitrary and amoral universe.

Born to a mother who did not want him and a father who humiliated him during his upbringing, Ingmar Bergman somehow endured his dysfunctional family to become one of the great artists of the twentieth century. However, the scars left from his early agony affected him both physically and emotionally. He suffered with a disabling psychosomatic gastrointestinal illness and serious problems in his interpersonal relationships. In The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons through Film, Barbara Young looks at how the director’s personal life shaped his creative output. A practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Young probes Bergman’s relationships with his parents, his wives, his children, and his colleagues to explore the meanings of his many films. As Bergman gradually began to work through his psychological problems, he accomplished something that few people have ever done—he analyzed himself. The films examined in this study include the majority of his features, including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, The Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, Face to Face, Autumn Sonata, Fanny and Alexander, and Persona. Young also draws upon recorded interviews and Bergman's autobiographical novels to provide further insight into the director's creative process. While many books have been written about Bergman and analysts have studied particular films, this volume represents a unique attempt approach to understanding an artist through his art. The Persona of Ingmar Bergman will appeal to film and art students, as well as those in the psychotherapy profession, and of course, the director’s fans throughout the world.

Following the success of his bestselling autobiography The Magic Lantern, the most influential film director of our time shares his wisdom and insig hts about himself and his cinematic work. Bergman's career spanned 40 years and produced over 50 films, many of which are considered classics. Over 200 photos.

Ingmar Bergman's film Persona (1966) is considered both one of his greatest masterpieces and his most enigmatic and abstract film. The highly influential film achieved global critical acclaim and has been the subject of numerous studies and interpretations. Wordless Secrets is a ground-breaking new study of Persona. It asserts that the essential Swedish context of the film has been overlooked by Bergman's international audience, which has mistakenly preferred to focus on the abstract and metaphysical aspects of Persona. By repatriating the discussion of Persona to its Swedish context, the book argues that: a) the film's setting is seen not just as a barren rocky shore, but as a landscape with people who live and work there and whose marginalization is not metaphysical, but immediate and political, as well as cultural; b) the profession of the nurse is not accidental, nor only symbolic: Alma's confusion may in part stem from the transformation of the nursing profession in the 1960s in Sweden; and c) the Holocaust photograph from the Warsaw ghetto is not just an image of total violence and cruelty, but also alludes to the Swedish guilt over neutrality in the face of Nazi war crimes. (Series: Studies in Nordic Literature and Film)

Ingmar Bergman, an undisputed giant of modern cinematic art, here talks frankly and extensively about himself and his films. This discussion with the great Swedish director ranges from Bergman's childhood memories to his admiration for Strindberg to his relationship with the stars whom he made famous - Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson, Max von Sydow and Bibi Andersson, among others. Originally published in 1973, this work covers Bergman's career from his early films through the works: The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, The Passion of Anna.

An astonishingly beautiful work of autofiction from one of Norway's most prominent literary writers Each summer of her childhood, the daughter visited her father at his remote Faro island home on the edge of the Baltic Sea. Years later, when she is grown with children of her own and he's in his eighties, they plan to write a book together. It will be about age and time, language and memory. She will ask the questions. He will answer them. The tape recorder will record. But old age has caught up with him in ways neither could have foreseen. And when the man is gone, only memories - both remembered and recorded - remain. Heart-breaking and spellbinding, Unquiet is a seamless blend of fiction and memoir in pursuit of elemental truths about how we live, love, lose and age.