This collection offers new and insightful perspectives on Ingmar Bergman's work as a film and theatre director as well as writer of fiction. Ingmar Bergman's rich legacy as a film director and writer of classics such as The Seventh Seal, Scenes From a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander has attracted scholars not only in film studies but also of literature, theater, gender, philosophy, religion, sociology, musicology, and more. Less known, however, is Bergman from the perspective of production studies, including all the choices, practices, and routines involved in what goes on behind the scenes. For instance, what about Bergman's collaborations and conflicts with film producers? What about his work with musicians at the opera, technicians in the television studio, and actors on the film set? What about Bergman and MeToo? In order to throw light on these issues, art practitioners such as film directors Ang Lee and Margarethe von Trotta, film and opera director Atom Egoyan, and film producer and screenwriter James Schamus are brought together with academics such as philosopher and film scholar Paisley Livingston, musicologist Alexis Luko, and playwright and performance studies scholar Allan Havis to discuss Bergman's work from their unique perspectives. In addition, Ingmar Bergman at the Crossroads provides, for the first time, in-depth interviews with Bergman's longtime collaborators Katinka Faragó and Måns Reuterswärd, who both have first-hand experience of working intimately as producers in film and television with Bergman, covering more than 5 decades. In an open exchange between individual and institutional perspectives, this book bridges the often-rigid boundaries between theoreticians and practitioners, in turn pointing Bergman's studies in new directions.

Until his early retirement at age 50, Hasse Ekman was one of the leading lights of Swedish cinema, an actor, writer, and director of prodigious talents. Yet today his work is virtually unknown outside of Sweden, eclipsed by the filmography of his occasional collaborator (and frequent rival) Ingmar Bergman. This comprehensive introduction—the first ever in English—follows Ekman’s career from his early days as a film journalist, through landmark films such as Girl with Hyacinths (1950), to his retirement amid exhaustion and disillusionment. Combining historical context with insightful analyses of Ekman’s styles and themes, this long overdue study considerably enriches our understanding of Swedish film history.

Protestants on Screen explores the Protestant contributions to American and European film from the silent era to the present day. The authors analyze how Protestant filmmakers, beliefs, theology, symbols, sensibilities, and cultural patterns have shaped the history of film. Challenging the stereotype of Protestants as world-denouncing-and-defying puritans and iconoclasts who stood in the way of film's maturation as an art, the authors contend that Protestants were among the key catalysts in the origins and development of film, bringing an identifiably Protestant aesthetic to the medium. The essays in this volume track key Protestant themes like faith and doubt, sin and depravity, biblical literalism, personal conversion and personal redemption, holiness and sanctification, moralism and pietism, Providence and secularism, apocalypticism, righteousness and justice, religion and race, the priesthood of all believers and its offshoots-democratization and individualism. Protestants, the essays in this volume demonstrate, helped birth and shape the film industry and harness the power of motion pictures for spiritual instruction, edification, and cultural influence.

Recognized as the father of palliative care in North America, Balfour Mount facilitated a sea change in medical practice by foregrounding concern for the whole person facing incurable illness. In this intimate and far-reaching memoir, Mount leads the reader through the formative moments and milestones of his personal and professional life as they intersected with the history of medical treatment over the last fifty years. Mount's lifelong pursuit of understanding the needs of dying patients began during his training as a surgical oncologist at Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital in the 1960s. He established the first comprehensive clinical program for end-of-life care in a teaching hospital in 1975 at McGill University's Royal Victoria Hospital, thus leading the charge for palliative medicine as a new specialty. His journey included collaboration with two storied healthcare innovators, British hospice pioneer Dame Cicely Saunders and American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, leading to a more fulsome understanding of the physical, psychosocial, and existential or spiritual needs of patients, their families, and their caregivers in the health care setting. This compelling narrative documents how the 'Royal Vic' team became internationally recognized as effective advocates of quality of life at the crossroad between life and death. From meetings with Viktor Frankl, the Dalai Lama and other teachers, to a memorable telephone chat with Mother Teresa, Mount recalls with appreciation, humour and humility, the places and people that helped to shed light on this universal human experience.

How are aesthetics and ethics related to the practical realities of the global fashion industry? Both have played an important role in academic fashion studies to this point, but they are most often discussed in the context of abstract phenomena such as modernity and capitalism, or identity issues such as sexuality, class and gender. The essays in this volume strive instead to show how the realities of the global fashion industry have important and pertinent aesthetic and ethical consequences. This collection provides critical and philosophical analysis of the interplay of aesthetics and ethics within the global fashion industry. Characterized by an increasingly fast spinning production, the industry is highly exploitative in terms of environment and labor force: underpaid textile workers, retailers working under brutal competition from the mass-merchandise discounters, young designers, seamstresses and curators often working for free, and a vast body of aspiring models. In addition, fashion-related aesthetic ideals are becoming more influential than ever in directing consumers in their social and personal identification processes and bodily practices with sometimes fatal consequences. Covering a wide range of subjects such as fashion's highly problematic production and consumption practices, the possibility of producing and consuming fashion ethically, fashion's intimate connection with nature and technology, Fashion Aesthetics and Ethics highlights the powerful aesthetical presence of fashion in relation to its ethical premises and often problematic outcomes.

World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism is a highly original study. Traditional views of cinematic realism usually draw on the so-called classical cinema and its allegiance to narrative mimesis, but Nagib challenges this, drawing instead on the filmmaker's commitment to truth and to the film medium's material bond with the real. Starting from the premise that world cinema's creative peaks are governed by an ethics of realism, Nagib conducts comparative case studies picked from world new waves, such as the Japanese New Wave, the French nouvelle vague, the Cinema Novo, the New German Cinema, the Russo-Cuban Revolutionary Cinema, the Portuguese self-performing auteur and the Inuit Indigenous Cinema. Drawing upon Badiou and Rancière, World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism revisits and reformulates several fundamental concepts in film studies, such as illusionism, identification, apparatus, alienation effects, presentation and representation. Its groundbreaking scholarship takes film theory in a bold new direction.