Cheap Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (Book) (Ingmar Bergman) Price

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Customer Reviews of Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman

Great plays, great films
Contains English translations of the screenplays for Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Magician (1958). Obviously, all four plays date around the same time period, a crucial coming-to-being turning point in the career of, almost inarguably, the greatest film-maker of all time. Also included is an introductory conversation exerpt by Bergman on film-making and a Preface by producer Carl Anders Dymling. The book I own was put out by Clarion, a division of Simon & Schuster: Books by the same title have been published, I believe, under the same name by different publishers, and I can't be sure as to the content or arrangement of them.

What strikes me most about Bergman's screenplays is the tremendous literary value of them, aside from their being an invaluable supplementary resource to the films. Reading the screenplays, one learns to catch the more subtle pieces of the films, sees the parts that were meant to be emphasized, the parts left out, and can examine closer the dialogue and events to extract their meanings. The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, of course, are universally regarded as milestones and alone make the book a worthy purchase; but I find most refreshing the addition of the Magician, an overlooked favorite of mine that has always seemed to me a great precursor to Tarkovsky. Even if you don't have the films or haven't seen them, however, Bergman's screenplays stand well enough on their own and deserve to be in any library of literature.

I'd like to find these in the original Swedish: perhaps a duel-language text might have made this book more worthwhile. In any case, highly recommended.