[Deathwatch] Ingmar Bergman, film director, 89

[Deathwatch Central <cdw@slick.org>]

Film director Ingmar Bergman dies
http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/Movies/07/30/bergman.obit.ap/index.html


STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, an
iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of
modern cinema, died Monday, local media reported. He was 89 years old.

 Bergman died at his home in Faro, Sweden, Swedish news agency TT said,
citing his daughter Eva Bergman. A cause of death wasn't immediately
available.

Through more than 50 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.

Bergman, who approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness
with inventive technique and carefully honed writing, became one of the
towering figures of serious filmmaking.

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."

"The Seventh Seal," released in 1957, 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 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 humor 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 Theater 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 grueling 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 theater 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 press 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 Theater, 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 was
later 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.

In 1942, Bergman was hired by the script department of Swedish Film
Industry, the country's main production company, as an assistant script
writer.

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.

The date of the funeral has not yet been set, but will be attended by a
close group of friends and family, the TT news agency reported.

Many thanks to TheLenGuy for posting this obituary