TEHRAN – “Images: My Life in Film” by Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman has recently been published in Persian by Cheshmeh.

Goli Emami is the translator of the book first published in 1990.

In this book, Bergman presents an intimate view of his own unique body of work in film. 

His career spanned forty years and produced more than fifty films, many of which are considered classics: “The Seventh Seal”, “The Virgin Spring”, “Persona”, “Smiles of a Summer Night”, “Wild Strawberries”, and “Fanny and Alexander”, to name but a few. 

When Bergman began this book, he had not seen most of his movies since he made them. Resorting to scripts and working notebooks, and especially to memory, he comments brilliantly and always cogently on his failures as well as his successes; on the themes that bind his work together; on his concerns, anxieties and moments of happiness; on the relationship between his life and art.

Readers are allowed a glimpse of the inner workings behind his well-known masterpieces: his anxiety and pain as he edited a 312-minute “Fanny and Alexander” for a three-hour feature film release; his attempt to reconcile the towering figures of his parents with “Wild Strawberries”. 

He relates his own starkly honest view of his great triumphs and quiet failures. 

More clearly than ever before, “Images” allows us to listen to his “voice of genius”, Woody Allen wrote in a preface to this book.

Allen calls Bergman the finest filmmaker of his lifetime and “a born spinner of tales.”

Photo: Front cover of the Persian edition of Ingmar Bergman’s book “Images: My Life in Film”.

MMS/YAW