Ingmar Bergman: The Life and Films of the Last Great European Director

by Geoffrey MacNab

Ingmar Bergman was the last and arguably the greatest of the old-style European auteurs and his influence across all areas of contemporary cinema has continued to be considerable since his death in July 2007. Drawing on interviews with collaborators and original research, this book puts Bergman's career into the context of his life and offers a new and revealing portrait of this great filmmaker. Geoffrey Macnab explores the often painfully autobiographical nature of his work, while also looking in detail at Bergman as a craftsman. He considers Bergman's working relationship with his actors (especially the actresses he helped make into international stars), his passion for theatre, literature and classical music and his obsession with death and cruelty. The book traces his traumatic childhood, asking how his experiences growing up as the son of a strict Lutheran pastor fed into his later writing and filmmaking. It also looks at his political life, chronicling his teenage flirtation with Nazism, his bitter spat in the mid-70s with the Swedish authorities over his tax affairs and his often vexed relationship with his fellow Swedes.
Geoffrey Macnab also considers how Bergman's work was financed and distributed, his relationship with US agents and how close he came to working in Hollywood. 'When I was 10 years old I received my first rattling film projector with its chimney and lamp which went round and round and round. I found it both mystifying and fascinating' - Ingmar Bergman.

Genres: Film

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Christopher]

Geoffrey MacNab is a UK film critic (chief film critic for The Independent since 2013) and in this book he aims to give a survey of Ingmar Bergman’s output as a filmmaker, also touching on aspects of the Swedish director’s life that influenced his work. MacNab proceeds basically chronologically through Bergman’s career, though oddly some of Bergman’s final films are discussed in an earlier chapter on his work in theatre.

This book will probably prove informative to anyone still unfamiliar with Bergman’s career – MacNab does discuss pretty much every film that Bergman made. Even for a longtime Bergman fan, I learned a lot here about the reception of Bergman’s films when they were originally released, as MacNab quotes the contemporary critics. There was also some interesting trivia scattered about the book, such as the rather poignant story of how in the late 1970s Jean Seberg of Breathless, then a washed-up actress undergoing a mental breakdown, wrote to Bergman and practically begged him for work.

The flaws of this book are that, firstly, it feels slight at little more than 200 pages, and secondly MacNab’s style is sometimes awkward, just stitching facts together instead of providing a smoothly flowing narrative. If one compares it to other surveys of a director’s entire career, like Richard Brody’s Everything is Cinema on Jean-Luc Godard, MacNab’s book is mediocre.