01/08/2007

The news came as a shock wave for Sweden and the international film community when Swedish wire agency TT announced on the morning of Monday, July 31 that Ingmar Bergman, one of the last living legends of modern cinema, had passed away in his retreat on Fårö Island, off of Sweden’s east coast, where he shot several of his films, including Persona and Scenes from a Marriage.

Bergman a brief appearance earlier this month during the Bergman Week in Fårö, where hundreds of friends, film professionals and scholars had gathered for the fourth time to celebrate the director’s unique and unmatched goldmine of work encompassing 54 films, 126 theatrical productions and 39 radio plays.

“This is a day of sorrow in the world of film. One of the world’s most prominent filmmakers is gone,” said Cissi Elwin, head of the Swedish Film Institute. ”Film in Sweden without Ingmar Bergman is almost unthinkable. For more than half a century he has led us into his own cinematic landscape – and forced us to face ourselves. He has relentlessly asked the most important questions about being human and pointed out our vulnerability, our smallness, but also our greatness. The films are some kind of comfort. Ingmar Bergman has left us, but his films will live on – long, long after he himself is gone.”

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala on July 14, 1918. The son of a Lutheran pastor, his life and work were to be highly influenced by his strict upbringing and traumatic childhood, described in his 1987 autobiography The Magic Lantern. This magic lantern or early projector - given to his brother as a Christmas gift but swiftly traded by Ingmar for hundreds of tin soldiers - was to be a key element in his later desire and ability to translate his tormented psyche into images.

Obsessed by existential and profound questions such as death, love, family and God, Bergman is one of the few filmmakers whose name gave birth to an adjective, “Bergmanesque”, which refers to tormented human relationships filmed with tight close-ups. Woody Allen, one of his most fervent followers, said about him: “Bergman evolved a style to deal with the human interior and he alone among directors has explored the soul’s battlefield to the fullest”.

Bergman had his international breakthrough as a filmmaker in 1956 when his romantic film Smile of a Summer Night won a Jury Prize in Cannes. The following year, he used his new fame to make one of his masterpieces and perhaps most celebrated film: The Seventh Seal, which also launched the international career of actor Max von Sydow.

Other landmark titles created during a career spanning over six decades include the 1958 Golden Bear winner in Berlin Wild Strawberries, and the three Oscar winning films for Best Foreign Language: The Virgin Spring (1961), Through a Glass Darkly (1962) and Fanny and Alexander (1984).

It was with this largely autobiographical film that Bergman announced his early retirement from major feature film production, although he continued to write film scripts (such as Faithless, directed in 2000 by one of his many actresses/muses Liv Ullmann) and to direct TV films, including Saraband in 2003.

Married five times and the father of nine children, Bergman had a tumultuous private life. He also suffered mental breakdown in 1976 following entanglements with Swedish tax authorities and then went into voluntary exile for almost a decade in Germany. He later returned to the Swedish capital before settling in Fåro.

As proof to Bergman’s wide influence and respect among the new generation of Scandinavia’s talented auteur filmmakers, Joachim Trier, director of Reprise, commented: “As a young filmmaker I find his work to be complex and diverse. He was one of the greatest voices cinema has ever seen. The complexity of his characters and the ambitions of his themes are just as relevant today as ever. The themes of guilt, loneliness and family relations are dealt with in a sincere and unique manner. I especially admire his films of the '60s: Persona, The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light, which are among my favourite films of all time. In his greatest films he shows us that form and content are inseparable. “