STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest artists in cinema history, died Monday at his home on an island off the coast of Sweden. He was 89.
Bergman’s works combined deep seriousness and unexpected flashes of humor in finely written, inventively shot explorations of difficult subjects such as plague and madness.
Once described by Woody Allen as “probably the greatest film artist … since the invention of the motion picture camera,” 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.”
His last work, of about 60, was “Saraband,” a made-for-television movie that aired on Swedish public television in December 2003, the year he retired.
“Saraband” starred Liv Ullmann, the Norwegian actress and director who appeared in nine Bergman films and had a five-year affair, and a daughter, with the director.
The other actor most closely associated with Bergman was Max von Sydow, who appeared in 1957’s “The Seventh Seal,” an allegorical tale of the Black Plague years, as a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death, one of cinema’s most famous scenes.
Bergman’s 1982 film “Fanny and Alexander” won an Oscar for best foreign film. His 1973 “Cries and Whispers” was nominated for Best Picture.
“The world has lost one of its very greatest filmmakers. He taught us all so much throughout his life,” said British actor and director Richard Attenborough.
Swedish journalist Marie Nyrerod said the director died peacefully during his sleep.
Bergman never fully recovered after hip surgery in October last year, Nyrerod told Swedish broadcaster SVT.
The son of a Lutheran clergyman and a housewife, Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden, 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.
The director said he coped with the authoritarian environment of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy; when he first saw a film, he was greatly moved.
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 a 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.
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.
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.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
