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Drama as Text and Performance
Strindberg's and Bergman's Miss Julie
Egil Törnqvist
Amsterdam University Press, 2012
This book is a study of August Strindberg’s famous drama Miss Julie, presented in both Swedish and English. Since it was first performed in 1888, Miss Julie has became one of the most successful plays written by Strindberg, widely considered one of the pioneers of modern drama. The book provides a penetrating analysis of the author’s text, followed by a close investigation of Ingmar Bergman’s much lauded 1985 production at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Drama as Text and Performance is intended as a paradigmatic illustration of similarities and differences between the two media—textand performance and their recipients, readers and spectators.

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Ingmar Bergman
A Reference Guide
Birgitta Steene
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
The films of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman are renowned for their largely spare and stark aesthetic, an existential framework, and plots driven by a fascination with death and the moral torments of the human soul. Birgitta Steene offers here in Ingmar Bergman: A Reference Guide an essential and unparalleled resource on the life and work of Bergman. Plumbing the depths of these trademark Bergman themes, Steene traces as well the indelible mark he left on world cinema through his other cinematographic work and writings.

Over the decades, Bergman's stature and image have evolved in fascinating ways—an iconoclast of the 1950s, a bourgeois traditionalist of the 1960s, and an icon in the 1980s. This exhaustive compendium considers each phase of his career, exploring his deep and vast oeuvre in all its controversy and complexity, and analyzes his intriguing and unique motifs such as his efforts to expose dead conventions and his portrayals of Woman as the archetype of humanity. As well as providing a detailed account of Bergman's life and chronicling his career as a filmmaker and theater director, including his work for television, Steene offers transcripts of some of the numerous interviews and conversations she conducted with Bergman. Writings by and about Bergman and a detailed chronological survey of his film and theatrical work completes this eminently readable and thoroughly researched volume. A wide-ranging and groundbreaking work of film history, Ingmar Bergman is the definitive reference for scholars of the Scandinavian master.
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The Magic Lantern
An Autobiography
Ingmar Bergman
University of Chicago Press, 1988

“When a film is not a document, it is a dream. . . . At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood.” Bergman, who has conveyed this heady sense of wonder and vision to moviegoers for decades, traces his lifelong love affair with film in his breathtakingly visual autobiography, The Magic Lantern.

More grand mosaic than linear account, Bergman’s vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywood’s golden age, and a tumultuous romantic history that includes five wives and more than a few mistresses. Throughout, Bergman recounts his life in a series of deeply personal flashbacks that document some of the most important moments in twentieth-century filmmaking as well as the private obsessions of the man behind them. Ambitious in scope yet sensitively wrought, The Magic Lantern is a window to the mind of one of our era’s great geniuses.

“[Bergman] has found a way to show the soul’s landscape . . . . Many gripping revelations.”—New York Times Book Review

“Joan Tate’s translation of this book has delicacy and true pitch . . . The Magic Lantern is as personal and penetrating as a Bergman film, wry, shadowy, austere.”—New Republic

“[Bergman] keeps returning to his past, reassessing it, distilling its meaning, offering it to his audiences in dazzling new shapes.”—New York Times

“What Bergman does relate, particularly his tangled relationships with his parents, is not only illuminating but quite moving. No ‘tell-all’ book this one, but revealing in ways that much longer and allegedly ‘franker’ books are not.”—Library Journal

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The Passion of Ingmar Bergman
Frank Gado
Duke University Press, 1986
Acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers of this or any other time, Bergman has with few exceptions written his own screenplays—an uncommon practice in the film industry—and for this practice critics refer to him as a "literary" filmmaker: In this work, Gado examines virtually the entire range of Bergman's literary output. While treating the matter of the visual presentation of Bergman's films, Gado concentrates on story and narrative and their relationship to Bergman's personal history.

Gado concludes that whatever the outward appearance of Bergman's works, they contain an elementary psychic fantasy that links them all, revealing an artist who hoped to be a dramatist, "the new Strindberg," and who saw the camera as an extension of his pen.

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Queer Bergman
Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema
By Daniel Humphrey
University of Texas Press, 2013

One of the twentieth century’s most important filmmakers—indeed one of its most important and influential artists—Ingmar Bergman and his films have been examined from almost every possible perspective, including their remarkable portrayals of women and their searing dramatizations of gender dynamics. Curiously however, especially considering the Swedish filmmaker’s numerous and intriguing comments on the subject, no study has focused on the undeniably queer characteristics present throughout this nominally straight auteur’s body of work; indeed, they have barely been noted.

Queer Bergman makes a bold and convincing argument that Ingmar Bergman’s work can best be thought of as profoundly queer in nature. Using persuasive historical evidence, including Bergman’s own on-the-record (though stubbornly ignored) remarks alluding to his own homosexual identifications, as well as the discourse of queer theory, Daniel Humphrey brings into focus the director’s radical denunciation of heteronormative values, his savage and darkly humorous deconstructions of gender roles, and his work’s trenchant, if also deeply conflicted, attacks on homophobically constructed forms of patriarchic authority. Adding an important chapter to the current discourse on GLBT/queer historiography, Humphrey also explores the unaddressed historical connections between post–World War II American queer culture and a concurrently vibrant European art cinema, proving that particular interrelationship to be as profound as the better documented associations between gay men and Hollywood musicals, queer spectators and the horror film, lesbians and gothic fiction, and others.

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The Serious Game
Ingmar Bergman as Stage Director
Egil Törnqvist
Amsterdam University Press, 2015
Though Ingmar Bergman became famous as a filmmaker, his roots-and, to some extent, his heart-were in the theater. He directed more than one hundred plays in his career, and The Serious Game takes a close look at fourteen productions he staged at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. Looking closely at the relationship between the verbal and the visual, this book gives even longtime Bergman fans a new understanding of his sensitivity to nuance, his versatility, and his dedication to craftsmanship.**INCLUDES DVD WITH FOURTEEN VIDEO RECORDINGS, ALL IN COLOUR**
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