Ingmar Bergman

At a time when few reviewers and critics were taking the study of film seriously, Robin Wood released a careful and thoroughly cinematic commentary on Ingmar Bergmans films that demonstrated the potential of film analysis in a nascent scholarly field. The original Ingmar Bergman influenced a generation of film scholars and cineastes after its publication in 1969 and remains one of the most important volumes on the director. This new edition of Ingmar Bergman, edited by film scholar Barry Keith Grant, contains all of Woods original text plus four later pieces on the director by Wood that were intended for a new volume that was not completed before Woods death in 2010. In analysing a selection of Bergmans films, Wood makes a compelling case for the logic of the filmmakers development while still respecting and indicating the distinctiveness of his individual films. Woods emphasis on questions of value (What makes a work important? How does it address our lives?) informed his entire career and serve as the basis for many of these chapters. In the added material for this new edition, Wood considers three important films Bergman made after the book was first publishedCries and Whispers, Fanny and Alexander, and From the Life of the Marionettesand also includes significant reassessment of Persona. These pieces provocatively suggest the more political directions Wood might have taken had he been able to produce Ingmar Bergman Revisited, as he had planned to do before his death. In its day, Ingmar Bergman was one of the most important volumes on the Swedish director published in English, and it remains compelling today despite the multitude of books to appear on the director since. Film scholars and fans of Bergmans work will enjoy this updated volume.