Ingmar Bergman passed today.
This isn’t something I’d ordinarily post on my blog, but he is my favorite filmmaker, and perhaps someone who is unfamiliar with his work might take an opportunity to view one of his films. We all collect props out of a love of film, and his body of work is truly astounding. He has had a huge impact on the form, and I think it would be a great tribute to celebrate his work by enjoying one of his films.
From the International Herald Tribune (AP Story): LINK
Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, master of modern cinema, is dead at age 89
The Associated Press
Published: July 30, 2007
STOCKHOLM, Sweden: Death and demons haunted the anguished works that made Ingmar Bergman a film-making legend.
But the Swedish director — one of the greatest artists in cinema history — had overcome his intense fear of death by the time it finally found him.
Bergman died Monday at age 89, at home on the Swedish islet of Faro, the Ingmar Bergman Foundation said. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Colleagues and fans worldwide mourned his death, comparing Bergman to cinema greats such as Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini.
“The world has lost one of its very greatest film makers. He taught us all so much throughout his life,” said British actor and director Richard Attenborough.
Bergman’s movies won numerous awards and international acclaim, including Oscars for best foreign film for “The Virgin Spring,” “Through a Glass Darkly” and “Fanny and Alexander.” The 1973 “Cries and Whispers” was nominated for Best Picture.
Bergman, who retired from films in 2003 after making more than 50 movies, 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.”
Bergman’s works combined deep seriousness, indelible imagery and unexpected flashes of humor in finely written, inventively shot explorations of difficult subjects such as plague and madness.
His fear of dying was reflected in films like the 1957 “The Seventh Seal,” but Marie Nyrerod, a Swedish journalist and friend of Bergman’s, said he overcame that fear after his fifth wife Ingrid von Rosen died in 1995.
“A lot happened when Ingrid died,” Nyrerod told The Associated Press. She said Bergman continued to feel the presence of von Rosen after she died, and abandoned his view of death as the absolute end of the human soul.
“He deserted that altogether and instead hoped he could rejoin her,” she said.
Nyrerod said this became evident in “Saraband,” Bergman’s last work, a TV movie that was shown by Swedish public broadcaster SVT in December 2003. Nearly a million Swedes — or one in nine — watched the family drama, which was based on the two main characters from his previous TV series, “Scenes From a Marriage.”
The show starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson — two of Bergman’s favorite actors.
Ullmann, a Norwegian actress and director with an international career, may be best known for her roles in nine Bergman films. She and the director also had a five-year affair, and a daughter.
Bergman had eight other children from five marriages.
Swedish actor Max von Sydow, another performer closely associated with Bergman, appeared in “The Seventh Seal,” which 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.
In his 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.
“He was one of the world’s biggest personalities. There were (Japanese film director Akira) Kurosawa, (Italy’s Federico) Fellini and then Bergman. Now he is also gone,” Oscar-winning Danish director Bille August said.
August, who in the 1990s was considered an heir to Bergman, rejected that idea: “That is nonsense. There can only be one Ingmar Bergman.”
Cannes Film Festival director Gilles Jacob echoed August’s words, calling Bergman the “last of the greats, because he proved that cinema can be as profound as literature.”
In 1988, Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute to Bergman that he was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also 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 films like “Scenes From a Marriage,” an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage, which was released in a theater version from the six-part TV series.
Bergman showed his lighter side in the 1974 “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.
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 100 tin soldiers for it.
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.
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.
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 took him 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 a 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.
Bergman broke into the world of drama by starting with a menial job at the Royal Opera House after dropping out of college. He 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.