Ingmar Bergman

Foreword

foreword Ingmar Bergman is the third book by influential film critic Robin Wood to be republished by Wayne State University Press within its Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series. Like Wood’s other early auteurist studies, Ingmar Bergman was an in- fluential milestone when it was first published in 1969. At a time when few reviewers and critics were taking film study seriously, Wood’s careful and thoroughly cinematic commentary demonstrated the potential of film analysis in a nascent scholarly field. It influenced a generation of students and cineastes. Wood’s great contribution as an analyst of Bergman’s films is to make a compelling case for the logic of the filmmaker’s development over a period of some twenty years while still respecting the distinctiveness of each individual film. Wood constantly compares and contrasts the Bergman movies under discussion, pointing out similar themes, motifs, symbolism, and narrative strategies. He is especially insightful on how Bergman utilized a stock company of actresses for multiple appearances in different films. The astuteness of Wood’s insights into Bergman ’s work is clear when one considers how well they apply to the films Bergman made after the book was published. It is not only the book’s insights into Bergman’s films but also its style and distinctive voice that make it an important x foreword work of film criticism. Ultimately Wood’s greatest achievement as a writer is to communicate a passion for films and their seriousness—a message that is, alas, at least as pressing today as it was in 1969. Back then, no one seriously interested in movies read this book without feeling an equally passionate response, nor will readers today. Wood’s voice is unmistakably his own, and his tone is wont to provoke. Because Wood is both dogmatic and transparent, the cruxes in his critical terminology so obvious, it is more productive, and certainly more exhilarating, to disagree with him than to be persuaded by most other writers on film. In short, as a work of criticism, Ingmar Bergman is exemplary in eloquence and insight. From the vantage point of today, however, over forty years since the book’s appearance and the successful establishment of film studies in academia, it might appear to some that the book is, as they say, “dated.” After all, Wood completed it before Bergman made such important later films as The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, From the Lives of the Marionettes, Scenes from a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander. A significant part of Bergman ’s career, which included many of his films for television, was still to come when the original book, which ended with a perceptive discussion of Bergman’s great 1968 film Shame, was published. This incompleteness is perhaps most poignant in Wood’s comment that Bergman was interested in mounting a production of The Magic Flute, a project the filmmaker did indeed successfully bring to the screen in 1975. It is unfortunate that Wood did not get to revise the book as part of a projected plan to revisit several of his early monographs for Wayne State University Press on the model of what xi foreword he had already famously done with his work on Alfred Hitchcock . The only one he had managed to do before his death was the volume on Howard Hawks, which was published by the Press in 2006. At one time Wood told me that he wanted to revise his Bergman and Satyajit Ray volumes next, and he looked forward excitedly to doing so. Undoubtedly, the astonishingly and always perceptive Wood, by incorporating new ideas from his own subsequent development as a critic, a development quite as remarkable in its way as Bergman’s, would have offered new insights on the director’s important later films as well as on such ill-conceived projects as The Touch and The Serpent’s Egg. Thus one might think of IngmarBergman as an incomplete account of one of the world’s most protean filmmakers from one of the world’s most resourceful critics, with much of each one’s future development uncharted here. The book noticeably lacks anything resembling what became accepted as “Theory” in film studies for decades after its publication. Throughout its pages Wood offers pronouncements on “the western cultural tradition ” with complete assurance, in a manner that contemporary scholars would not dare since such terms have become, in...