Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Pages: 250
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-4422-4565-5 • Hardback • October 2015 • $50.00 • (£38.00)
978-1-4422-4566-2 • eBook • October 2015 • $47.00 • (£36.00)
Barbara Young is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has been practicing in the Baltimore, Maryland area for more than 50 years. She has published twenty-five papers on the relationship of therapy and creativity. Young is also an accomplished photographer.
Merging biography, cinema studies, and psychoanalysis, psychiatrist Young traces the life and career of storied Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and examines how his rocky personal life shaped his films in this sometimes insightful . . . history. Moving chronologically, from Bergman’s unhappy childhood (after nearly dying of the Spanish flu shortly after birth, he was raised briefly by his grandmother and never formed a strong bond with his mother) to his promiscuous, illness-riddled adulthood, Young highlights each of the director’s films and stage productions. As a photographer herself—and there is often too much of the author here—she has an eye for Bergman’s striking visuals, such as the use of light and shadows in one of his bestknown films, The Seventh Seal. Young rather repeatedly reminds the reader that Bergman worked to exorcise his inner demons through his art, and his films were often direct reflections of his personal crises; he was married five times and engaged in multiple affairs on and off the set, the details of which worked their way into the screenplays for Thirst and Sawdust and Tinsel. . . . Bergman’s life and work are as rich as ever, and both are as he once described his ideal film: 'I want to give [the audience] a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.'
— Publishers Weekly