Ingmar Bergman

Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series

by Robin Wood, Ian Cameron (editor)

Profusely illustrated study of the movies of Ingmar Bergman, from his 1st movies in Sweden up to Shame with stops at Frenzy, Summer Interlude, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Persona etc. Illustrated with b&w film stills; includes Biography & Bibliography.
Notes
Introduction
Parents & Victims
Innocence & Experience
Broken Dreams
Lessons in Love
Doubts & Fears
The Isaksson Films
The Trilogy
Intermezzo
The World Without, The World Within
Filmography

Genres: Film, Biography

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

Robert Paul Wood, known as Robin Wood, was an English film critic and educator who lived in Canada for much of his life. He wrote books on the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Arthur Penn. Wood was a longtime member - and co-founder, along with other colleagues at Toronto's York University - of the editorial collective which publishes CineACTION!, a film theory magazine. Wood was also York professor emeritus of film.[2]

Robin Wood was a founding editor of CineAction! and author of numerous influential works, including new editions published by Wayne State University Press of Personal Views: Explorations in Film (2006), Howard Hawks (2006), Ingmar Bergman (2013), Arthur Penn (2014) and The Apu Trilogy (2016). He was professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in the sixties, when Hugh Hefner still lived in Chicago and my grandfather had a club key, the Playboy Mansion regularly showed late night art films. They may have even started at midnight. Whatever, there was always a large percolator with strong coffee in the lobby of their rather plush, mid-sized theatre.

The art films were pretty much all foreign, all highly regarded by critics. There was no funny bunny stuff at the theatre at all. Nor was there any enforcement of local curfew laws. We went regularly throughout high school, usually at the urging of Bob O'Connell, who had a car, and always when they were showing Ingmar Bergman.

Gosh, we were a serious bunch of kids back then. This was mostly heavy stuff. Even his Swedish comedies, such as Smiles of a Summer's Night, made demands on our attention given their richness of allusion, not to mention their sometimes fuzzy subtitles.

Far and away my favorite Bergman films were two of his mediaeval trilogy, The Virgin Spring, spare and powerful, and especially his The Seventh Seal. Persona, frankly, was beyond me. It may still be beyond me. It was one of the reasons I bought Wood's book--one of series of movie paperbacks which I have never been disappointed by.

[Dan Humphrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really doesn't hold up and the new "chapters", a bunch of afterthought essays originally published separately, seem like they're written by a different person. In a way they were; they were written by the born-again (circa 1977 or so) radical gay Marxist Wood, and he repudiates much of what appears in the first 4/5ths of this volume. Even more annoying is how THIS Wood changes his mind, moving from high praise of FROM THE LIFE OF THE MARIONETTES in a 1983 piece to condemning it in on from 2000 with no explanation or acknowledgement of the flip-flop. Perhaps most inexcusably, he damns the end of SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE in that final 2000 essay, ridiculing the way a major heterosexual character decides to "just go gay all of a sudden." In fact that DOES NOT HAPPEN. Wood is confusing a character from that film with a (consistently gay) character from FACE TO FACE. Both are played by the same actor, but still. I recognize that Wood died before finishing this new edition, but I feel the editor had an obligation to offer a footnote correcting this mistake, especially since it's used by Wood to argue Bergman had naive ideas about homosexuality.

[sarah ☆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

lowkey i can't stand him