Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face

Ingmar Bergman's Face to Face

  • Author: Tapper, Michael
  • Publisher: Columbia University Press
  • ISBN: 9780231176521
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780231851213
  • Place of publication:  New York , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2017
  • Month: October
  • Language: English
The 1976 premiere of Face to Face came at the height of director-screenwriter Ingmar Bergman's career. Prestigious awards and critical acclaim had made him into a leading name in European art cinema, yet today Face to Face is a largely overlooked and dismissed work.

This book tells the story of its rise and fall. It presents a new portrait of Bergman as a political artist exploring a new medium with huge public impact: television. Inspired by Henrik Ibsen, feminism, and alternative psychotherapy, he made a series of portraits of the modern bourgeois family focusing on the plight of women; Face to Face followed in the tracks of The Lie (1970) and Scenes from a Marriage (1973). By his workbooks, engagement planners, and other archival material, we can trace his investigation into the heart of repressive family structures to eventually glimpse a way out. This volume culminates in an extensive study of the two-year process from the first outlines of the screenplay to the reception and aftermath of Face to Face. It thus offers a unique insight into Bergman's world, his ideas and artistry during a turbulent time in cinema history.
  • Table of Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Part I. Prelude: The 1960s
    • Under Fire
    • Crisis
  • Part II. Bergman Goes TV
    • Out of the Ivory Tower
    • Mass-Market Bergman
    • The TV Medium and Bergman’s Style
  • Part III. Bergman’s Modernism
    • Attack of Second-Wave Feminism
    • The Strindberg-Ibsen-Bergman Connection
    • Persona: War on Idealism
    • The Making of Ingmar Bergman
    • One Man, Four Women
  • Part IV. The Djursholm Trilogy Plus One
    • The Lie: A Tragi-Comedy of Banality
    • Scenes from a Marriage
    • Life in the Beige Lane
    • Cries and Whispers: Into the Belly of the Idealism Beast
  • Part V. Face to Face
    • To the Orgasm and Beyond: Ingmar Bergman and the Sexual Revolution
    • Arthur Janov Conquers Sweden – and Bergman
    • Workbook No. 29, Part I: Everything is a Dream
    • Traum and Trauma
    • Workbook No. 29, Part II: Jenny the Psychiatrist
    • Workbook No. 29, Part III: The Primal Scream
    • The Screenplay
    • The Production
    • The TV Series
    • The Film
    • Overture to the Release
    • Reception
    • A Success and a Failure
    • Coda: The End of Art?
  • References
  • Index

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