Legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, largely regarded as one of the titans of modern cinema, passed away today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden (Monday July 30). The cause of death wasn’t immediately available, but the director was 89.
Having produced over 50 films in 40-plus years, Bergman’s cinematic oeuvre is regarded next to the works of Akira Kurosawa and Federico fellini as one of the most important of the 20th century.
Obsessed with mortality (and the impending lack thereof), his glacially-paced, internal-psyche’d pictures include films that are renowned as masterworks: the iconographic “The Seventh Seal,” “Persona,” “Cries And Whispers,” “Fanny and Alexander,” “Smiles of a Summer Night,” “Wild Strawberries” and countless others.
Woody Allen – a huge Bergman devotee – whose 1978 film, “Interiors” was a a direct and respectfully dour homage to Bergman said in a 1998 tribute to the Swedish director, “[He was] probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera” (Allen’s “Another Woman” (1988) and “September” (1987) also owed greatly to Bergman).
Hailed internationally, outside of a small group of devoted bespectacled art-house denizens (the type that collect coupons), North Americans generally ignored Bergman’s films. The filmmaker himself perhaps understood why. “I don’t watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry … and miserable. I think it’s awful,” the filmmaker said of his existentially difficult-to-bear, often cheerless cinema. His sometimes dull pictures are habitually cherished and lovingly revived by folks like the dvd excavators, the Criterion collection.
Bergman repertory of favored actors including Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson and, above all, “Persona’s” Liv Ullmann, with whom he had a long personal relationship and child with. He also for many years used the same cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, largely regarded as one of the world’s greats.
Bergman’s films are routinely noted as being one of the first to bring true “seriousness” to movies in the 1950s. “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.”
Bergman’s career took off in 1956 when his film “Smiles of a Summer Night,” won a special prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Three years later, “The Seventh Seal” took home another Cannes prize (though “Torment” won the Grand Prize at the 1946 Cannes, solid international acclaim didn’t come until the ’50s). In 1960 his film, “The Virgin Spring”, which cheerfully told the story of a rape and its mysterious aftermath in medieval Scandinavia; won the Academy Award for best foreign film. The following year, “Through a Glass Darkly,” earned him another Oscar. Bergman won his third and final foreign language Oscar for “Franny & Alexander” in 1984. All in all, Bergman was a 9-time Oscar nominee and also was a recipient of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 1971.
Later in life, Bergman took time away from the cinema to concentrated on directing plays, but he never entirely left that world. Preoccupied with death from a young age (he had severe and strict upbringing that doubtlessly gave him much of his internal fodder) Berman learned to accept fate later in life.
“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.”
Download: Scott Walker – “The Seventh Seal”
Watch: Odd Ingmar Bergman tribute featuring his film “Shame” set to the Smashing Pumpkins song of the same name.
