• Complain

Barbara Young - The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film

Here you can read online Barbara Young - The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2015, publisher: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, genre: Non-fiction / History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Barbara Young The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film
  • Book:
    The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Rowman and Littlefield Publishers
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2015
  • Rating:
    4 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 80
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Born 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 directors personal life shaped his creative output. A practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Young probes Bergmans 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 Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, The Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers, Face to Face, Autumn Sonata, Fanny and Alexander, and of course, Persona. Young also looks at Bergmans novels and letters to provide further insight into the directors creative process.
While many books have been written about Bergman and analysts have studied particular films, this volume represents a unique attempt by a psychoanalyst to understand an artist through his art. The Persona of Ingmar Bergman will appeal to film and art students, as well as those in the psychotherapy profession, and of course, the directors fans throughout the world.

Barbara Young: author's other books


Who wrote The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

The Persona of

Ingmar Bergman


The Persona of

Ingmar Bergman

Conquering Demons through Film

Barbara Young


ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

Lanham Boulder New York London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield

A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

www.rowman.com


Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB


Copyright 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield


All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.


British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Young, Barbara, 1920.

The persona of Ingmar Bergman : conquering demons through film / Barbara Young.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4422-4565-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-4566-2 (ebook)

1. Bergman, Ingmar, 19182007Psychology. 2. Motion picture producers and directorsSwedenBiography. 3. Bergman, Ingmar, 19182007Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

PN1998.3.B47Y68 2015

791.430233092dc23 [B]

2015013360


Picture 1 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.


Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated to the memory of

Blanche DeBra and Harvey Young, my parents;

Dr. Lewis Hill and Dr. Sarah Tower, my psychoanalysts;

Dr. John C. Whitehorn, my professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins; and to my patients and Ingmar Bergman, who have taught me so much about the infinite intricacies of the mind, body, and soul.

This is what the demons that have tormented me all my life have been about: my terror that I would disintegrate and lose control of my murderous or suicidal feelings.

Bergman


From an early age, Bergman re-created in himself a kind of alternative mothergiving himself, in his fantasy
obsessed playhis own form of undivided attention.

John Lahr

Preface We all have demons inside us that have accompanied us since childhood - photo 2
Preface

We all have demons inside us that have accompanied us since childhood, and we had to find ways of dealing with them early in life in order to survive. We locked them in a closet or hid them behind walls so we werent anxious and frightened all the time, but the demons still found ways of tormenting us. We would wake with nightmares, knowing the demons were hiding under our beds. We would forget in the middle of a speech. We stopped studying so we would fail a course. As lonely as we were, we pushed people away who wanted to be friends. These painful defense mechanisms against the mysterious demons or ghosts consumed a great deal of energy and limited our ability to use the skills we possessed to live a full life.

As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, my job has been to help people identify who their demons really are and how and why they came into existence, and to find ways of proceeding in the face of the demons threats, recognizing that what might have killed them as a child was not going to kill them as an adult. They werent going to release the deadly monster within themselves. Therapy is a slow process, however. The demons are ferocious and tenacious. My patients had to use all the good fairy-ghosts they had been given by those who loved them, and the skills they had inherited, to lock the demons back in the closet for good. When the demons occasionally did sneak out, my patients had learned how to call them by name and gently talk them back into the past where they belong.

The majority of people have been fortunate enough in their childhood family lives to have the means to deal with their demons without realizing what theyre doing. But there are those unfortunate ones whose demons are so violent that they escape into psychosis because their damaged lives are totally unbearable, as we will see played out in Ingmar Bergmans Through a Glass Darkly and The Hour of the Wolf. When my patients were finally able to face their demons, their aggressive energy was released to be used in positive and creative ways. And if tragedy hit and the demons temporarily emerged, my patients had learned to stay with the disturbing feelings until they understood what in the present had released the ghosts from the past.

You are about to encounter a most extraordinary man, Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker. He is extraordinary not because he is considered the finest film director in the past one hundred years, not because he was a genius in creating films of both beauty and deep understanding of the human condition, and not because he communicated directly to his audience his concern for the state of the world. (At the time he produced his early film Prison, which grew out of his own struggles to get free from the demons who imprisoned him, he remarked, I dont want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck in aesthetically.... I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.) What makes Bergman unique is that he conquered his demonsthe legacy of a traumatic childhoodthrough his creativity. As a youngster he had a puppet theater, he made short films with a primitive film projector, and he had an imaginative mind that could float above the many traumas he endured. And as an adultdrawing on his life experiencehe gradually managed to put his demons back in the closet for good. With no help from a psychiatristthrough intuition aloneBergman gradually faced down his demons, overcoming his terror of disintegration and death, gaining control of his murderous rage, and solving the problem of his intolerance of intimacy, which had led to his abandonment of four wives, eight children, and many mistresses.

Why did I spend four years of my life getting acquainted with this man? When I first saw The Seventh Seal I had just begun my second profession of photography. Burned into my mind to this day are three powerful images: a knight playing chess with death in the sunlight, the knight confessing to a priest (who is actually death in disguise) behind a grated window, and a young teenage girl who has been declared a witch waiting to be burned to death. As much as I was stunned in admiration of his art, I knew when I left the theater that death was real and unavoidable. Bergman had certainly delivered his blow effectively.

I didnt return to Bergman until years later when I prepared a discussion of WildStrawberries for the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Film Forum. Writing shortly after The Seventh Seal, in Wild Strawberries Bergman is again dealing with approaching death, but in a gentler way. The old doctor realizes he has lived only half a life, but while he is driving to his university to receive an award, the experiences he has in his interactions with young people along the way soften his heart. The delicate, complex artistry of the film with its many flashbacks is unsurpassed. Bergman said it was his fathers loneliness he was writing about. Later he realized the loneliness was his own.

It was at this point that my engagement with Bergman began. I watched his films in sequence. Contained in the DVDs were interviews with him, discussions of his works, and a few films of him at work on the movie set. Many books written by Bergman scholars are available. Shortly after the film

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film»

Look at similar books to The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons Through Film and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.