Ingmar Bergman dead at 89

[Robert J]

STOCKHOLM — Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, has died, local media reported Monday. He was 89 years old.

Bergman died at his home in Faro, Sweden, Swedish news agency TT said, citing his daughter Eva Bergman.

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 humour and striking images.

In an interview in 2004 with Swedish broadcaster SVT, the reclusive filmmaker admitted 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 was also a prominent stage director. He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theatre 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 gruelling 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 theatre 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 press 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 Theatre, 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 was later 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 long-time 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.

In 1942, Bergman was hired by the script department of Swedish Film Industry, the country's main production company, as an assistant script writer.

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.

[AllenLowe]

loved him in Casablanca -

[king ubu]

yeah, he quite looked like an old-fashioned auntie there... come to think of it, in most of his flicks...

[sal]

One of my favorite filmmakers of all time. His work is one of the reasons I love film today, and in some ways, his films changed my life at the time when I first saw them. RIP Mr. Bergman. You will be missed.

[Van Basten II]

Saw a documentary about him that was basically a three hour interview set in the island he lived on for the remainder of his life. Still a fascinating man to listen to

.A real artist in every sense of the world.

RIP

[AllenLowe]

last of the great avant garde pianists - especially his stuff with Hamid Drake -

[Van Basten II]

last of the great avant garde pianists - especially his stuff with Hamid Drake -

Edited July 30, 2007 by Van Basten II

[MoGrubb]

I saw a couple of his flix in my younger days; quite an artiste.

Rip Ingmar Bergman

[brownie]

I probably was too young to really appreciate many of his films when they came out. Over the years the full grasping of Bergman's achievements came through.

And most of his later films ('Persona', 'Cries and Whispers', 'Fanny and Alexander' are masterpieces).

But I also have a passion for his early films like 'Summer with Monika' and 'To Joy', one of te most moving film dealing with music!

[Adam]

"Persona" is my favorite film of all time. This is a devastating loss, but he had a long and amazing life, and has left us art of the highest caliber that will last forever.

NY Times Obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/movies/3...gWDpYTw6u6Lfq1Q

Ingmar Bergman, Famed Director, Dies at 89

By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

Published: July 30, 2007

Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said. Bergman was 89.

Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.

He moved from the comic romp of lovers in “Smiles of a Summer Night” to the Crusader’s search for God in “The Seventh Seal,” and from the gripping portrayal of fatal illness in “Cries and Whispers” to the alternately humorous and horrifying depiction of family life in “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman dealt with pain and torment, desire and religion, evil and love; in Mr. Bergman’s films, “this world is a place where faith is tenuous; communication, elusive; and self-knowledge, illusory,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times Magazine in a profile of the director. God is either silent or malevolent; men and women are creatures and prisoners of their desires.

For many filmgoers and critics, it was Mr. Bergman more than any other director who in the 1950s brought a new seriousness to film making.

“Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics — religion, death, existentialism — to the screen,” Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, once said. “But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He’s like a miner digging in search of purity.”

He influenced many other film makers, including Woody Allen, who according to The Associated Press said in a tribute in 1988 that Mr. Bergman was “probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

In his more than 40 years in the cinema, Mr. Bergman made about 50 films, often focusing on two themes — the relationship between the sexes, and the relationship between mankind and God. Mr. Bergman found in cinema, he wrote in a 1965 essay, “a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect.”

In Bergman, the mind is constantly seeking, constantly inquiring, constantly puzzled.

Mr. Bergman often acknowledged that his work was autobiographical, but only “in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time.”

He carried out a simultaneous career in the theater, becoming a director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. He married multiple times and had highly publicized and passionate liaisons with his leading ladies.

Mr. Bergman broke upon the international film scene in the mid-1950s with four films that shook the movie world, films that became identified with him and symbols of his career — “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “The Magician.”

He had been a director for 10 years, but was little known outside Sweden. Then, in 1956, “Smiles” won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, the haunting and eloquent “Seventh Seal,” with its memorable medieval visions of a knight (Max von Sydow) playing chess with death in a world terrorized by the plague, won another special prize at Cannes. And in 1959, “The Magician” took the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Audiences flocked to art cinemas all over the world to see his films. Then, in 1960, “The Virgin Spring”, told of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; it won the Academy Award as best foreign film. In a few years, he had become both a cult figure and a box-office success.

Throughout his career, Mr. Bergman often talked about what he considered the dual nature of his creative and private personalities. “I am very much aware of my own double self,” he once said. “The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work — he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional.”

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born on July 14, 1918, in the university town of Uppsala, Sweden. His father, Erik, a Lutheran clergyman who later became chaplain to the Swedish royal family, believed in strict discipline, including caning and locking his children in closets. His mother, Karin, was moody and unpredictable.

“I was very much in love with my mother,” he told Alan Riding of The New York Times in a 1995 interview. “She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting.”

The young Mr. Bergman accompanied his father on preaching rounds of small country churches near Stockholm.

“While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened,” he once recalled, “I devoted my interest to the church’s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one’s imagination could desire — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans.”

His earliest memories, he once said, were of light and death:“I remember how the sunlight hit the edge of my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvelous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated.”

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Mr. Bergman was the subject of the 2006 documentary “Bergman Island.”

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A Profile of Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face With a Life of Creation (April 30, 1995)

Times Topics: Ingmar Bergman

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An undated photograph of Ingmar Bergman from the 1970s.

At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world, he later recalled, in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts.

He entered the University of Stockholm in 1937, nominally to study the history of literature but actually to spend most of his time working in amateur theater. He soon left home and university for a career in the theater and the movies.

He split his time between film and theater beginning in the early 1940s, when he first was taken into the script department of Svensk Filmindustri — a youth, as his first boss described him, “shabby, rude and scampish with a laugh born out of the darkest depths of the inferno.”

In his theater career, he became head of the municipal theater in the southern Swedish city of Halsingborg in 1944; in 1946, he switched to Goteborg for four years, then spent two years as a guest producer in a couple of cities before going to Malmo in 1952 to become associated with the municipal theater there.

In films, he wrote many scenarios as well as directed. His name first appeared on the screen in 1944 in “Torment,” which he wrote and Alf Sjoberg, one of the dominant figures in Swedish film, directed. The film, based on a story Bergman wrote about his final, torturous year at school, won eight Swedish awards as well as the Grand Prix du Cinema at Cannes. It made an international star of its leading performer, Mai Zetterling, who portrayed a shop girl loved by a young student and shadowed by the student’s sadistic teacher.

Mr. Bergman got his first chance to direct the next year. His early films were essentially training films — basically soap operas that enabled him to experiment with directorial style.

Most experts agree that his first film of note was “Prison,” his sixth movie and the first all-Bergman production. The film is the story of a prostitute who committed suicide. He made it in 18 days, and while critics have called it cruel, disjointed and in many ways sophomoric, it was an early favorite of his.

In the next few years, he made “Summer Interlude” (1950), a tragedy of teen-age lovers; “Waiting Women” (1952), his first successful comedy; “Sawdust and Tinsel” set in a traveling circus and originally released in the United States as “The Naked Night”; “A Lesson in Love” (1953), a witty comedy of marital infidelity, and, finally, “Smiles of a Summer Night” and “The Seventh Seal,” his breakthroughs to fame.

In 1957, the same year as “Seventh Seal,” Mr. Bergman also directed “Wild Strawberries,” his acclaimed study of old age. In the film, the 78-year-old Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjostrom), drives through the countryside, stops at his childhood home, relives the memory of his first love and comes to terms with his emotional isolation. “I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through,” Mr. Bergman has said. “I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions.”

Mr. Bergman won his second Academy Award in 1961 for “Through a Glass Darkly,” and then came the turning point in his career — “Winter Light,” which he made in 1963, the second of his trilogy of the early 60s that ended with “The Silence” and portrayed the loneliness and vulnerability of modern man, without faith or love. Many of his earlier films had been animated by an anguished search for belief, Ms. Kakutani wrote, but “Winter Light” — which shows a minister’s own loss of faith — implies that whatever answers there are are to be found on earth.

Mr. Bergman explained that the philosophical shift occurred during a brief hospital stay. Awakening from the anesthesia, he realized that he was no longer scared of death, and that the question of death had suddenly disappeared. Since then, many critics feel, his films have contained a kind of humanism in which human love is the only hope of salvation.

Some critics lashed at individual films as obscure, pretentious and meaningless.

But every time he made a failure, he managed to win back critics and audiences quickly with such films as “Persona” — in which the personalities of two women break down and merge — “The Passion of Anna,” “Cries and Whispers” — a stark portrait of three sisters — and “Fanny and Alexander.”

Mr. Bergman often used what amounted to a repertory company — a group of actors who appeared in many of his films. They included Mr. von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and with whom he had a child. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.

The ideas for his films, he said, came to him in many ways. “Persona,” the study of two women in neurotic intimacy, came to life, he said, when one day he saw two women sitting together comparing hands. “I thought to myself,” he said, “that one of them is mute and the other speaks.”

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A Profile of Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face With a Life of Creation (April 30, 1995)

Times Topics: Ingmar Bergman

The germ for “The Silence” — in which a dying woman and her sister are in a foreign country with no means of communication — came from a hospital visit, he said, where “I noticed from a window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park.”

“As I watched,” he said, “four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind.”

In other cases, films were suggested by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, he said, some outside event had turned the key on some deep-seated memory — each film was a projection of some past experience.

“I have maintained open channels with my childhood,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I think it may be that way with many artists. Sometimes in the night, when I am on the limit between sleeping and being awake, I can just go through a door into my childhood and everything is as it was — with lights, smells, sounds and people . . . I remember the silent street where my grandmother lived, the sudden aggressivity of the grown-up world, the terror of the unknown and the fear from the tension between my father and mother.”

Mr. Bergman used his memories in many other films: “Scenes From a Marriage” (which was originally done for television), “Autumn Sonata,” “From the Life of the Marionettes,” “Hour of the Wolf,” “Shame,” “Face to Face” and his version of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” considered by many to be the most successful film ever made of an opera.

From the 1950s through the 1990s, Mr. Bergman maintained his successful theatrical career in Sweden. It was while rehearsing Strindberg’s “Dance of Death” at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 1976 that he was arrested for tax evasion. The incident received a great deal of publicity, and while the charges were later dropped and the Swedish Government issued a formal apology, Mr. Bergman exiled himself from Sweden to West Germany, where he made “The Serpent’s Egg.” He had a nervous breakdown over the incident and was hospitalized for a time. The exile lasted for a number of years and he only returned permanently to his native country in the mid-80s.

In 1982, Mr. Bergman announced that he had just made his last theatrical film — it was “Fanny and Alexander,” a look at high society in a Swedish town early in the last century that was in part inspired by his own childhood.

“Making ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was such a joy that I thought that feeling will never come back,” he told Ms. Kakutani. “I will try to explain: When I was at university many years ago, we were all in love with this extremely beautiful girl. She said no to all of us, and we didn’t understand. She had had a love affair with a prince from Egypt and, for her, everything after this love affair had to be a failure. So she rejected all our proposals. I would like to say the same thing. The time with ‘Fanny and Alexander’ was so wonderful that I decided it was time to stop. I have had my prince of Egypt.”

“Fanny and Alexander” won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for best foreign film in 1984.

Mr. Bergman did not, however, leave the world of film altogether. He spent much of his time on Faro, a sparsely populated island that visitors described as chilly and desolate but that he considered the one place he felt safe, secure and at home. And he would devote his mornings to working on his plays, novels and television scripts.

He made a television film, “After the Rehearsal” — about three actors working on a production of Strindberg’s “Dream Play” — which was released theatrically in the United States. He wrote “The Best Intentions,” first as a novel and then in 1991 as an eloquent six-hour film directed by Billie August about Mr. Bergman’s parents’ troubled marriage just before his birth.

“The slightly fictional Anna and Henrik Bergman are complex, stubborn, well-meaning people who share a heartbreaking inability to be happy no matter what they try,” Ms. James wrote, and Mr. Bergman “is a benevolent ghost hovering over the film.”

Mr. Bergman said in an interview in Sweden that the act of writing the film had changed his attitude toward his parents. “After this,” he said, “every form of reproach, blame, bitterness or even vague feeling that they have messed up my life is gone forever from my mind.”

“The Best Intentions” was one of three novels he wrote in the 80s and 90s about his parents. The second, “Sunday’s Children,” was made into a film and directed by his son Daniel. The third, “Private Confessions,” about his mother, became a film directed by Ms. Ullmann.

In 1997, he directed a two-hour made-for-television movie, “In the Presence of Clowns,” set in the 1920s and based on a story he discovered among the papers left by an uncle who appeared as a main character in “Fanny and Alexander” and “Best Intentions” and was played in all three films by Borje Ahlstedt.

He directed two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theater. In May 1995 the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as part of a New York Bergman Festival that included retrospectives by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Television and Radio, presented the Royal Theater in two plays Mr. Bergman directed, Shakespeare’s “Winter’s Tale” and Yukio Mishima’s “Madame de Sade.”

He also directed operas, and wrote many plays and television dramas, several novels and a 1987 memoir, “The Magic Lantern.”

[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,” The Associated Press reported. In a news conference, the director said he wrote the story after realizing he was “pregnant with a play.” “At first I felt sick, very sick,” he said. “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.”]

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A Profile of Ingmar Bergman: Face to Face With a Life of Creation (April 30, 1995)

Times Topics: Ingmar Bergman

In addition to Oscars and prizes at film festivals, Mr. Bergman’s films won many awards from the New York Film Critics and the National Society of Film Critics, among others. In 1977, he was given the Swedish Academy of Letters’ Great Gold Medal, one of only 17 people to have received it in this century.

Mr. Bergman’s fifth wife, Ingrid Karlebo Bergman, died in 1995. He had many children from his marriages and relationships.

Once, when asked by the critic Andrew Sarris why he did what he did, Mr. Bergman told the story of the rebuilding of Chartres Cathedral in the Middle Ages by thousands of anonymous artisans.

“I want to be one of the artists of the cathedral that rises on the plain,” he said. “I want to occupy myself by carving out of stone the head of a dragon, an angel or a demon, or perhaps a saint; it doesn’t matter; I will find the same joy in any case. Whether I am a believer or an unbeliever, Christian or pagan, I work with all the world to build a cathedral because I am artist and artisan, and because I have learned to draw faces, limbs, and bodies out of stone. I will never worry about the judgment of posterity or of my contemporaries; my name is carved nowhere and will disappear with me. But a little part of myself will survive in the anonymous and triumphant totality. A dragon or a demon, or perhaps a saint, it doesn’t matter!”

Mr. Bergman’s celluloid carvings often revealed an obsession with death. But in later life he said that the obsession had abated. “When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying,” he said. “But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It’s like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.”

According to The A.P., which cited TT, the Swedish news agency, the date of Mr. Bergman’s funeral has not been set but will be attended by a close group of his friends and family.

------------

AP Obituary:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070730/ap_on_re_eu/obit_bergman

Film great Ingmar Bergman dies at 89

By LOUISE NORDSTROM, Associated Press Writer 53 minutes ago

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.

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Bergman's dozens of 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 vision encompassed the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, its glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the Baltic islet of Faro, where the reclusive artist spent his last years.

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.

"Sixty years have passed, nothing has changed, it's still the same fever," he wrote of his passion for film in an 1987 autobiography.

"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.

His 1982 film "Fanny and Alexander" won an Oscar for best foreign film.

"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.

Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, confirmed the death to The Associated Press, and Swedish journalist Marie Nyrerod said the director died peacefully during his sleep.

Bergman never fully recovered after a hip surgery in October last year, Nyrerod told Swedish broadcaster SVT.

"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," Danish director Bille August told The Associated Press.

"It is a great loss. I am in shock," August said.

Cannes Film Festival director Gilles Jacob called Bergman the "last of the greats, because he proved that cinema can be as profound as literature."

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 had coped with the authoritarian environment of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy. When he first saw a movie 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.

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.

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 "Scenes From a Marriage," an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage that was released as a feature film in 1974.

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.

Bergman, at age 84, started production on "Saraband" — based on the two main characters from "Scenes From a Marriage" — in the fall of 2002.

In a rare news conference, he 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."

Bergman 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.

The date of Bergman's funeral has not been set, but will be attended by a close group of friends and family, the TT news agency reported.

[Alexander]

I love all of the Bergman films that I've seen (and over the years I've seen a good many), but my favorite will always be the first four I ever saw: "Smiles of a Summer Night," "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries" and "The Magician." My good friend, HWright, gave me a book of those four filmscripts for my 16th or 17th birthday and I immediately ran out and rented all four films. I was hooked. To date, I own only one Bergman film on DVD ("Wild Strawberries") but I'd love to have more.

RIP, Ingmar. Truly, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century.

BTW, the first time I saw "Persona" was when I was in college and I managed to persaude my school's film library into to doing a private screening (I think I had to get one of my professors to write me a note testifying that the film was for a class, even though it really wasn't). This, to me, was the best way to watch the film. Every time a reel ended, I had to go get the grad student who ran the library to come in a change it for me...

[J.A.W.]

One of the all-time great film makers.

[GA Russell]

No mention of Da Duva!

I saw A Stye in the Eye on television many years ago and enjoyed it.

I never really gave him a chance. When I was a junior in high school I went to see an exciting French mystery called The Sleeping Car Murder, and it became one of my favorite pictures. Also on the bill was The Seventh Seal, which I hadn't gone to see, but I thought I would give it a chance because after all it was free. After that exciting French movie with its fast-paced ending, Seal with its chess match was way too ponderous in its beginning and I got up and left.

Also to be recalled is the Woody Allen movie, don't remember which one, that had the guy playing tennis with death!

[skeith]

what can be said but the obvious - one of the greatest directors of all time or that there ever will be. what a loss.

[HWright]

Bergman has been and remains one of my favorite film directors. His work has meant so much to me over the years.

I saw his films in theaters and auditoriums whenever possible (I very much agree with Alexander's point about this), rented them whenever I could, read them when I couldn't see them (in English translations) and in recent years bought many of them on DVD.

[sal]

A nice piece from Slate:

http://www.slate.com/id/2171375/nav/tap3/

Rock Star

The indelible cinema of Ingmar Bergman.

By Dana Stevens

Posted Monday, July 30, 2007, at 7:14 PM ET

Ingmar Bergman

To mourn Ingmar Bergman, who died Monday at the age of

89 on his beloved island of Faro, is to mourn a certain kind of hope for what cinema could do. For a time around the height of his fame—the late '50s to the early '70s, when each new Bergman film was an internationally discussed event—this new medium, still less than 100 years old, emerged as the most ambitious of the muses. Films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries (or, from other directors, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ikiru) were suddenly taking on a metaphysical cargo traditionally associated with literature, theater, or opera, daring to ask, like the suicidal protagonist of Bergman's Winter Light, "Why must we live?"

It's easy to laugh now at the portentousness of that line, not because we've figured out why, indeed, we must live, but because the movie theater stopped being the place to ask that question. In the past couple of decades, cinema has scaled back its ambitions, and Bergman's own artistic ambition—his films can be cerebral, austere, unashamedly indebted to psychoanalysis and philosophy—has come to seem dated:

noble, to be sure, but faintly quaint.

This falling out of favor has been subtle: The few films Bergman directed after the glorious Fanny and Alexander (which he claimed, upon its 1982 release, would be his final theatrical film) were, for the most part, acclaimed by critics. His last, Saraband (2003), a kind of 30-years-after sequel to Scenes From a Marriage, was praised to the skies, and deservedly so.

But it nonetheless seemed, in the past two decades, as if Bergman's work had dropped out of the conversation, relegated to the shelf of Janus classics, more respected than watched. (Though the recent release of a restored 50th-anniversary print of The Seventh Seal did spark a revival of that gloomy repertory

favorite.)

By way of mourning the man, then, I propose a trip to your local video store (or to Netflix) to remind yourself just how juicy a director Bergman could be.

Walking out of The Best Intentions (1991), a superb three-hour exploration of Bergman's parents'

marriage—written by Bergman and directed by Bille August—the wife of a friend marveled, "Can you imagine what it would be like to live with that level of insight into your parents' relationship?" Bergman's best films had an almost fearsome astuteness, yet they were far from devoid of beauty or joy. One of my best Bergman memories is of watching his delightful comic adaptation of The Magic Flute with my 80-something-year-old grandmother on New Year's Eve, the libretto open on the bed between us.

Of the great filmmakers of the high-art

period—Kubrick, Fellini, Kurosawa—it was Bergman who worked on the smallest and most intimate scale. "I'm passionately interested in human beings, the human face, the human soul," he told Dick Cavett in an interview. When screening a mental clip reel of my most memorable Bergman moments, I find that nearly all of them involve faces: There's that shot late in Persona in which the simplest of effects, a vertically split screen, creates a terrifying image of madness, as the perfect features of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann merge into one asymmetrical and shockingly ugly face. There's the rapt face of the child in the audience in The Magic Flute (played by Bergman's daughter), and the solemn face of Alexander (Bertil

Guve) peering into his toy theater at the beginning of Fanny and Alexander.

That theater-mad boy, of course, was Bergman himself, who wrote in his autobiography how desperately he coveted his younger brother's "magic lantern," a kind of proto-film projector that threw animated shadows on the wall. He swapped 100 tin soldiers for the toy, and proceeded, in one form or another, to play with it for the rest of his life. I think, on this day, we can safely say he made a good trade.