Description
Book SynopsisBorn to a mother who did not want him and a father who humiliated him during his upbringing, Ingmar Bergman somehow endured his dysfunctional family to become one of the great artists of the twentieth century. However, the scars left from his early agony affected him both physically and emotionally. He suffered with a disabling psychosomatic gastrointestinal illness and serious problems in his interpersonal relationships. In The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons through Film, Barbara Young looks at how the director's personal life shaped his creative output. A practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Young probes Bergman's relationships with his parents, his wives, his children, and his colleagues to explore the meanings of his many films. As Bergman gradually began to work through his psychological problems, he accomplished something that few people have ever donehe analyzed himself. The films examined in this study include the majority of his features, including The Seve
Trade ReviewMerging biography, cinema studies, and psychoanalysis, psychiatrist Young traces the life and career of storied Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and examines how his rocky personal life shaped his films in this sometimes insightful . . . history. Moving chronologically, from Bergman’s unhappy childhood (after nearly dying of the Spanish flu shortly after birth, he was raised briefly by his grandmother and never formed a strong bond with his mother) to his promiscuous, illness-riddled adulthood, Young highlights each of the director’s films and stage productions. As a photographer herself—and there is often too much of the author here—she has an eye for Bergman’s striking visuals, such as the use of light and shadows in one of his bestknown films, The Seventh Seal. Young rather repeatedly reminds the reader that Bergman worked to exorcise his inner demons through his art, and his films were often direct reflections of his personal crises; he was married five times and engaged in multiple affairs on and off the set, the details of which worked their way into the screenplays for Thirst and Sawdust and Tinsel. . . . Bergman’s life and work are as rich as ever, and both are as he once described his ideal film: 'I want to give [the audience] a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.' * Publishers Weekly *
