The Study Of Mother’s Image In Ingmar Bergman’s Films

Ingmar Bergman is one of the20th century’s greatest film director, whose films are well known as abstruse and deep philosophical meaning. Bergman’s films have been studied from different angles by a lot of people and this paper seeks to study from a new perspective. I notice that the reproduction of mother’s image is involved in most of Bergman’s films, especially in "Persona","Cries and Whispers","Autumn Sonata" and "From the Life of the Marionettes". In the four movies, maternal role is the main driving force of plot development, so they are the main research objects of this paper. And the typical image of mother in other films is also taken into account, such as "Crisis","Wild Strawberries" and "Sarabande".After the discussion of patriarchy, Bergman began to search for meaning in women’s stance. The marginalized "mother" faces a no father world in which male authority is lost but patriarchal shadow still remains. Bergman expressed the mothers’ depression and lonely with "indoor drama", but did not mention the causes of their spiritual crisis. If you do not carefully study, the hidden patriarchal shadow behind mothers’suffering would be difficult to be exposed. Through the contrast of "angel mother" and "evil mother", we can see that Bergman agrees with the patriarchal nuclear family mechanism and the traditional gender order. He emphasizes the importance of motherhood and tries to build the relationship between motherhood and children’s "spiritual disease", but in the end he has no choice but to blame "mother". Finally we find that Bergman has an ambivalent attitude towards "mother": compassion and trial, fascination and condemnation.In this paper, I mainly use the feminist and psychoanalytic theory, combining with Bergman’s personal experience. The dissertation is divided into three sections. It aims to dig out the gender ideology of Ingmar Bergman and remove the veil of male power which has always covered on mother’s head.