This Reference Guide to Ingmar Bergman offers a critical overview and annotated record of the artistic career of a very productive filmmaker, stage director, and author. Born in 1918 and still active in his mid-eighties, Bergman has made some 50 feature films, directed more than 120 theatre presentations, a number of radio and television productions, and has authored numerous scripts, plays, and prose works. Possessing a great visual and narrative talent, combined with musical sensitivity and psychological perspicacity, Bergman has projected a moral vision formed since childhood by the values of his Lutheran family background and by a Swedish bourgeois lifestyle. But his artistic production not only reflects the world he knew during his formative years; it also constitutes a serious examination of it.

In addition to its personal roots, Bergman's art has drawn creative stimulation from a still young and expanding film medium and from a dynamic and challenging period in the Swedish theatre, including opera, television, and radio drama. His deep sense of belonging to a native tradition in film and drama with such names as Victor Sjöström and August Strindberg as portal figures does not preclude an equally strong interest in the classical European theatre and international cinema.

Bergman has today achieved a world reputation like few other Swedish artists before him. A sign of this is the vast critical response that his work has elicited both in his native country and abroad, manifesting itself in many hundreds of books, articles, and dissertations. Bergman's achievement has also been recognized in numerous film and theatre awards and in tributes ranging from honorary doctorates to special symposia and Bergman festivals. There are even poems published that testify to his impact on viewers and audiences.

To assemble the critical record pertaining to Ingmar Bergman's œuvre is no small task and poses several questions. The first but not least is a general question: What is the purpose of a Reference Guide? The immediate answer is simple: to provide existing information to interested readers and scholars in a given field. That is, a reference guide is to serve as a cumulative checkpoint where it becomes possible to search and familiarize oneself with existing material on the subject. The second question follows almost automatically: What should be the selective process behind the presentation of the material?