Ingmar Bergman, Famed Director, Dies at 89
Bengt Ekerot, left, and Max von Sydow in the 1957 film "The Seventh Seal."
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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