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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
- Sprache: Englisch
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.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction A Companion to Ingmar Bergman: The Second Century
Bergman’s Eternal Return
Beyond the Western Cinémathèque
Digital Resurrection
Shifting Academic Winds
Diverse Approaches, Readers, Authorship
Framing Perspectives: Volume Contents
References
Part I: Theories Old and New
1 To Signify Something for Others: The Hysteric’s Discourse in Bergman’s
Persona
Introduction: Where Am I? Situating the Hysteric in
Persona
Tell Me Who I Am: Hysteria as Neurosis and the Violence of the Imaginary
Where Am I? The Discourse of the Hysteric and the Symbolic Order
Cinematography and the Male Auteur
References
2 The Auteur Quickly Found, Quickly Lost: Jean‐Louis Comolli on Bergman
Anonymous Bergman
Persona
’s Phantoms
Last Act, Encore
Postface
References
3 The Queer Failure of Ingmar Bergman’s
För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor
(
All These Women
)
Another ‘Bergman’ Film
Quirky, but Also Queer?
A Queer Failure, Perhaps, but Counter Political?
Shadows of Swedish Racial Innocence
Conclusion
References
4 Uncertainty, Delirium, and a Betrayal of What My Body Knew: Horror in the Films of Ingmar Bergman and Beyond
Schismatic Horror: Uncertainty and the Delirium of Cinema
Suspension, Disturbance and
amour fou
The Horror of the Face; What My Body Knew
References
5 “One Sees What One Sees, and One Knows What One Knows”: Ingmar Bergman’s
Ansiktet
(
The Magician
) and Affect
How to Read Affect: From Interpretation to Understanding
Animal Magnetism
Sound Effects as Sensual Scaffolding
What Can Fingers Know?
5
Conclusion: The Miserable Vanity of Scholars
References
6 Identity Crises and Dreams of Being: Gender Ambiguity and Performance in Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema
Introduction
Transgender Studies and Bergman?
Gender Trouble in
Ansiktet
Identity Crisis and Gender Roles in
Persona
Who’s Who in Fanny och Alexander
Honesty in Comedy –
En lektion i kärlek
The Divided Self – ‘Kärlek utan älskare’
Conclusion
References
7 Evolutionary Insights into Master‐Narrative Transitions in
Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal)
Evolutionary Theory and Film Studies
Trapped in a World of Phantoms
New Thoughts from a New World
When We Stop Believing
Down with Those Who Disagree
As the Wider Community Comes Unglued
From Humanism to Dataism
References
Part II: Methods and Applications
8 Ingmar Bergman, Beyond the Walls of Reality
Secret Rooms
Eavesdropping
Observing
Witnessing
Restoring Vision
References
9 Existential Feelings in Bergman’s ‘Silence’ Trilogy
Introduction
Bergman and the ‘Film as Philosophy’ Debate
Livingston on Bergman and Kaila
Existential Feelings
References
10 More Than Just a Melancholy Gaze: Birger Malmsten in and beyond the Films of Ingmar Bergman
Introduction
Into the Big City
The Talented Young Men
Friends and Associates – The Career Taking Off
“Soul‐shakers”
The Persona of a Working Actor
Conclusion: Birger
References
11 “I wouldn’t want to live there!” Imagining the Nordics through Ingmar Bergman’s Films
Introduction
The Nordic Countries as Imaginary Construction
Bergman from Within and Without
Bergman in Belgium: The Critical and Audience Reception
Conclusion
References
12 Bergman’s Temporality in its Relation to Memory, the Imaginary, and Legend
Smultronstället
Fängelse
Jungfrukällan
References
13 Communicating
Persona
The Press Conference: Filmstaden, 15 July 1965
Semantic Fields and Paratexts
‘The Snakeskin’ and a Double
Persona
The
Filmkrönikan
Special, 26 October 1966
Alternative
Persona
s: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson
Communicating
Persona
References
14 Ingmar Bergman and the Importance of Being Superficial: Fashion, Style, and the Auteur as Celebrity
The Auteur and Popular Culture
The Auteur as Spin Doctor and Producer of His Own Brand
The Auteur as Celebrity
The Auteur as Glamorous Celebrity
The Meaning of Style, Costume – and (Anti‐)Fashion
Conclusion
References
15 Travelling to Ingmar Bergman Land: Cinematic Tourism and Memories of Modernist Landscapes
Method: Tourism Studies
Cinematic Tourism Beyond the Tourist Gaze
Landscapes, Visitors, and Tourists in Bergman’s Fårö Films
Bergman Tourism on Fårö
Cinematic Tourism as Multifaceted Place
References
16 Bergman and the World: Considering Race and Ethnicity in the Films of Ingmar Bergman
I.
II.
III.
IV.
References
Part III: New Takes on Individual Films
17 “Oh, dear, I’ve grown tubby”: Pregnancy and the Fantasy of the Child in
Sommaren med Monika
(
Summer with Monika
)
I. “It’s a damned pretty city we live in”
II. “Oh, dear, I’ve grown tubby”
III. “Yeah, but what about now?”
Acknowledgments
References
18 Cinematic Atmosphere and Bergman’s
Jungfrukällan
(The Virgin Spring)
Why
Jungfrukällan
?
Atmosphere, Emotion, and Affect
Performance and Atmosphere
Lighting and Atmosphere
Sound and Atmosphere
References
19 God in a Film about Godlessness:
Tystnaden
(
The Silence
)
Biblical Names
Johan’s Apple
Tystnaden
, Ecclesiastes, and
Ett Drömspel
Guds tystnad – det negativa avtrycket
Cloven People in a Broken World
The Church in the Square
You Can’t Take It with You
The Hotel’s Architecture and Decor
Quaternities, the Frosted Glass Design, and Lotuses
Ticks of Time and the Saintly Floor Waiter
The Uneasy Bach Truce
The Little Ones
Heavy Patriarchs
Kvävas
,
Ångest
,
Andas
,
Ande
A Fan, a Deathbed Confession, a Blessing, and a Pitcher of Lemonade
Ester’s Resurrection and Testament
Conclusion
References
20 “Unborn Sorrow, Ripe in Fortune’s Womb”: Abjection, Gothic Spaces, and The Spectral Mother in
Viskningar och rop
(
Cries and Whispers
)
References
21 Following the Forces in Ingmar Bergman’s
En Passion
Krafterna
Charting a Philosophy of Forces
Forces Majeure
Violent Relations
‘Unlivable’ Force
References
22 Islands in the Stream:
Fårö document
s, 1969 and 1979
Salvage Ethnography
Oral History
Editorial Commentary
Fictional Fabricator
23 Bergman’s Homosexual Surprise
Thesis
Crime and Inquest
Getting People to Talk
A Likely Story
The Homosexual Surprise
The Mother
Tim
From Behind
Deep in Shit
Thesis (For Tim)
Acknowledgments
References
24 Bisexuality, Neurosis, and Fantasies of the Caribbean in
Ansikte mot ansikte
(
Face to Face
)
Bisexual Epistemology, Art Cinema, and
Ansikte mot ansikte
Bisexual Neurosis
Jenny’s Encounters with Bisexual Possibility
Tomas’s Bisexual Neurosis
Desiring Bisexually through the Idea of the Caribbean
Conclusion: Toward a Bisexual Bergman
Acknowledgments
References
Part IV: Contexts and Influences
25 Ingmar Bergman and His Peers
1
2
3
4
5
References
Filmography
26 The Swedish Middle Way and the Cold‐War Espionage Thriller:
Film Noir,
Neorealism, Psychological Defense, and Ingmar Bergman’s
Sånt händer inte här
(
This Can’t Happen Here
)
An International Stockholm as the Site of Cold War Espionage
The Middle Way, the Cold War, and Swedish Psychological Defense Films
Cinematic Geopolitics and Cold War Tension
Stylistic Transnationalism:
Film Noir
and Neorealism
Secret Origins: The (Many Different) Reasons Bergman Didn’t Want the Film Screened
Circulation and Reception: The 1950s and 2000s
The Spy Thriller in a Sociopolitical Context: Swedish Film in the 1940s and Early 1950s
Conclusion
References
27 Kafkaesque Aesthetics, Politics, and the Crisis of Liberal Individualism:
Vargtimmen
(
Hour of the Wolf
) and
Skammen
(
Shame
)
Introduction: Some Comments on the Kafkaesque
The Decline of Autonomy: The Work of Art as Alienating Labour
Post‐Fascism in
Shame
Acknowledgements
References
28 Art‐cinema and Cultural Resistance: Ingmar Bergman’s Reception in Chile during Pinochet’s Dictatorship (1973–1990)
Chilean Film Culture During the Dictatorship (1973–1990)
The Modern Auteur: Bergman at the Cine Arte Normandie
Bergman, Christianity, and Catholic cinephilia
Conclusion: Ingmar Bergman and the Ninja Turtles
Acknowledgements
References
29 Ingmar Bergman Wrote a Porno,
or
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About ‘Den förstenade prinsen' (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Summary of the Plot
Bergman or Porn (or Both)
A Sex Tragedy
Foreplay to Finish
(Anti)climax
References
30 The Audacity of Influence: Zetterling and Bergman
Bergman and Zetterling in Swedish Film Cultural Life
The Anxiety of Influence?
Intertextual Connections
Conclusion
References
31 The Ripened Reverend: Ingmar Bergman and Paul Schrader
References
32 Projectile Dysfunctions: Influences on and of Bergman’s
Persona
Pulling Back the Curtain: From
Psycho
to
Persona
All These Women: Robert Altman’s Variations on a Theme
A Copy of a Copy of a Copy: The Personae of
Fight Club
References
Selected Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Cornelius and Isolde in a familiar, favorite close‐up composition...
Figure 3.2 Ester and Anna in a comparable composition.
Tystnaden
(
The Silenc
...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 A priest (Bertil Anderberg) who plunders a plague victim is inter...
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Isak Borg visits a scene from his past that he never personally ...
Figure 12.2 The oneiric temporality and surreal staging of a car accident de...
Figure 12.3 Karin embraces her father, Töre, as her mother, Märeta, looks on...
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 Play‐acting and fakery. (Left) Peter Stormare on stage as Hamlet...
Figure 14.2 Bergman flanked by two of his leading ladies, Bibi Andersson and...
Figure 14.3 Figure 14.3a (left) Bergman and Laretei with their son Daniel, p...
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Jack leading a group of youths in jazz revelry during the villag...
Figure 16.2 Alexander destroys his private room, bringing an end to his esca...
Figure 16.3 Alma and Elisabet dissolve their individual identities.
Persona
/...
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 An image of June Monika’s face found in the Hallmark version of
Figure 17.2 Monika stares at children who are motionlessly watching adults d...
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 Two priests pass a woman who offers votive candles. Artificial l...
Figure 19.2 The hotel’s corridor as Gothic church nave.
Tystnaden
/Directed b...
Figure 19.3 Johan and the quaternity and arabesque frosted patterns.
Tystnad
...
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 The spectral mother: Beckoned to approach, a young Agnes commune...
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 The first shot of
En passion
following the credits, setting up t...
Figure 21.2 Exploring Elis’ studio, Andreas is shot partially obscured by th...
Figure 21.3 Part way through
En passion
’s final shot, the slowly moving opti...
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 Tim ×2.
Aus dem Leben der Marionetten
(1980) / Directed by Ingma...
Figure 23.2 An unheterosexual image of Peter and Katarina. Screen capture, A...
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1 In a dream sequence, Jenny (Liv Ullmann) attempts to restrain Ma...
Chapter 26
Figure 26.1 Film noir aesthetics, with Swedish summer evening light filterin...
Figure 26.2 Natas close to being captured by the police. The shot is reminis...
Figure 26.3 Styles bridging
film noir
(slanted camera angle, body in shadow)...
Chapter 28
Figure 28.1 ‘Fanny and Alexander: For or Against.’ Cover of
Enfoque
magazine...
Figure 28.2
El Rostro
(
The Magician
, 1958) as part of the ‘Normandie Classic...
Figure 28.3 ‘Bergman’s Season’ at the Normandie, August 1988. The selection ...
Figure 28.4 Promotion of the special series at CineUC in 1984. It includes a...
Chapter 29
Figure 29.1 Ingmar Bergman’s
The Touch
(rated R) advertised alongside two X‐...
Chapter 30
Figure 30.1 Mai Zetterling as St Lucy and Ingmar Bergman as St Stephen at th...
Chapter 31
Figure 31.1 Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer in a poster for the film
West Si
...
Chapter 32
Figure 32.1 The film itself appears to tear down the middle and burn in the ...
Figure 32.2 Sprocket holes are visible as the film attempts to tear itself o...
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Begin Reading
Selected Bibliography
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors
The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors survey key directors whose work constitutes what we refer to as the Hollywood and world cinema canons. Whether Haneke or Hitchcock, Bigelow or Bergman, Capra or the Coen brothers, each volume comprises 25 or more newly commissioned essays written by leading experts who explore a canonical, contemporary, and/or controversial auteur in a sophisticated, authoritative, and multidimensional capacity. Individual volumes interrogate any number of subjects—the director’s oeuvre, dominant themes, well‐known, worthy, and under‐rated films, stars, collaborators, and key influences, reception, reputation, and above all, the director’s intellectual currency in the scholarly world.
Published
1. A Companion to Michael Haneke, edited by Roy Grundmann
2. A Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, edited by Thomas Leitch and Leland Poague
3. A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, edited by Brigitte Peucker
4. A Companion to Werner Herzog, edited by Brad Prager
5. A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar, edited by Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon
6. A Companion to Woody Allen, edited by Peter J. Bailey and Sam B. Girgus
7. A Companion to Jean Renoir, edited by Alastair Phillips and Ginette Vincendeau
8. A Companion to François Truffaut, edited by Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillian
9. A Companion to Luis Buñuel, edited by Robert Stone and Julián Daniel Gutiérrez‐Albilla
10. A Companion to Jean‐Luc Godard, edited by Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline
11. A Companion to Martin Scorsese, edited by Aaron Baker
12. A Companion to Fritz Lang, edited by Joseph McElhaney
13. A Companion to Robert Altman, edited by Adrian Danks
14. A Companion to Wong Kar‐wai, edited by Martha P. Nochimson
15. A Companion to Steven Spielberg, edited by Nigel Morris
16. A Companion to D. W. Griffith, edited by Charles Keil
17. A Companion to Federico Fellini, edited by Frank Burke, Marguerite Waller, Marita Gubareva
18. A Companion to Ingmar Bergman, edited by Daniel Humphrey and Hamish Ford
A Companion to Ingmar Bergman
Edited by
Daniel Humphrey and Hamish Ford
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Notes on Contributors
Anna Backman Rogers is Professor of Aesthetics and Culture, specializing in feminist theory and film, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is the author of American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis‐Image, Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure, Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda, and Picnic at Hanging Rock (BFI Film Classics). She has also edited multiple volumes dedicated to feminist theory and visual culture. She is the founder and co‐editor‐in‐chief of the journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture and oversees its press imprint with Punctum Books. She is currently working on a book exploring the iconography of Lana Del Rey.
James Bogdanski teaches film studies in the Visual and Media Arts department at Long Beach City College and the Fine Arts department at El Camino College in southern California. He holds an MFA in Screenwriting from Loyola Marymount University. He has published on the Gothic and queer authorship in the anthology Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster. As an invited speaker, he has presented his research at the ‘Alfred Hitchcock and I Confess’ conference at University College London and during Bergmanveckan (Bergman Week) on the island of Fårö, Sweden.
Tracy Cox‐Stanton is the founder and editor of the online scholarly journal of film studies The Cine‐Files. She is a video essayist, film scholar, and professor. Her work has appeared in the journals NECSUS, [in]Transition, Visual Arts Research, and camera obscura, as well as the anthology For the Love of Cinema, and her video essays have been screened internationally. She is a professor of cinema studies at Savannah College of Art and Design.
Brendan Dennerley is a PhD student at the University of Newcastle, currently writing his thesis on atmosphere in 1960s Japanese cinema. He is also a prolific no‐budget filmmaker, making short films such as The Wardrobe (2021), which won the We Make Films ‘Best Film Under £1,500’ award in 2021. In addition, he is an occasional contributor to the Maitland and Newcastle theatre scenes, performing in a variety of local theatre works.
Amanda Doxtater is Assistant Professor and Barbro Osher Endowed Chair of Swedish Studies in the Department of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Washington. Her book Visions and Victims: Art Melodrama in the Films of Carl Th. Dreyer (2024) explores intersections between popular film melodrama and Scandinavian art cinema. Writing widely on Nordic cinema, her work engages with melodrama, gender, queer historiography, childhood, and the family in the Nordic welfare state; and issues of class, race, and ethnicity. Her publications include ‘From Diversity to Precarity: Reading Childhood in Ruben Östlund’s Film Play (2011)’ ‘Terror Melodrama, Race and the Nation: Ulaa Salim’s Sons of Denmark,’ and ‘History as Embodied Encounter: Queer Pleasures and Temporal Drag in Benjamin Christensen’s Witchcraft Through the Ages’. Together with Maxine Savage, she provided a commentary track on a Kino Lorber Blu‐Ray edition of Carl Th. Dreyer’s classic of queer cinema, Michael (1924).
Samuel Robert Dunn has taught at the University of Utah since 1986. He holds degrees in theater–film from the University of Utah and History and Scandinavian studies from UCLA, and he has studied law, philosophy, and biology. He is a longstanding lover of all things Scandinavian. He has worked in the motion picture industry and has made short films and videos. Since the mid‐1980s, he has worked for the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival.
Jacob Engelberg is Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has published articles in the Journal of Bisexuality and Porn Studies, where he has also edited a special issue on bisexuality and pornography (2024). His essays appear in the following edited collections: Call Me by Your Name: Perspectives on the Film (2024), Screening Adult Cinema (2024), and Transnational Horror: Folklore, Genre, and Cultural Politics (2024). His forthcoming monograph considers the critical utility of cinematic figures of bisexual transgression for queer film studies.
Daniel Fairfax teaches at the Institute of Theater, Film, and Media Studies at the Goethe University, Frankfurt, where he coordinates the international masters degree in audiovisual and cinema studies. Daniel’s research has focused on French film theory in the post‐1968 period, resulting in the two‐volume monograph The Red Years of Cahiers du Cinéma (1968–1973) (2021), and he has translated the writings of Jean‐Louis Comolli, Christian Metz, and Jean‐Pierre Meunier. He is presently working on a research project looking at developments in film theory in the neoliberal era. Daniel is also a regular contributor to and former editor of the Australian online film journal Senses of Cinema.
Hamish Ford is Senior Lecturer in screen and cultural studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. The author of Post‐War Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time (Palve Macmillan, 2012), which features extensive analysis of Persona, he has written extensively on Bergman in a range of articles and essays for over two decades, plus other modernist European post‐war filmmaking and subsequent world cinema. Alongside the present Wiley Blackwell volume coedited with Daniel Humphrey, he is currently working on a monograph analysing the formally, aesthetically, philosophically, and politically radical aspects of Bergman’s 1960s cinema for Edinburgh University Press, as well as articles on Ousmane Sembene and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Shelleen Greene is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was the 2020–2021 Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include Italian cinema, Black European studies, and Black Digital Studies. Her book, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema (2012), examines racial discourses in the Italian national cinema. Her recent work has appeared in Italian Culture, Feminist Media Histories, California Italian Studies, the African American Review, and the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies.
Fredrik Gustafsson has a PhD in cinema studies from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He has written a book about Hasse Ekman, The Man From the Third Row (2016), and has worked at the Ingmar Bergman Archives in Stockholm. He has also worked as Ingmar Bergman festival coordinator at the Swedish Institute and curated a Hasse Ekman retrospective at MoMA in New York in 2015. He is chair of the Swedish Film Critics Association.
Jan Holmberg is CEO of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, with a PhD in cinema studies from Stockholm University. He is the author of three books, most recently Författaren Ingmar Bergman (Ingmar Bergman, the writer), and numerous articles on early cinema, film aesthetics, digital media, archival theory and practice, and the work of Ingmar Bergman. He was the general editor of Ingmar Bergman’s collected writings in 2018.
Daniel Humphrey is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas A&M University. He is the author of Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema (2013) and Archaic Modernism: Queer Poetics in the Cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini (2020) and numerous articles on queer cinema, the horror film, cinema authorship, and European modernist film. He has been co‐chair of the Nordic Studies Scholarly Interest Group for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies since 2020.
Soohyun Jeon is a PhD student in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. His research interests include twentieth‐ and twenty‐first‐century literature and culture, disability studies, health humanities, and film studies.
Maaret Koskinen is Professor Emerita at Stockholm University. She was the first scholar given access to Ingmar Bergman’s private papers during the last years of his life, which led to the formation of the Bergman Foundation. Her monographs in English include Ingmar Bergman Revisited: Cinema, Performance, and the Arts (2008) and Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence: Pictures in the Typewriter, Writings on the Screen (2010), and her Swedish‐language book on Bergman as writer was published in Spanish as Ingmar Bergman y sus primeros escritos. En el principio era la palabra (2018). Her most recent books include the anthologies Now About All These Women in the Swedish Film Industry (2023) and Ingmar Bergman at the Crossroads: Between Theory and Practice (2023), both co‐edited with Louise Wallenberg. Between 1981 and 2011 she was film critic for Sweden’s largest national daily Dagens Nyheter, and she has also served as Board Member of the Swedish Film Institute and the Broadcasting Commission, as well as Chair of the Film Academy.
Angelos Koutsourakis is Associate Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at the Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures, University of Leeds. He is the author of Kafkaesque Cinema (2024), Rethinking Brechtian Film Theory and Cinema (2018), and Politics as Form in Lars von Trier (2013) and the co‐editor of Cinema of Crisis: Film and Contemporary Europe (2020) and The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos (2015).
Mads Larsen received an MFA in Screenwriting (2018) and a PhD in Germanic Languages (2022) from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently a research postdoc at the University of Oslo. Larsen has published more than three dozen articles, mostly on Nordic film and literature. His first monograph is Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder: The Evolution of Modern Mating Ideologies, Dating Dysfunction, and Demographic Collapse (2024). His forthcoming monograph is titled Master‐Narrative Transitions from Vikings to A.I.: How Fiction Helps Communities Adapt to a Changing World.
Mariah Larsson is Professor of Film Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Among her publications are Swedish Cinema and the Sexual Revolution: Critical Essays (co‐edited with Elisabet Björklund, 2016), The Swedish Porn Scene: Exhibition Contexts, 8mm Pornography and the Sex Film (2017), A Visual History of HIV/AIDS (co‐edited with Elisabet Björklund, 2019), and A Cinema of Obsession: The Life and Work of Mai Zetterling (2020). She has been co‐chair of the Nordic Studies Scholarly Interest Group for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies since 2020.
Scott MacKenzie is Professor and Head, Department of Film and Media, Queen’s University. His books include Cinema and Nation (2000; with Mette Hjort); Purity and Provocation: Dogma '95 (2003; with Mette Hjort); Screening Québec: Québécois Moving Images, National Identity and the Public Sphere (2004); The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (2013; with Brenda Longfellow and Thomas Waugh); Film Manifestoes and Global Cinema Cultures (2014); Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (2015; with Anna Stenport); Arctic Environmental Modernities (2017; with Lill‐Ann Körber and Anna Stenport); Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (2019; with Lilya Kaganovsky and Anna Stenport); Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age (2019; with Janine Marchessault); Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury (2021; with Gunnar Iversen); and New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and the Climate Crisis (2023; with Anna Stenport).
Page Maitland is a PhD student in the Department of Humanities, Creative Industries, and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle. Her research interests include linguistics, sociology, philosophy, and film and media studies.
Anders Marklund is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Lund University, Sweden. His current research focuses on European cinema and television and includes studies on cultural memory, intermediality, and representation, usually with emphasis on contemporary and successful European productions. With a particular interest in Nordic cinemas – past and present – Marklund is the primary editor of the Journal of Scandinavian Cinema and coordinator of the annual Lübeck Film Studies Colloquium, dedicated to Nordic cinema.
Joe McElhaney is Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College/City University of New York. His most recent book is Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema (2021). He is the author of numerous essays on various aspects of American, Asian, and European cinema.
Sharon Jane Mee is Adjunct Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is the author of the book The Pulse in Cinema: The Aesthetics of Horror (2020) and co‐editor of the collection Sound Affects: A User’s Guide (2023) and has published in numerous collected volumes and academic journals including The Routledge Companion to Gender and Affect, Cinéma & Cie, and SubStance. She holds the role of Publications Officer at Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety.
D. A. Miller is John F. Hotchkis Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent publications include 8 ½ (BFI Film Classics) (2022, new edn.), Second Time Around: From Art House to DVD (2021), and Hidden Hitchcock (2016).
Richard R. Ness is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Western Illinois University. He is the author of Alan Rudolph: Romance and a Crazed World (1996), From Headline Hunter to Superman: A Journalism Filmography (1997), and Encyclopedia of Journalists on Film (2020). His articles and reviews have appeared in Cinema Journal, Miranda, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Hitchcock Annual, and the Cahiers du cinema anthology Print the Legend: Cinema and Journalism, as well as in anthologies on Michael Moore, Robert Altman, Alfred Hitchcock, and film music. He has been a member of several film clubs but never joined a fight club (that he can talk about).
Bill Nichols received SCMS’s Career Achievement Award in 2022 for his outstanding contributions to the field of film studies. He is Professor Emeritus of Cinema at San Francisco State University and edited Movies and Methods, volumes 1 and 2 (1976, 1985), instrumental works in the establishment of film studies as an academic discipline. His Representing Reality (1992) launched the contemporary study of documentary film. He has published a dozen books, written well over 100 articles, and lectured widely on six continents. His general introduction to film, Engaging Cinema (2010), is the first introduction to film studies that integrates an appreciation of film’s formal qualities with its powerful role as a medium of social representation. His Introduction to Documentary (2001/2010/2017/2024 editions) is the most widely used textbook of its type. He consults regularly with documentary filmmakers and has served on a number of film festival juries. He writes about film and other topics on his Facebook page and his blog, BillNichols.net.
María Paz Peirano is Assistant Professor in Film and Cultural Studies at Universidad de Chile, with a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Kent. Her research involves an ethnographic approach to film as social practice, focusing on Chilean cinema, film festivals, and the development of audiences and local film cultures. She is the co‐editor of the volumes Ingmar Bergman Out of Focus: International Reception and Canonisation of an Auteur (2024), La vieja escuela: El rol del Cine Arte Normandie en la formación de audiencias (1982–2001) (2020), and Film Festivals and Anthropology (2017). She was the lead researcher on two major national projects, ‘Film festivals, educative experiences and the expansion of the Chilean field’ and ‘Chilean film audiences: film culture, cinephilia and education,’ funded by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development through the National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development. She is currently a Marie Skłodowska‐Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Antwerp, studying the role of European National Institutes for Culture in Chile.
Anna Sofia Rossholm is Associate Professor in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University. She holds a PhD from Stockholm University (2006). Since then, she has been employed at Linnaeus University and has also undertaken research and teaching visits to the National University of Singapore and Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Rossholm's research spans a range of fields, such as adaptation studies, ecocriticism, and screenwriting studies. She has published several articles and a book on Ingmar Bergman's creative writing and screenwriting processes.
Robert Sinnerbrink is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film (Second Edition): An Introduction to Cinema as a Way of Thinking (2021), Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2019), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (2016), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (2011), and Understanding Hegelianism (2007/2014). He has published numerous articles on film and philosophy in journals such as the Australasian Philosophical Review, Angelaki, Contemporary Aesthetics, Film‐Philosophy, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Projections: The Journal of Movies and Mind, Post‐Script, Screen, Screening the Past, and SubStance. He is also the editor of Emotion, Ethics, and Cinematic Experience: New Phenomenological and Cognitivist Perspectives (2021) and a co‐editor (with Lucy Bolton and David Martin‐Jones) of Contemporary Screen Ethics: Absences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew (2023).
Tytti Soila is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Media Studies and former Vice Dean at the Faculty of Humanities at Stockholm University. Soila is the editor of Cinema of Scandinavia (2005) and Stellar Encounters: Stardom European Film (2009) and co‐editor of Nordic National Cinemas, a History of Popular Film (1998) and Now About All These Women in the Swedish Film Industry (2023).
Anna Stenport is the University of Georgia Foundation Professor of Arts and Sciences, a professor of Communication Studies, and Dean of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia. She is the co‐author of New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and the Climate Crisis (2023; with Scott MacKenzie) and the co‐editor of Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere (2019; with Arne Lunde); Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (2019; with Lilya Kaganovsky and Scott MacKenzie); and Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (2015; with Scott MacKenzie). She has also published widely on author, playwright, and artist August Strindberg; director Lukas Moodysson; and Scandinavian contemporary cinema, Nordic Noir, and popular culture.
Mikko Tuhkanen is Professor of English at Texas A&M University, where he teaches African American and African‐diasporic literatures, LGBTQ+ literatures, and literary theory. He is the author of, among other books, The American Optic: Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2008) and The Essentialist Villain: On Leo Bersani (2018). He is the editor of Leo Bersani: Queer Theory and Beyond (2014) and Fascination and Cinema, a special issue of Postmodern Culture (2020); as well as the co‐editor, with E. L. McCallum, of The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature (2014) and Queer Times, Queer Becomings (2011). He is currently finishing two book‐length studies: ‘Time’s Witness: On James Baldwin’ and ‘Some Speculation: Thinking with Pet Shop Boys.’
Maureen Turim is Professor Emerita of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She has published three books: The Films Of Oshima Nagisa. Images of a Japanese Iconoclast (1998); Flashbacks in Film: Memory And History (1989); and Abstraction in Avant‐Garde Films (1985). With Diane Waldman, she is editor of Desire and Consent in Representations of Adolescent Sexuality with Adults (2024). She has published over 120 essays in journals and anthologies on theoretical, historical, and aesthetic issues in cinema, video, art, cultural studies, feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and comparative literature.
Jono Van Belle is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication Studies at Örebro University, Sweden. Van Belle earned her joint PhD in communication and cinema studies at Ghent University and Stockholm University in 2019 and has previously published on cinema memory, audience reception, Ingmar Bergman, and the sociology of emotions.
Louise Wallenberg is Professor of Fashion Studies at the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her most recent publications include the anthologies Harry bit för bit (2017), Fashion and Modernism (2018), Ingmar Bergman at the Crossroad between Theory and Practice (2022), Fashion Ethics and Aesthetics (2023), and Now About All These Women in the Swedish Film Industry (2023).
Acknowledgements
First of all, we would like to express the warmest of thanks to our loyal and very patient team at Wiley‐Blackwell: Nicole Allen, Radhika Madhiseelan, Radhika Raheja Sharma, and Ed Robinson. For her careful proofing, we thank Tiffany Taylor.
Beyond the publisher, a number of other individuals and organisations have also helped us make A Companion to Ingmar Bergman a reality at various stages of its development in large ways and small – often more than they could possibly imagine. These include the Ingmar Bergman Foundation’s Curator, Hélène Dahl, and its CEO, Jan Holmberg, a contributor to this volume who did much more than that to assist us; the board and staff of the Bergman Center on Fårö, notably Jannike Åhlund, Helen Beltrame Linné, Emmy Bergman, Christina Jardim Ribeiro, Juliana Moreira, and Kasia Syty; The Bergman Estate on Fårö Foundation, particularly Kerstin Brunnberg, Jon Iversen, Kerstin Kalström, and Inger Soderdahl; the Swedish Film Institute, including Paula Davila Alvarez, Jan Göransson, Magnus Rosborn, and Ola Törjas; Ingmar Bergman, Jr.; Patrick Burkhart; Peter Cowie; Anna Håkansson; Erik Helding; Arne Lund; Paisley Livingston; William Siska; and Nils Warnecke. Others who contributed chapters to this volume but also assisted us in other invaluable ways that should be acknowledged include James Bogdanski, Fredrick Gustafsson, Maaret Koskinen, Mariah Larsson, and Louise Wallenberg.
A very special note of genuine thanks goes to the authors of the chapters that make up this volume. Their original research and insights into the films and director we thought we knew well consistently impressed us and furthered our knowledge from the start. Additional work undertaken in response to our suggestions and feedback only furthered each author’s scholarly contribution and opened the chapters up to a more diverse readership. We are collectively proud of the efforts the authors have gone to, and the final results, in contributing to a collective project we are confident represents the health and breath of twenty‐first‐century Anglophone scholarship devoted to a cinema giant many of us consider the greatest of all filmmakers.
Daniel Humphrey would also like to thank Roger E. Palomino, John Abi‐Najm, Juan A. Alonzo, Leonardo Cardoso, Marian Eide, Kim Katari, Pamela Matthews, Marcia Miller, Steven Oberhelman, Martin Reagan, and Patrick Sullivan.
Hamish Ford would also like to thank Imogen Wellford, Elisabeth Powell, Gail Ford, Adrian Danks, George Kouvaros, Adrian Martin, Rebecca Beirne, Jesper Gulddal, Cathy Coleborne, and Kate Nash.
IntroductionA Companion to Ingmar Bergman: The Second Century
Hamish Ford and Daniel Humphrey
Bergman’s Eternal Return
The emergence of this book has taken some time in its evolution from idea to – more importantly – an idea amenable to the changing winds of the academic publishing marketplace and then, ultimately, to the completed volume you have before you now. Our first attempts to interest academic presses in this project more than a decade ago, in the form of book room table pitches at the 2012 and 2013 Society for Film and Media Studies (SCMS) conferences in the USA, were met with unmistakable disinterest. This lack of enthusiasm exemplified an attitude that held sway in many academic and critical quarters from the early 1980s into the first decade of the twenty‐first century regarding the worth and status of Ingmar Bergman’s cinematic work, and is instructive to consider.
In the introduction of Maaret Koskinen’s 2010 monograph on Bergman’s 1963 film Tystnaden (The Silence), appropriating the title of a 1998 essay by Harlin Kennedy called ‘Whatever Happened to Ingmar Bergman?’, she notes the public outpouring of international attention and praise for the filmmaker upon his then‐recent death in 2007 while also making sure to cite and discuss in some detail the prominence of rather less enthusiastic voices. These voices represented what had been for a long time a lukewarm, at best, attitude towards Bergman’s cinema, as Koskinen explains:
Others, critics as well as the usual trendsetters and gatekeepers of academia, had proclaimed Bergman metaphorically dead and culturally passé. As a writer, they snorted, he is not much above the sort of three‐penny philosopher one idolizes in one’s teens but eventually grows out of. And as for his cinematic style, they added, Bergman is at best a skillful craftsman, representing but a stage in film history … Should one add to this the academic demise of the auteur and the notion of authorship, … it is perfectly understandable why Bergman fell into obscurity. (2010, p. 4)
Ahead, we will address some of the reasons for the complex historical transformations of Bergman’s reputation, particularly in the English‐speaking world, over recent decades – not only the decline but also the more recent return, and why it is important – a story within which the films and their purported author also play a perhaps surprising role.1 The oscillation of directors’ fashionability in scholarly film culture affects nearly all the big names, given time, and Koskinen quickly goes on to remind us that an “ever present hausse‐baisse oscillation in film culture (not least in academia)” has affected the reputations of other directors, such as Douglas Sirk, and can hardly be seen as unique to Bergman’s reputation (ibid., pp. 6–7). However, his is an especially important and illuminating case for reasons we will address.
When we repitched at the 2019 SCMS conference – by now as a confirmed editorial team working on a special journal issue regarding Bergman’s global reception (Ford and Humphrey 2021b)2 – this time to Wiley‐Blackwell’s Catriona King, the idea for a large edited volume was met with real enthusiasm. Upon our reminder that the publisher’s ‘Companions to Film Directors’ series was nearly 10 years old and that Bergman surely deserved to be included in it alongside the likes of Fritz Lang, Jean‐Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Robert Altman, and Wong Kar‐Wai, among others, she immediately concurred, and her enthusiasm was echoed throughout our subsequent discussions with commissioning editor Nicole Allen. Directing a multitude of long‐admired films and television productions between 1946 and 2003, and writing the majority of them (plus some notable screenplays directed by others through parts of his career), this was, after all, the man who for two decades from 1957 was arguably the most famous and influential non‐English‐language filmmaker in the world,3 whose feature films have now enjoyed over seven decades of genuinely global attraction and dedicated commentary. Five years, apparently, makes a lot of difference, and confirmation that Bergman’s cinema was once again of significant interest to the scholarly film world two decades into the twentieth century had indeed occurred in the intervening period. This reached an apogee with the passionate international response to the Bergman Centenary throughout 2018. That series of events, spearheaded by the Swedish Film Institute and the Ingmar Bergman Foundation in Stockholm and taking place across the planet’s six inhabited continents, was capped for physical media consumers by the release of a massive box set comprising the lion’s share of Bergman’s theatrically released films on Blu‐ray by the Criterion Collection in North America (and happily for viewers elsewhere, region free).4 Although Criterion’s parent company, Janus Films, had a long and successful history of releasing Bergman’s films in the USA going back to the 1950s, the fact that their Centenary offering sold out almost immediately seemed to surprise the company. “We can’t make them fast enough,” a Criterion spokesperson told The New York Times (quoted in Kenny 2018).
This all said, the return of Bergman’s work to serious artistic, cultural, and scholarly consideration in the Anglophone world actually began more than 10 years earlier, a reality made clear soon after the director’s death on 30 July 2007. Upon the publication, five days later, of an opinion piece in The New York Times headlined (with typical op‐ed snark) ‘Scenes from an Overrated Career’ by the respected independent critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, a backlash immediately ensued that forced a reconsideration of the director’s popularity beyond what were at that point commonly assumed to be relatively small circles of older northern hemisphere viewers.5 The reality, immediately made clear, was rather different: Bergman’s reputation had not declined nearly as much in the wider film‐loving world as many critics, self‐appointed taste makers, and screen studies academics appeared to have presumed, and was far more generationally and culturally diverse in its appeal. If public protestations challenging Rosenbaum’s argument were to emerge in the mainstream press and film publications, he may have predicted they would be relatively scarce and come from a small pocket of easily dismissible greybeards stuck in a pre‐nouvelle vague, ‘humanist’ and ‘Existentialist’ art cinema mindset. Instead, the reaction to his New York Times piece was brutal and swift. Roger Ebert, the biggest name in mainstream US film criticism at the time and fighting cancer, rose to the occasion and called Rosenbaum’s essay “a bizarre departure from his usual sanity” (2007). Ebert’s counterargument was echoed across the internet on blogs, Facebook posts, and Twitter messages from around the world. It resulted in something even more surprising than the renewed public expression of fealty to Bergman’s work itself. The backlash quickly occasioned a hasty, partial disavowal by Rosenbaum of the article bearing his name in the form of a number of blog posts and social media comments that stressed some admiration on his part for select Bergman films – perhaps notably, relatively lesser‐discussed titles such as Gycklarnas afton (Sawdust and Tinsel, 1953) and Ansiktet (The Magician, 1958).6
Beyond the Western Cinémathèque
The small but revealing Rosenbaum controversy corresponds to something far bigger. In fact, nobody should have been surprised at the reaction to his article if they were paying attention to the masses of film fans for whom the Swedish director’s work had remained a touchstone canon representing ‘art cinema’ – or indeed, cinema per se – at its most impactful, substantive, and tenacious, particularly if they were remotely aware of the global picture. A key part of the renewed prominence of Bergman’s cinema in the Anglosphere today has been the kind of communication made possible through social media, which soon provided a reminder of the broader reality following his death. We have long seen and interacted with regular, enthusiastic online postings and discussion about the director and his work from around the world both before and following July 2007, by people representing a large array of ethnicities, genders, identity positions, political persuasions, and socioeconomic classes (at least those with access to cinema in some form and networked devices).7 And when meeting scholars and critics from around the world at academic conferences, screenings, and other film culture events since the 1990s, we typically find undimmed enthusiasm for Bergman’s films in particular from those based outside the Anglosphere. Such voices quickly dispelled familiar claims that his cinema was only of interest to upper‐ and middle‐class, white, Western European or North American filmgoers seen as valuing a kind of masculine self‐pity while being focused exclusively on what have come, more recently, to be called ‘first‐world problems.’ In other words, they often strongly disputed the well‐worn line that these films and their fans were thereby inherently Eurocentric, bourgeois, and ‘apolitical’ (so, implicitly conservative).
Beyond the internationalising aspect, there is also something to be said about how social media, with its blurring of the boundaries between private lives and public consumption, its flashes of previously occulted emotional extremes among our own friends and families, and encouragement of what has been termed ‘oversharing,’ makes Bergman’s cinema resonate even more with twenty‐first‐century structures of feeling than during the filmmaker’s own working life. In addition, increased awareness of depression, anxiety, and childhood trauma in the twenty‐first century makes it somewhat unseemly to dismiss these themes as niche concerns and, in particular, makes young people’s newly developed sympathies for such struggles amenable to an appreciation of films at times belittled for such content in the past.
In our research for a special journal issue called ‘Bergman World’ that we co‐edited for Popular Communication focused on the filmmaker’s international reception across seven decades (Ford and Humphrey 2021b), a number of things emerged to challenge another disparagement routinely aimed at his work and reiterated by Rosenbaum in criticising the “antiseptic, upscale look of Mr. Bergman’s interiors and his mainly blond, blue‐eyed cast members [as] a brand to be adopted and emulated” (2007). Most interestingly, when it comes to this particular canard, the play Exile Bergman by Chilean‐Peruvian Swedish playwright America Vera‐Zavala, which we published in English translation for ‘Bergman World,’ presents a non‐fictional account of five emigres to Sweden, each of them collaborating with the playwright to realise their on‐stage personas: a Persian from Iran, an African from Burkina Faso, a Columbian, a Romanian, and a Jewish citizen of the USA (Vera‐Zavala 2021). Each of them loved Bergman’s cinema, only to be faced with Swedish natives conspicuously less enamoured of their national poet of screen and stage than they as outsiders were. Perhaps more interestingly still, in her introduction to the play’s translation, Vera‐Zavala (who is also a left‐wing politician in Sweden) reports that unlike the case in Western Europe and North America, Latin Americans most receptive to Bergman are often members of Marxist‐oriented cultural and intellectual communities, many of whom (including her parents) emigrated to Europe when Washington‐backed right‐wing military governments were installed in Central and South American countries (ibid.). She goes on to address how they found significant value and insight in the work of a filmmaker long declared irreconcilably and irredeemably ‘bourgeois’ by many of their northern hemisphere fellow travellers.
In short, it seems clear that the viewpoint of those would‐be taste chroniclers in English‐speaking capitals who have dismissed Bergman’s impact has often been as narrow as they claimed the filmmaker’s to be. If the focus includes little more than Anglosphere metropolitan cineaste circles and one is temperamentally disinclined to appreciate the Swedish director’s work, it becomes easy to conclude that if his cinema is valued in upscale Manhattan, it is overvalued there and that this speaks to the limitations, cultural myopia, and elite politics both of that milieu and the films themselves. Rosenbaum spends a paragraph in his New York Times essay discussing how Bergman's work resonated with well‐heeled New Yorkers (understandably perhaps, considering his essay was commissioned by a publication chronicling and speaking to exactly that demographic and culture), the implication being that matters of class mixed with a kind of unconscious racism was a key factor in Manhattanites’ particularly enthusiastic appreciation of films cast with “blond, blue eyed” actors (something that could, of course, be partially true and is overdue for a rigorous, fair‐minded exploration). He doesn’t, however, appear to know or be interested in how Bergman’s films might have been appreciated outside that rarefied context, let alone in New Delhi or Santiago. Nor, for example, does Rosenbaum consider the well‐known, very enthusiastic reaction to the director’s work by the gay, African American writer James Baldwin (1991), who left Manhattan for Paris in 1948 after finding racism in the Big Apple intolerable. The fact that Baldwin felt a profound connection to Bergman’s films, one he explained in riveting detail in an important 1960 Esquire article (ibid.) – which Shelleen Greene dissects ahead in her contribution to this anthology – should, as a bare minimum, be factored into any argument suggesting the Swedish filmmaker was only of interest to members of the white East Coast cultural establishment or those aspiring to membership of their cloistered world. In curating this volume, we have sought to face what two of our contributors have recently termed in the introduction of their own invaluable edited volume, Ingmar Bergman at the Crossroads, the increasingly conspicuous “non‐issue of race” in much Bergman commentary, “the very whiteness” that has characterised Bergman studies, past and present (Koskinen and Wallenberg 2023, p. 5). We hope that Greene’s chapter has the effect of jump‐starting an extended conversation on this issue in Bergman’s cinema.8
Presumably, like many Anglophone critics and commentators, Rosenbaum was unaware of the fact that Bergman’s cinema had long been held in high regard by critics and audiences beyond the English‐speaking West and Paris (his reputation had also waxed and waned in the latter over the decades but was overall secure). Birgitta Steene (2021) began to explore this topic for English readers in a little‐known 1998 article that we were privileged to republish in the ‘Bergman World’ special journal issue. Following our own earlier work (Ford 2002, 2011, 2012; Humphrey 2013, 2021), we believe such questions regarding global reception of the director’s work remain of utmost importance. As stated in ‘Situating Ingmar Bergman and World Cinema’ (Ford and Humphrey 2021a
