Ingmar Bergman's the Silence

Maaret Koskinen is professor of cinema studies at Stockholm University and the author of several books on Ingmar Bergman's work.

". . . 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)

• PART ONE Backdrops and Contexts1. National Cinema, Art Film, and the AuteurThe Auteur ContextualizedAntonioni: "That Perpetual Foil to Bergman" Art Versus Business The Auteur as StarThe Art of Reinventing Authorship2. Censorship Issues: Sex, Women, and HollywoodThe Silence at Home: Debate and ControversyThe 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 Variations3. In the Beginning Was (the Fear of) the Word: NotebooksFrom Word to Sound . . . to Music and Painting 4. In Between Words and Images: Manuscripts and ScreenplaysEdits: Too Many WordsSex and the City: The Eroticism of LanguageThe Published Screenplay: Senses and SynestheticsExcursion: Flash Forward to a Writer Let LoosePART THREE The Finished Film5. Framing the SensesSounds and Linguistic VoidsBeginnings: Windows and SightsPaintings and Tableaux VivantsThe Phenomenology of Vision: Hotel ExcursionsThe Eroticism of Vision: Mirrors and DoorwaysThe Close-Up: The Bergman IconConclusionProduction NotesFilmographyTranscript of the U.S. Trailer for The SilenceBibliography