July 30, 2007
Ingmar Bergman is dead.
The Guardian reports:
The legendary Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman died this morning at his home on the island of Faro. According to his daughter, Eve, the director of The Seventh Seal and Persona died peacefully in his sleep. He was 89.
. . .
Such was Bergman’s stark, uncompromising vision that he found himself a byword for existential gloom, a man whose films offered a pitiless vision of a Godless universe. Yet while there is no denying the serious nature of Bergman’s work, the stereotype conveniently ignored the lush eroticism of films shown in films such as Summer With Monika, or the joyous comedy that runs through Smiles of a Summer Night or A Lesson in Love.
A frequent sufferer of depression, the director knew the importance of keeping his demons at arm’s length. “If I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage,” he said. “Lilies often grown out of carcasses’ arseholes.”
. . .
In later years, Bergman rarely left his home on the remote Swedish island of Faro and earned a reputation as a recluse, a stern old magus locked away from all but his nearest and dearest. In the course of a rare interview in 2004, he admitted that his own personal favourites of his films were Winter Light, Persona and Cries and Whispers. However, he added that he now rarely watched any of his movies because he found them “too depressing”.
A colossus of world cinema, Ingmar Bergman influenced a generation of film-makers who were inspired both by his effortless command of the medium and his high-minded sense of its moral and artistic possibilities. In 1988, Woody Allen hailed him as “probably the greatest artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera.”
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