Ingmar Bergman : World Cinema's Great Humanist
Louise Nordstrom
Crisis, 1945
Eva, 1948
Illicit Interlude, 1950
Secrets of Women, 1952
Smiles of a Summer Night,1955
The Seventh Seal, 1956
Wild Strawberries, 1957
Through a Glass Darkly, 1960
The Silence, 1962
Persona, 1965
Hour of the Wolf, 1966
Cries and Whispers, 1971
Scenes from a Marriage, 1972
The Magic Flute, 1974
Face to Face, 1975
Autumn Sonata, 1977
Fannie and Alexander, 1982
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A file photo dated September 9, 1971 of Swedish legendary film
director Ingmar Bergman and Scandinavian actress Liv Ullman
during the filming of ‘Cries and Whispers’. AFP
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STOCKHOLM: Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, widely regarded as
one of the great masters of modern cinema, died yesterday.
Bergman, whose 1982 film "Fanny and Alexander" won an Oscar for best
foreign film, made about 60 movies before retiring from film making in
2003.
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 great masters and one of the great humanists of
cinema. There are very few people of that kind of stature today.
He proved that cinema could be an art form," said Nick James, editor
of Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute.
"The passing of Bergman comes at a time when cinema is valued more as
an entertainment idiom than an art form," James said Monday. "It would
be good if there were more film makers around with his level of artistic
ambition."
Ingmar Bergman |
Bergman approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness with
inventive technique and carefully honed writing, became one of the
towering figures of serious film making.
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." His last work was "Saraband," a
made-for-television movie that aired on Swedish public television 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
favourite actors - who reprised their roles from "Scenes From a
Marriage," which was edited and released as a feature film in 1974.
But it was "The Seventh Seal," released two years later, that 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 1957 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 news 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 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.
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.
AP |