Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. An undated photograph of Ingmar Bergman from the 1970s.
Ingmar Bergman, Famed Swedish Film Director, Dies at 89
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:58 a.m. ET
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died Monday, the president of his foundation said. He was 89.
''It's an unbelievable loss for Sweden, but even more so internationally,'' Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, which administers the directors' archives, told The Associated Press.
Bergman died at his home in Faro, Sweden, Swedish news agency TT said, citing his daughter Eva Bergman. A cause of death was not immediately available.
Through more than 50 films, Bergman's vision encompassed all the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, the gentle merriment of glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the island where he spent his last years.
Bergman, who approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness with inventive technique and carefully honed writing, became one of the towering figures of serious filmmaking.
He was ''probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera,'' Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988.
Bergman first gained international attention with 1955's ''Smiles of a Summer Night,'' a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical ''A Little Night Music.''
''The Seventh Seal,'' released in 1957, riveted critics and audiences. An allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, it contains one of cinema's most famous scenes -- a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.
''I was terribly scared of death,'' Bergman said of his state of mind when making the film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the best picture category.
The film distilled the essence of Bergman's work -- high seriousness, flashes of unexpected humor and striking images.
In a 2004 interview with Swedish broadcaster SVT, the reclusive filmmaker acknowledged that he was reluctant to view his work.
''I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry ... and miserable. I think it's awful,'' Bergman said.
Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman also was a prominent stage director. He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, which he headed from 1963 to 1966. He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg, whom he cited as an inspiration.
The influence of Strindberg's grueling and precise psychological dissections could be seen in the production that brought Bergman an even-wider audience: 1973's ''Scenes From a Marriage.'' First produced as a six-part series for television, then released in a theater version, it is an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage.
Bergman showed his lighter side in the following year's ''The Magic Flute,'' again first produced for TV. It is a fairly straight production of the Mozart opera, enlivened by touches such as repeatedly showing the face of a young girl watching the opera and comically clumsy props and costumes.
Bergman remained active later in life with stage productions and occasional TV shows. He said he still felt a need to direct, although he had no plans to make another feature film.
In the fall of 2002, Bergman, at age 84, started production on ''Saraband,'' a 120-minute television movie based on the two main characters in ''Scenes From a Marriage.''
In a rare news conference, the reclusive director said he wrote the story after realizing he was ''pregnant with a play.''
''At first I felt sick, very sick. It was strange. Like Abraham and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant,'' he said, referring to biblical characters. ''It was lots of fun, suddenly to feel this urge returning.''
The son of a Lutheran clergyman and a housewife, Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala on July 14, 1918, and grew up with a brother and sister in a household of severe discipline that he described in painful detail in the autobiography ''The Magic Lantern.''
The title comes from his childhood, when his brother got a ''magic lantern'' -- a precursor of the slide-projector -- for Christmas. Ingmar was consumed with jealousy, and he managed to acquire the object of his desire by trading it for a hundred tin soldiers.
The apparatus was a spot of joy in an often-cruel young life. Bergman recounted the horror of being locked in a closet and the humiliation of being made to wear a skirt as punishment for wetting his pants.
He broke with his parents at 19 and remained aloof from them, but later in life sought to understand them. The story of their lives was told in the television film ''Sunday's Child,'' directed by his own son Daniel.
Young Ingmar found his love for drama production early in life. The director said he had coped with the authoritarian environment of his childhood by living in a world of fantasies. When he first saw a movie he was greatly moved.
''Sixty years have passed, nothing has changed, it's still the same fever,'' he wrote of his passion for film in the 1987 autobiography.
But he said the escape into another world went so far that it took him years to tell reality from fantasy, and Bergman repeatedly described his life as a constant fight against demons, also reflected in his work.
The demons sometimes drove him to great art -- as in ''Cries and Whispers,'' the deathbed drama that climaxes when the dying woman cries ''I am dead, but I can't leave you.'' Sometimes they drove him over the top, as in ''Hour of the Wolf,'' where a nightmare-plagued artist meets real-life demons on a lonely island.
Bergman also waged a fight against real-life tormentors: Sweden's powerful tax authorities.
In 1976, during a rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theater, police came to take Bergman away for interrogation about tax evasion. The director, who had left all finances to be handled by a lawyer, was questioned for hours while his home was searched. When released, he was forbidden to leave the country.
The case caused an enormous uproar in the media and Bergman had a mental breakdown that sent him to hospital for over a month. He later was absolved of all accusations and in the end only had to pay some extra taxes.
In his autobiography he admitted to guilt in only one aspect: ''I signed papers that I didn't read, even less understood.''
The experience made him go into voluntary exile in Germany, to the embarrassment of the Swedish authorities. After nine years, he returned to Stockholm, his longtime base.
It was in the Swedish capital that Bergman broke into the world of drama, starting with a menial job at the Royal Opera House after dropping out of college.
Bergman was hired by the script department of Swedish Film Industry, the country's main production company, as an assistant script writer in 1942.
In 1944, his first original screenplay was filmed by Alf Sjoeberg, the dominant Swedish film director of the time. ''Torment'' won several awards including the Grand Prize of the 1946 Cannes Film Festival, and soon Bergman was directing an average of two films a year as well as working with stage production.
After the acclaimed ''The Seventh Seal,'' he quickly came up with another success in ''Wild Strawberries,'' in which an elderly professor's car trip to pick up an award is interspersed with dreams.
Other noted films include ''Persona,'' about an actress and her nurse whose identities seem to merge, and ''The Autumn Sonata,'' about a concert pianist and her two daughters, one severely handicapped and the other burdened by her child's drowning.
The date of the funeral has not yet been set, but will be attended by a close group of friends and family, the TT news agency reported.
Copyright 2007 The Associated Press
Born: July 14, 1918
Birthplace: Uppsala, Sweden
Full Biography
From All Movie Guide: The most famed and honored filmmaker ever to emerge from the nation of Sweden, Ingmar Bergman radically altered the nature and meaning of the motion picture form, transfiguring a medium long devoted to spectacle into an art capable of profoundly personal meditations into the myriad struggles facing the psyche and the soul. By focusing on the exploration of self with unparalleled intensity, Bergman brought to the screen a new sense of emotional intimacy, fusing the concepts behind Freudian psychotherapy with a dreamlike sensibility founded on visual metaphors, flashbacks, and extreme close-ups to create a revelatory cinematic world unlike any before it. Born Ernst Ingmar Bergman on July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden, he followed a brief 1938 military stay by attending Stockholm University; there he staged his first plays, among them adaptations of Macbeth, August Strindberg's Lucky Peter's Journey and Master Olaf, and Maunce Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird. In 1939, Bergman accepted the job of production assistant at the Royal Theatre (the Stockholm Opera), leaving school the following year to focus on stage work. By early 1943, he had begun work at the script department of Svensk Filmindustri, with his original screenplay for Hets (Torment) filmed by leading director Alf Sjoberg the following year.
While remaining active in the theater, Bergman also continued his work in the film industry, and in the summer of 1945 he began directing his debut feature, Kris (Crisis), an adaptation of a drama by Leck Fisher. His next four films -- 1946's Det Regnar på Vår Kärlek/It Rains on Our Love, 1947's Skepp till Indialand/A Ship Bound for India, and 1948's Musik i Mörker/Night Is My Future, and Hamnstad/Port of Call -- were all adaptations as well, although Bergman continued crafting original screenplays, including one for the 1947 Gustaf Molander feature Kvinna Utan Ansikte/Woman Without a Face. In a sense, Bergman's career began in earnest with 1948's Fängelse/The Devil's Wanton, his first true auteur work. In addition to directing his own original script, the feature also marked the introduction of a number of Bergman hallmarks including his patented emotional complexity, a fascination with the dynamics of marriage, and a willingness to experiment with the motion-picture form and structure. Törst (Three Strange Loves), based on a screenplay by Herbert Grevenius, followed in 1949, but within months Bergman was filming Till Glädje (To Joy), another original effort again exploring a disintegrating marriage.
In 1950, Bergman began shooting Sommarlek (Summer Interlude), his breakthrough effort. Told extensively through flashback, the film hones in on a number of the themes which would continue to recur throughout his oeuvre, including the loss of artistic identity, the demise of love, and the slow decay of life, all explored with a newfound confidence and grace. The political thriller Sånt Händer Inte Här (This Can't Happen Here) soon followed, but in 1951 the Swedish film studios suffered a shutdown, reducing Bergman to helming soap commercials. Upon returning to work in 1952, he filmed the relatively lightweight Kvinnors Väntan (Secrets of Women) before turning to 1953's Sommaren Med Monika (Summer With Monika), another exploration of an ill-fated romance. With 1953's Gycklarnas Afton (Sawdust and Tinsel/The Naked Night), Bergman made his next significant leap. His first period piece, the film was his bleakest work to date, drawing from the breadth of his major influences (particularly 1930s French films and silent German cinema) to create a newly mature and distinctive visual sensibility. The sense of freedom so dominant throughout Gycklarnas Afton remained for 1954's farcical En Lektion i Kärlek (A Lesson in Love). After 1955's Kvinnodröm, Bergman created his next masterpiece, the intricate romantic comedy Sommarnattens Leende (Smiles of a Summer Night).
Having hit his stride, Bergman began work on one of his most famed efforts, Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal). The film which brought him international renown, it marked a turning point away from the romantic explorations of his earlier work toward an examination of the relationships of man to God and death, a theme which remained at the center of his work for many years to come. A medieval morality play, The Seventh Seal contains one of the most memorable scenes in all of cinema, in which the knight portrayed by Max Von Sydow opposes Death in a game of chess. The winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, The Seventh Seal launched Bergman to the forefront of the global filmmaking community, a position he would not relinquish throughout the duration of his career.
Bergman's obsession with death continued in 1957's brilliant Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries), starring Victor Sjöström as an aging professor reminiscing about the disappointments which tainted his life. After the somewhat slight Nära Livet (Brink of Life), Bergman helmed 1958's Gothic comedy Ansiktet (The Magician), a stunning return to form. The medieval setting of The Seventh Seal reappeared in 1960's Jungfrukällan (The Virgin Spring), a controversial essay on rape which won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It was followed later that same year by Djävulens öga (The Devil's Eye). The outstanding Såsom i en Spegel (Through a Glass Darkly) was the next step in Bergman's evolution, marking the beginning of his "chamber" style of photography -- essentially, a penchant for extreme close-ups designed to highlight the nuances of his actors' faces to underscore a scene's psychological intensity. It also opened his so-called "religious trilogy," a series of films exploring crises of faith, which also included 1962's Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light) and 1963's Tystnaden (The Silence). In the wake of 1964's För Att Inte Tala om Alla Dessa Kvinnor (All These Women), Bergman planned to mount a theatrical production of The Magic Flute, but instead fell prey to a viral infection which kept him out of action during the early months of 1965.
When he returned to the screen in late 1966 with Persona, it was with a renewed sense of force and purpose. An intense meditation on identity which is later revealed to be an examination of the very nature of cinema itself, the film was his most avant-garde effort to date and remains his crowning masterpiece. Another trilogy of films, all of them set on the tiny island of Fårö -- 1968's Vargtimmen (Hour of the Wolf) and Skammen (Shame), rounded out by Bergman's first color film, 1969's En Passion (The Passion of Anna) -- concluded the decade. In 1970, Bergman directed his first English-language film, The Touch. The masterful Viskningar och Rop (Cries and Whispers) followed in 1972, with the acclaimed television miniseries Scenes From a Marriage premiering in 1973. The small screen remained Bergman's medium of choice for the next several years, with The Magic Flute in 1975 and Ansikte mot Ansikte (Face to Face) in 1976. That same year he was arrested for alleged tax evasion, later leaving Sweden as a voluntary exile. Relocating to Munich, he began work on 1977's The Serpent's Egg, his first feature film in half a decade.
After completing 1978's Autumn Sonata, Bergman entered the 1980s with Aus dem Leben des Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes); two years later, he released the Oscar-winning Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander), a final, autobiographical masterpiece announced as his cinematic swan song. He then turned strictly to television, premiering Efter repetitionen (After the Rehearsal) in 1984, followed a year later by The Blessed Ones. He also maintained his busy theatrical schedule and in 1987 published an autobiography, Laterna Magica. In 1992, his script Den Goda Viljan (The Best Intentions) was filmed for television by Bille August; three years later, he announced his retirement from the stage, but by 1996 he was shooting the television drama Larmar Och Gör Sig Till. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Movie Guide
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