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.
Autorentext
Michael Tapper is an affiliated researcher in film studies at Lund University, Sweden, and a film critic at the daily papers Sydsvenska Dagbladet and Helsingborgs Dagblad. His previous books include Swedish Cops: From Sjöwall and Wahlöö to Stieg Larsson (2014) and he has contributed to several anthologies and journals.
Inhalt
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