Ingmar Bergman’s films had a very broad and rich relationship with the rest of European cinema, contrary to the myth that Bergman was a peripheral figure, culturally and aesthetically isolated from the rest of Europe. This book contends that he should be put at the very center of European film history by chronologically comparing Bergman’s relationship to key European directors such as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, and also looks at Bergman’s critical relationship to key movements in film history such as the French New Wave. In so doing, it demonstrates how Ingmar Bergman’s films illustrate the demonic struggle in modernity between faith and secularity through “his intense preoccupation with the malaise of intimacy.”
First book length study of Ingmar Bergman in a specific European context – political, philosophical and aesthetic. Dispels commonly held myth of Bergman as a culturally isolated Swedish auteur. Use of the unusual concept of demonic materialism to distinguish and discuss Bergman’s key loss of faith and the carnal physicality of his vision.
