Film Culture in Transition
2 total works
Ingmar Bergman is worldwide known as a film and stage director. Yet no-one has attempted to compare his stage and screen activities. In Between stage and screen Egil Tornqvist examines formal and thematical correspondences and differences between a number of Bergman's stage, screen, and radio productions. In the prologue Bergman's spiritual and aesthetic heritage and his position in the twentieth century media landscape is outlined. In the epilogue the question is answered to what extent one can speak of Bergman's directorial 'method' irrespective of the chosen medium.
Although television drama has existed for more than half a century and is now, in terms of audience participation, the dominant form of theatre, "there is as yet hardly any serious criticism of drama on television." Martin Esslin's statement ten years ago still holds true. Seeing it as a challenge, Egil T�rnqvist compares various Scandinavian and British TV versions of some of Ibsen's and Strindberg's best known plays. By means of close readings of textual passages, followed by transcriptions and analyses of the corresponding passages in the productions, T�rnqvist throws a revealing light on the difference between the textual and the audiovisual medium as well as between various directorial approaches. The first book to deal with the adaptation of stage drama to the small screen, it fills a gap both for students of drama and theatre and for those generally interested in television drama as an art form.