A detailed feminist study of Bergman's most important films. This book covers the whole of Bergman's production, but concentrates in particular on close analyses of five of his major films: Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, The Silence, Persona, and Cries and Whispers. In addition to bringing post-modernist theoretical strategies to bear on the films, it offers a clear, current, pluralist feminist perspective.

"Marilyn Johns Blackwell concentrates on about half a dozen of the forty-odd films, and applies an intense gaze to each of them. Ms. Blackwell herself often has better notions than the myriad other academics she cites. She is excellent on Bergman's voyeuristic technique in Smiles, on the Swede's 'troubling stereotype' of associating the upper classes with the spirit, and the lower classes with the flesh, and the underestimated use of silence throughout a film like The Seventh Seal." - THE SWEDISH BOOK REVIEW