An enormous study (575 pages) of the stories, plays and screenplays
of Bergman seen as a single 40-year dream play. Gado spent 17 years
writing this think-piece, which successfully isolates an Oedipal
paradigm at the basis of Bergman's work. He focuses on the
screenplays for his psycholiterary analysis, barely scratches at
biography, except where a marriage or Bergman's tax problems may
impinge on his choice of text. For example, in his middle period,
Bergman's marriage to a concert pianist turned him to chamber films
(Through a Glass Darkly, The Communicants - known here as Winter
Light - and The Silence), partly in imitation of Strindberg's
chamber dramas and partly in imitation of chamber music. Bergman
had exhausted himself artistically after the rousing successes of
Smiles of the Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and
the lesser success of The Magician. These screenplays had somewhat
slyly suggested strong closures for each work, but this was only
sleight-of-hand to mask his themes' ragged endings. He needed a new
direction and found it in music and in Korosawa's Rashornon, which
he admired intensely and turned to good effect in The Virgin
Spring. Gado studies each of Bergman's many stories and plays
written before his ad. vent as a filmmaker, when he still hoped to
grab Strindberg's banner in the theater. He found that he was not a
playwright, was not capable even of a polished short story or
novel. Gradually, he discovered that what he did so really well was
use the camera as a pen. In one segment of his early Dreams, he
allowed the camera to tell much of the story and this was his
breakthrough, giving him a weapon with which to begin his major
mode. But, whether writing his early theater pieces or his
screenplays, he essentially worked on variations of his punishing
infancy and youth as the son of a widely admired but weak-willed
(and sex-starved) minister and a domineering female intellectual.
Bergman himself, according to his siblings, has overblown the
family climate - but it's all real to him. Bergmanians must have
this indispensable study, which will be the corner stone of all
future studies until a definitive biography appears. It's
intelligent, deep-running, and readably unpedantic, but not stylish
or witty. (Kirkus Reviews)
Acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers of this or any other
time, Bergman has with few exceptions written his own
screenplays--an uncommon practice in the film industry--and for
this practice critics refer to him as a "literary" filmmaker: In
this work, Gado examines virtually the entire range of Bergman's
literary output. While treating the matter of the visual
preentation fo Bergman's films, Gado concentrates on story and
narrative and their relationship to Bergman's personal history.
Gado concludes that whatever the outward appearance of Bergman's
works, they contain an elementary psychic fantasy that links them
all, revealing an artist who hoped to be a dramatist, "the new
Strindberg," and who saw the camera as an extension of his pen.
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