Persona and Shame

Ingmar Bergman is known for masterpieces of controlled human emotion, exploring every facet of the personality in relentless detail. He wrote, I had the possibility of corresponding with the world around me in a language that is literally spoken from soul to soul.

Persona is a brooding study of personal disintegration, as Elizabeth, an actress recovering from a severe emotional breakdown, is cared for by Alma, her apparently well-balanced and extrovert nurse. Slowly the barriers that separate and define the two woman crumble, and their relationship turns into a bewildering reversal and substitution of their respective identities.

Shame pitches Jan and Eva, husband and wife and both professional musicians, into a world torn apart by civil war. Completely brutalised by the progressive breakdown of all civilised standards of behaviour, Jan and Eva’s fate reflects how superficial culture, good order and morality are when set against the lack of concern of an arbitrary and amoral universe.

Bergman’s ability to combine the greatest universality with the most delicate intimacy of characterisation and narrative gives these two screenplays the inescapable power of myth.

Liberally illustrated with production stills, the volume also includes "The Snakeskin", Bergman's address written for the presentation of the Erasmus Prize ni Amsterdam, 1965.