Images

“The finest filmmaker of my lifetime . . . Bergman was a born spinner of tales.” —Woody Allen

In this new paperback edition, Ingmar Bergman presents an intimate view of his own unique body of work in film. His career spanned forty years and produced more than fifty films, many of which are considered classics: The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring, Persona, Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, and Fanny and Alexander, to name but a few. When he began this book, Bergman had not seen most of his movies since he made them. Resorting to scripts and working notebooks, and especially to memory, he comments brilliantly and always cogently on his failures as well as his successes; on the themes that bind his work together; on his concerns, anxieties, and moments of happiness; on the relationship between his life and art.

Readers are allowed a glimpse of the inner workings behind his well-known masterpieces: his anxiety and pain as he edited a 312 minute Fanny and Alexander for a three-hour feature film release; his attempt to reconcile the towering figures of his parents with Wild Strawberries. He relates his own starkly honest view of his great triumphs and quiet failures. More clearly than ever before, Images allows us to listen to his “voice of genius” (Woody Allen, New York Times Book Review).