The legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman has died, it was reported today.
Bergman, who was 89, died peacefully at his home on the Swedish island of Faro, his daughter, Eve, said.
A 20th century auteur, the groundbreaking director was most famous for his 1957 film The Seventh Seal, in which a character plays chess with death.
Woody Allen, delivering a tribute on Bergman's 70th birthday in 1988, described him as "probably the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera".
Bergman directed more than 50 films, beginning his career with Crisis in 1946 and gaining fame with the success of Interlude in the early 1950s. He retired from filmmaking in 2003.
He won three Oscars for best foreign language film between 1961 and 1984, taking honours for The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly and Fanny and Alexander. In 1971, the Academy gave him a lifetime achievement award.
He first gained international acclaim with Smiles of a Summer Night, a romantic comedy made in 1955 which later inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music.
His final work was Saraband, a made-for-television film starring Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, two of his favorite actors. Ms Ullmann also mothered one Bergman's children, Linn Ullmann.
Bergman's films approached subjects such as plague and madness with inventive technique and carefully honed writing. His vision encompassed all the extremes of his beloved Sweden, from the claustrophobic gloom of long winter nights to the gentleness of glowing summer evenings.
Alhough best known for his cinema work, he was also a prominent stage director from the 40s onwards, working at Swedish theatres including the Royal Dramatic in Stockholm, which he headed from 1963 to 1966.
Bergman, who was married five times, had nine children. A date for his funeral, which will be attended by family and close friends, has yet to be set.
Vila i frid pa Faaroe (RIP in *his city of residence* in Swedish).
It's truly an end of an era for the Swedish film industry. But then, his work is so much more important than a local film industry, he was one of the very best directors ever.
__________________ bottle in front of me
Last edited by iluvjeisa : 30-07-2007 at 09:32 PM.
From independent.co.uk: The master: Ingmar Bergman 1918 - 2007 By Paul Schrader, film director and screenwriter of 'Taxi Driver' Published: 31 July 2007
I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman.
His death, at the age of 89, may not have been a surprise. He was an old man. But what he has left is a legacy greater than any other director. He made film-making a serious and introspective enterprise. No one had been able to pull that off until he showed up. I really wasn't that interested in being a film-maker, except in the way that Bergman redefined what you could be as a film-maker.
I think the extraordinary thing that Bergman will be remembered for, other than his body of work, was that he probably did more than anyone to make cinema a medium of personal and introspective value. Movies by nature are, of course, very commercially driven and very accessible. No one really used cinema as private personal expression in that way. Bergman showed that you could actually do movies that were personal introspections and have them seen by general audiences.
For an entire generation, starting in the 1960s, it was a whole new way to see the very nature of cinema. It is impossible for anyone of my generation not to have been influenced by Bergman. That is just a matter of fact. He cut too wide a path down the history of cinema not to influence everybody. I can remember vividly my first taste of a Bergman film. Through a Glass Darkly, the first of Bergman's trilogy of films with Winter Light and The Silence, when I was about 17, at our local little cinema in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while I was at college. It was probably the fourth or fifth serious film I had ever seen and it just took me unawares. I had no idea that movies could be a serious enterprise.
He has a handful of masterpieces, but the film that stands above all the others is Persona. He has done a lot of visceral, painful work - even his last film, Saraband, is extraordinary - but Persona really brings together all his personal demons, as well as his relationships with women.
It's not like we have lost an ongoing voice. His body of work was completed. So we are losing one of the saints in the pantheon, which is sad to note, but it is actually an occasion to appreciate what has been left behind.
Not all his films were great. I'm not a big fan of the family reminiscence stuff which is Fanny and Alexander. I wasn't knocked out by the early domestic comedies such as Smiles of a Summer Night. After The Virgin Spring in 1959 and Through a Glass Darkly in 1961, then it really starts getting interesting. Persona was the pinnacle of that. Coming as it did in 1966, it was the great seminal film during the great seminal years of the acme of cinema. Once you got into that trilogy of Persona, The Hour of the Wolf and The Shame, it's just incredible. He reinvented himself in 1973 with Scenes from a Marriage, then he went back to the theme for Saraband, another major piece of work, in 2003.
Time magazine had a wonderful opening line in its review of Saraband. "He's old. He's old fashioned. He's out of date. How dare Ingmar Bergman make a great movie."
There are a lot of directors who are poets behind a camera. Bergman is more of the metaphysician behind the camera. Persona was his boldest film - and the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who was shooting the films, did a lot of very interesting work in that film such as over exposures, letting stuff burn out, the way that light and dark contrasted in ways that were previously considered unacceptable and breaking some of those rules.
I was a big Bergman fan so I would tend to see each of his films the first day they were released if I was in a city where they were being shown. I do remember the anticipation of going to that first show the first day. He obviously played a role in my choice to be a critic and then to be a film-maker, and in my decision to take film seriously.
Last of the greats
* Woody Allen: "He was a friend and certainly the finest film director of my lifetime."
* Richard Attenborough: "The world has lost one of its very greatest film-makers. He taught us all so much throughout his life."
* Lars von Trier" "I am proud to say he treated me exactly like his other children - with no interest whatsoever."
* Bille August, Danish director: "He was the last big director left. The three big ones for me were Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman. The two others had already passed and now Ingmar has also left us. He leaves a big vacuum behind. He was such an incredible, unusually bright person."
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