Ingmar Bergman (1918 - 2007) was a Swedish film and theatre director, screenwriter and producer, widely regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. [1] Over some sixty films and a parallel career in the theatre he examined faith and doubt, mortality, family and the difficulty of communication, in works including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Cries and Whispers and Fanny and Alexander. [2]
Early life
Bergman was born on 14 July 1918 in Uppsala, the son of a Lutheran minister who later served as chaplain to the Swedish royal court. His upbringing was strict and religious, and the tension between religious authority and personal doubt recurs throughout his work. [1] As a child he was given a magic lantern and a toy theatre, which he described as the origin of his fascination with projected images and staged illusion. He studied literature and art history at Stockholm University and directed student theatre before leaving without a degree.
Theatre and early films
Bergman worked in municipal theatres in Helsingborg, Gothenburg and Malmö, and from 1963 to 1966 was head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. He directed for the stage throughout his life, treating theatre and film as complementary rather than separate careers. [3]
He entered cinema as a scriptwriter, and his screenplay for Torment in 1944 brought him attention. He directed his first film, Crisis, in 1946, and reached international audiences with Summer with Monika and the comedy Smiles of a Summer Night, which won a prize at Cannes in 1956. [1]
Major films
The Seventh Seal, released in 1957, set a returning crusader's chess game with Death against the plague years and became one of the best-known images in world cinema. Wild Strawberries, from the same year, follows an elderly professor's journey and his confrontation with his own coldness, and won the Golden Bear at Berlin. [2]
A sequence of chamber films followed, including Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence, addressing the silence of God and the failure of language. Persona, in 1966, reduced the material to two women in isolation on an island and dissolved the boundary between their identities; it is often cited as his most formally radical work. [4]
He worked repeatedly with the cinematographer Sven Nykvist and with actors including Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Björnstrand and Erland Josephson. Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage and Autumn Sonata followed in the 1970s. [3]
Later life and legacy
In 1976 Bergman was detained on suspicion of tax offences; the case was dropped, but after a breakdown he left Sweden and worked for several years in West Germany, where he made The Serpent's Egg and From the Life of the Marionettes. He returned to make Fanny and Alexander in 1982, a large autobiographical family chronicle that he announced as his last feature for cinema, though he continued to direct for theatre and television. [1]
Bergman received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the Erasmus Prize, a BAFTA Fellowship and the Praemium Imperiale, and films he directed won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film on three occasions. He spent his later decades largely on the island of Fårö, where he died on 30 July 2007. [2] His influence is acknowledged by directors across several generations, and his house and archive on Fårö are maintained as a centre for film study. [4]
