Description
Book SynopsisTouches on issues of censorship and the cinema of small nations, while shedding light on the shifting views of Bergman and auteurist film, high art, and popular culture.
Trade Review". . . more than a major contribution to Bergman studies. It will, I predict, change the way most serious Bergman critics 'read' this film. Seldom do archive work, decades of experience with a text and its author, and theoretical sophistication come together so fruitfully."
-- Marilyn Johns Blackwell * Scandinavian-Canadian Studies *
"The monograph rests on the opening up of a new resource, the Bergman Archive, and Koskinen deserves our gratitude for her role here, in preserving this unique body of work for public access."
-- James B. Tueller * The Northern Mariner *
"Koskinen's study of the genesis and enactment of The Silence is quite probably the best Bergman case study ever written. It benefits enormously from the writing notebooks shown to the author by Bergman in 1998 and it is almost literally a study of a masterpiece being born. But it is more than that, for Koskinen highlights context and consequences…. This is a brilliant summary of the relationship between the film's creation and the film itself, and shows that Bergman's writing is itself indefinable, part literary, part cinematic, endlessly battling the forbidding link between word and image with great fertility."
* Senses of Cinema *
Table of ContentsPART ONE Backdrops and Contexts
1. National Cinema, Art Film, and the Auteur
The Auteur Contextualized
Antonioni: "That Perpetual Foil to Bergman"
Art Versus Business
The Auteur as Star
The Art of Reinventing Authorship
2. Censorship Issues: Sex, Women, and Hollywood
The Silence at Home: Debate and Controversy
The Silence Abroad: "The Bergman Ballyhoo Era"
Gender Issues: Now What About All These Women?
Director and Actress: Nudity and Power Relations
PART TWO Works in Progress: Intermedial Variations
3. In the Beginning Was (the Fear of) the Word: Notebooks
From Word to Sound . . . to Music and Painting
4. In Between Words and Images: Manuscripts and Screenplays
Edits: Too Many Words
Sex and the City: The Eroticism of Language
The Published Screenplay: Senses and Synesthetics
Excursion: Flash Forward to a Writer Let Loose
PART THREE The Finished Film
5. Framing the Senses
Sounds and Linguistic Voids
Beginnings: Windows and Sights
Paintings and Tableaux Vivants
The Phenomenology of Vision: Hotel Excursions
The Eroticism of Vision: Mirrors and Doorways
The Close-Up: The Bergman Icon
Conclusion
Production Notes
Filmography
Transcript of the U.S. Trailer for The Silence
Bibliography
