Situating Ingmar Bergman and world cinema

ABSTRACT Introducing four essays and a stage play that make up the “Bergman World” special issue of Popular Communication, the authors argue for an expanded understanding of world cinema, one that attends to critical and scholarly voices beyond the hegemon of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western continental Europe, one that, indeed, attends to “their” (the non-West’s) perspective on “us” (Western filmmakers, film scholars, and films) as much as what “we” think of “them.” More specifically, the article asserts the profound global impact of the work of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman outside North America and Western Europe.