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.

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.

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)

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.

This unique collection focuses on the work of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Written in the wake of the centenary of Bergman’s birth in 2018, the volume aims to combine new approaches to Bergman’s films and writings with more traditional analyses. Established themes such as Bergman’s interest in philosophy and psychology are addressed, but also less familiar topics, notably his relationship with Hollywood and his elaborate use of film music and autobiographical writing that characterised his later work. There are new analyses of aspects of Bergman’s most famous films, including Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny and Alexander, but also insightful readings of lesser-known works, such as Saraband and Sawdust and Tinsel.

The development of themes, motifs, and techniques in Bergman's films, from the first intimations in the early work to the consummate resolutions in the final movies. Known for their repeating motifs and signature tropes, the films of Ingmar Bergman also contain extensive variation and development. In these reflections on Bergman's artistry and thought, Irving Singer discerns distinctive themes in Bergman's filmmaking, from first intimations in the early work to consummate resolutions in the later movies. Singer demonstrates that while Bergman's output is not philosophy on celluloid, it attains an expressive and purely aesthetic truthfulness that can be considered philosophical in a broader sense. Through analysis of both narrative and filmic effects, Singer probes Bergman's mythmaking and his reliance upon the magic inherent in his cinematic techniques. Singer traces throughout the evolution of Bergman's ideas about life and death, and about the possibility of happiness and interpersonal love. In the overtly self-referential films that he wrote or directed (The Best Intentions, Fanny and Alexander, Sunday's Children) as well as the less obviously autobiographical ones (including Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, and the triad that begins with Through a Glass Darkly) Bergman investigates problems in his existence and frequently reverts to childhood memories. In such movies as Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage, and Saraband, Bergman draws upon his mature experience and depicts the troubled relationships between men who are often weak and women who are made to suffer by the damaged men with whom they live. In Persona, Cries and Whispers, and other works, his experiments with the camera are uniquely masterful. Inspecting the panorama of Bergman's art, Singer shows how the endless search for human contact motivates the content of his films and reflects Bergman's profound perspective on the world.