An essential new anthology that will pay dividends in Theatre, Film, and Bergman Studies for years, perhaps decades to come. The collected essays and interviews are smart, engaging, and focused on concerns of vital interest to the contemporary reader. Nobody interested in the Demon Director can afford to pass it up.

Daniel Humphrey, Professor of Performance, Visualization, and Fine Arts, Texas A&M University, USA, and author of Queer Bergman: Sexuality, Gender, and the European Art Cinema (2013)

This new anthology by renowned Bergman scholars Maaret Koskinen and Louise Wallenberg presents a cloud of witnesses, giving testimony on diverse aspects of the art of the multifarious Swedish film director and writer. Beyond the obvious heterogeneity of the different perspectives lies a recurrent common interest in the practical and also collective work, the “art of making illusions” and thus, the art of “making the silence speak”.

Lars Gustaf Andersson, Professor in Film Studies at the Centre for Literature and Languages, Lund University, Sweden

Painting a truly mature, challenging picture of Bergman’s overdetermined authorship, both celebrating its results on screen while also interrogating the ethical costs of such uncommon power spanning multiple decades, Maaret Koskinen and Louise Wallenberg’s expertly curated volume rises above the current Manichean vogue for designating authors as simple heroes or villains. With its genuinely refreshing emphasis on Swedish production context and a highly generative mix of academic analyses, interviews with collaborators, and commentaries by well-chosen film and theatre directors of subsequent generations, this very welcome book features an entirely apposite mix of admiration, new insight, and more troubled reflection.

Hamish Ford, Senior Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Newcastle, Australia