Everything you need to understand or teach
Ingmar Bergman.
Products may contain comprehensive summaries, analysis, notes, articles, essays,
lesson plans and more. See below for details on what is included.
Bergman, Ingmar (1918—)
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman's name is virtually synonymous with the sort of intellectual European films that most critics love to praise—but that many ...
Read more
The works of Swedish film and stage director Ingmar Bergman (born 1918) are marked by intellectuality, metaphysical speculation, and symbolic and allegorical content.Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14...
Read more
Ingmar Bergman, Swedish author and movie and theater director, is one of the foremost contributors to postwar European cinema and a leading stage interpreter of such playwrights as William Shakespeare...
Read more
Critical Essay by Eric Rohmer
There is certainly naivete in [the allegory used in The Seventh Seal], but there is some naivete in every fable. It is the naivete proper to the great periods of art ...
Read more
Critical Essay by Birgitta Steene
[There are writers] whose works seem to lend themselves to a thematic interpretation; writers who appear as "hedgehogs" in the literary world, i.e., rel...
Read more
Critical Essay by Tom Milne
The easiest way out of dealing with an embarassing white elephant like Bergman's Now About These Women … is to follow everybody else in sweeping it away under...
Read more
Critical Essay by Richard Schickel
Ingmar Bergman likes to speak of himself as a magician. The film maker, he notes, bases his art on the use of a machine that exploits a weakness in human vision in o...
Read more
Critical Essay by Robin Wood
Prison is a turgid, tedious film finally invalidated by the tendency to inflate a personal neurosis into a Vision of Life. Its explicit thesis is that life on earth is alr...
Read more
Critical Essay by Arthur Gibson
Three persistent and intensifying impressions assail me as I contemplate the consistent whole that is the film series [consisting of seven films: The Seventh Seal, Wild...
Read more
Critical Essay by Eugene Archer
Bergman's essential theme, as expressed in his films, is man's search for knowledge in a hostile universe. The ultimate answer is that there is no answer,...
Read more
Critical Essay by Birgitta Steene
To a great extent Bergman's films from the fifties—The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Virgin Spring—...
Read more
Critical Essay by Vernon Young
It must never be overlooked that Bergman is as persistent a showman as he is a moralist. He is of the theatre, and while I should not want to declare that the one talent...
Read more
Critical Essay by Art Carduner
Living in the same world with Ingmar Bergman is like living in one of those cities which has a perpetual view of majestic snow-capped mountain peaks. Nobody spends his e...
Read more
Critical Essay by Francois Truffaut
For me, the lesson that Bergman gives us hinges on three points: liberation of dialogue, a radical cleansing of image, and absolute primacy granted to the human fac...
Read more
Critical Essay by Joan Mellen
Bergman employs [women] as spokeswomen to express his personal world-view—a world-view basically defined by the traumatic absence and silence of God, who has coldl...
Read more
Critical Essay by Peter Harcourt
More than any other film artist, Bergman's work is rooted in the past. His early films grew out of the culture that surrounded them and they were invariably con...
Read more
Critical Essay by Arlene Croce
While Bergman is the darling of the sophisticates, he is nonetheless a cinematic artist of unusual accomplishment, whose works demand a proportionately serious considera...
Read more
Critical Essay by Diane M. Borden
For Bergman, the human face is a register, a kind of antenna that signals and communicates the life of the consciousness. That "life" is a constant exis...
Read more
Critical Essay by Ronald S. Librach
The largest metaphor in The Serpent's Egg is the metaphor of the narrative film itself as a dream—the complete inversion of two levels of "real...
Read more
Critical Essay by Caroline Blackwood
Cecil B. de Mille gave the public "Religion and Sex"; Ingmar Bergman has now simply come up with a more esoteric formula, the Supernatural and Sex, d...
Read more
Critical Essay by JÖrn Donner
As an artist in film [Bergman] interprets and transfers his private dreams and imaginings to the celluloid. As an artist he is firmly anchored in a Swedish and Eur...
Read more