Ingmar Bergman has long been revered as a master craftsman of the cinema, a film poet who has created works that are intensely revealing of himself while resonating mysteriously and powerfully with his audience. In Ingmar Bergman Marc Gervais explores what has largely been taken for granted - how Bergman achieves this cinematic magic through his specific choices in the use of film language and the texturing and structuring of his images, sounds, and rhythms.

Gervais shows also how Bergman's work resonates in a much broader sphere than the personal. His films, which are without equal in the history of cinema in quality, consistency, and relevance, are crucial moments in an ongoing conversation with western culture in its frenetic evolution since World War II.

Gervais situates Bergman within the tensions of modernism and the western tradition that have manifested themselves in the twentieth century from existentialism, through deconstruction, and into postmodernism. Bergman's films are experienced as incarnations, meditations, explorations, and aesthetic objects that reflect, comment on, conflict with, or embrace the movements that produced them.