INGMAR BERGMAN | JULY 14, 1918 – JULY 30, 2007
Ingmar Bergman, the Academy Award-winning Swedish writer- director whose name came to define an entire genre of stark movies about the human condition, such as “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries” and “Persona,” died Sunday at his home on Faro Island, Sweden. No cause of death was disclosed. He was 89.
The “Bergmanesque” style of intensely personal cinema, in which desire and suffering dominated the characters’ lives, first gained wide attention in the early 1950s – when many American filmmakers were making soapy dramas or promoting gimmicks like Smell-o-Vision.
In Europe, Bergman stood out for dreamy and often disturbingly psychological films that expressed emotional isolation and modern spiritual crisis.
Women were especially prominent in his films. Confused by their doubts and desires, sometimes entirely driven by their passions, Bergman’s female characters usually stood on the brink of mental collapse. Meanwhile, his men were often hapless bystanders, incapable of understanding their own lives, much less those of anyone around them.
“The people in my films are exactly like myself – creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best only think while they’re talking,” Bergman once said.
For his psychological insight, Bergman won favorable comparisons with August Strindberg, the 19th-century playwright he admired. Bergman was also praised for addressing themes often ignored by contemporaries.
Film critic and scholar David Sterritt said Bergman made it fashionable among American audiences to discuss movies as an art form.
“He showed that cinema could be a genuine art that could take on the deepest of all human themes,” Sterritt said.
With their heavily abstract, sometimes allegorical story telling technique, Bergman’s nearly 60 motion pictures found their greatest fans among viewers in small, art-house theaters. His most enthusiastic American champion was Woody Allen, who tried to mimic Bergman’s themes with “Interiors” and “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.”
Three of Bergman’s movies received Oscars for best foreign- language film: “The Virgin Spring” (1960), about a 14th-century Swede who avenges the rape and death of his daughter; “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), about a crumbling modern family; and his final film, “Fanny and Alexander” (1982), a story of an adolescence that is often terrifying.
Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden, and raised in Stockholm, where his father was chaplain to the Swedish royal family. He later said his mother wanted to leave her husband but stayed for the sake of the children.
The future filmmaker cynically thanked his parents for the unhappy environment in which he was raised, saying they “created a world for me to revolt against.”
Bergman dropped out of the University of Stockholm to work in local theaters. In 1942, he joined the film company Svensk Filmindustri as a scriptwriter adapting stories. After writing and directing a series of adolescent dramas and suspense tales, Bergman foreshadowed many of his later classics with the bittersweet themes in “Summer Interlude” (1951) and “Summer With Monika” (1953).
In later life, between films, he retreated to his home on the rainswept, stony seascape on Faro Island in the Baltic Sea, and spoke of his need to live remote from civilization, among the sound of waves and a ticking grandfather clock.
His marriages to Else Fisher, Ellen Lundstrom, Gun Hagberg and pianist Kabi Laretei ended in divorce. His fifth wife, a countess named Ingrid Karlebo von Rosen, died in 1995.
He reportedly had nine children among his wives and other relationships, one of whom he acknowledged only in later years.
He told the documentarians in “Bergman Island”: “I had a bad conscience until I discovered that having a bad conscience about something so gravely serious as leaving your children is an affectation, a way of achieving a little suffering that can’t for a moment be equal to the suffering you’ve caused. I haven’t put an ounce of effort into my families. I never have.”
