A Companion to Ingmar Bergman

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.