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
- 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
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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