Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face

by Michael Tapper

The 1976 premiere of Face to Face came at the height of director-screenwriter Ingmar Bergman's career. Prestigious awards and critical acclaim had made him into a leading name in European art cinema, yet today Face to Face is a largely overlooked and dismissed work.

This book tells the story of its rise and fall. It presents a new portrait of Bergman as a political artist exploring a new medium with huge public impact: television. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen, feminism, and alternative psychotherapy, he made a series of portraits of the modern bourgeois family focusing on the plight of women; Face to Face followed in the tracks of The Lie (1970) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973). By his workbooks, engagement planners, and other archival material, we can trace his investigation into the heart of repressive family structures to eventually glimpse a way out. This volume culminates in an extensive study of the two-year process from the first outlines of the screenplay to the reception and aftermath of Face to Face. It thus offers a unique insight into Bergman's world, his ideas and artistry during a turbulent time in cinema history.

216 pages, Paperback

Published October 3, 2017

About the author

B. 1959. MA in journalism, PhD in Cinema Studies, associate professor and affiliated researcher in Cinema Studies at the Centre for Literature and Languages, Lund University. I have been a freelance journalist since 1989, working with encyclopaedias such as the Swedish National Encyclopaedia and the Swedish Filmography. From 1998 to 2002 I was the chief editor of the film journal Filmhäftet, and from 2003 to 2005 its English successor Film International (published by Intellect in the UK). I have also been a member of the editorial board of Cinema Journal. Since 1999 I have a contract to work as a film critic for Swedish daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet, which from 2015 also includes Helsingborgs Dagblad. My books in Swedish are: Clint Eastwood (2011) and Snuten i skymningslandet: Svenska polisberättelser i roman och film (2011, dissertation).
My books in English are: Swedish Cops: From Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Stieg Larsson (2014) and Ingmar Bergman's 'Face to Face' (2017).
I have contributed to a number of anthologies, including (in English): 1001 Movie You Must See Before You Die (originally published in 2003), Lars von Trier: Interviews (2003), Scandinavian Crime Fiction (2011), Nordic Genre Film (2015) and Ingmar Bergman: An Enduring Legacy (2021).