Introduction

Abstract

Illusion is a subject that permeates Ingmar Bergman’s work, from his early films’ preoccupations with art and life, through to his later films’ deconstruction of truth and reality as fixities. The apex of the shift occurs during the 1950s and 1960s. At this time, fictional representation itself came under investigation in Bergman’s films, resembling strikingly similar investigations elsewhere in European and North American cinema during the 1960s, where the infinite possibility of layers of illusion projecting illusion — often under the general heading of debates about reflexivity — intrigued directors and audiences. These preoccupations sparked off a greater fluidity in Bergman’s films, marking the death of fixed notions of identity and existence and the evolution of a mergence between dream and reality, outer and inner, mask and person, suggesting a multiplicity of lives, selves and realities.