This short subject identifies twelve Bergman films in which the Swedish director wryly and playfully includes Hitchcockian cameo appearances of himself. Nine of these cameos appear in films Bergman made between 1946 and 1955, before the director’s international breakthrough and during a period when the writer-director was making genre pictures inside the Swedish studio system for several different studios. The present study argues that Bergman self-consciously exploits these early cameos, à la Hitchcock, as a clever, subversive means of including his authorial presence and visual signature within his film texts. He thus operates as a hidden auteur within an industrial Hollywood-like studio factory system before emerging as ‘Bergman’ the brand name in international art house cinema after the late 1950s.
Arne Lunde, “Ingmar’s Hitchcockian cameos: Early Bergman as auteur inside the Swedish studio system,” in Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 8(1) (March 2018), pp. 19-33.