Stretching the Parameters: Bergman and Oshima

Abstract

The crucial importance of one of the cinema’s most respected directors to the theme of this book cannot be overestimated. Always confrontational, the Swedish giant of film Ingmar Bergman dealt in an honest and serious fashion with issues of sexuality, along with his other concerns: the relevance of art and music in the modern world; the false consolations of belief; and, a crucial theme, the uncomfortable relationships between men and women. In the latter area, he reflected the plays of August Strindberg, which Bergman had directed in the theatre. Bergman’s work altered the parameters of the treatment of sex in film, and the battles over such films as The Silence, The Virgin Spring and Summer with Monika were much reported in their day and paved the way for such Swedish films as Vilgot Sjöman’s I Am Curious (Yellow), with its incendiary melange of left-wing politics and graphic lovemaking cenes. Bergman, however, rejected modish notions of agitprop and facile political solutions to society’s problems.