The development of themes, motifs, and techniques in Bergman's films, from the first intimations in the early work to the consummate resolutions in the final movies. Known for their repeating motifs and signature tropes, the films of Ingmar Bergman also contain extensive variation and development. In these reflections on Bergman's artistry and thought, Irving Singer discerns distinctive themes in Bergman's filmmaking, from first intimations in the early work to consummate resolutions in the later movies. Singer demonstrates that while Bergman's output is not philosophy on celluloid, it attains an expressive and purely aesthetic truthfulness that can be considered philosophical in a broader sense. Through analysis of both narrative and filmic effects, Singer probes Bergman's mythmaking and his reliance upon the magic inherent in his cinematic techniques. Singer traces throughout the evolution of Bergman's ideas about life and death, and about the possibility of happiness and interpersonal love. In the overtly self-referential films that he wrote or directed ( The Best Intentions , Fanny and Alexander , Sunday's Children ) as well as the less obviously autobiographical ones (including Wild Strawberries , The Seventh Seal , and the triad that begins with Through a Glass Darkly ) Bergman investigates problems in his existence and frequently reverts to childhood memories. In such movies as Smiles of a Summer Night, Scenes from a Marriage , and Saraband , Bergman draws upon his mature experience and depicts the troubled relationships between men who are often weak and women who are made to suffer by the damaged men with whom they live. In Persona , Cries and Whispers , and other works, his experiments with the camera are uniquely masterful. Inspecting the panorama of Bergman's art, Singer shows how the endless search for human contact motivates the content of his films and reflects Bergman's profound perspective on the world.

Born near Manchester in 1948, Anna Mendelssohn authored poetry, fiction, drama, and life writing; she was also a visual artist, musician, and translator. From 1971 to 1977 she served time at Holloway Prison in London due to her involvement in extreme leftist activism. From the early 1980s, Mendelssohn composed nineteen poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics, among them, Parataxis, Critical Quarterly, and Jacket. Her work appeared in seminal anthologies including Denise Riley's Poets on Writing (1992), Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1996), and Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004). Often situated within the British Poetry Revival, Mendelssohn retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England, where she lived from 1983 until her death in 2009. In 2010, her vast archive of writings and drawings was generously donated by her three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex. Labelled surrealist and ludic, Mendelssohn's poems draw thematically and stylistically on an expansive lineage that encompasses an international array of post-1850 avant-garde figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Anna Ahkmatova, Nâzim Hikmet, Federico García Lorca, and Tom Raworth. Closely attuned to the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to disparities of class and race, her poems are impassioned, acute, probing, allusive, and unparalleled. Part aesthetic treatise ("a poem is not going to give precise directions"); part antipolitical manifesto ("the war is too close / for revolution to be understood"); part lament ("softly the sound of woe / gallops"); part celebration of the possibilities of poetic noise and possibility, replete with "scoopydoo sounds", "night[s of] pouring gold", and "high walk[s] into fantasy", Mendelssohn's writing resolutely resists containment or category. This scholarly edition is the first replete collection of the poems Anna Mendelssohn published or prepared for circulation in her lifetime, often writing under the name Grace Lake.