Ingmar Bergman

Ernst Ingmar Bergman, film and theatre director: born Uppsala, Sweden 14 July 1918; five times married (three sons, five daughters, and one son deceased); died Fårö, Sweden 30 July 2007.

'Growing old is hard work - a full-time occupation," the great Swedish film and stage director Ingmar Bergman declared in an interview on Swedish television in 2000. "The fact that I must die does not bother me. Indeed, I look forward to it as an interesting experience."

That was the voice of his childhood speaking, for at an early age Bergman had become obsessed by death and dying, a subject he went on to explore in his films, including the 1957 masterpiece which first brought him to international attention, The Seventh Seal. He was born into a very strait-laced family. His father was a strict Lutheran pastor, his mother a domineering puritan. They brought up their children to be always on their best behaviour, to suppress all their natural instincts.

So Bergman sought refuge from that stifling, life-denying atmosphere in fantasy, in imaginary universes. With his sister Margaret, he constructed a marionette theatre in which the dolls played out their personal dilemmas. They had an old-fashioned magic lantern with crudely tinted slides, and later a hand-cranked projector on which they ground out bits of discarded black-and-white reels.

At 18, Bergman at last found a kind of release when he left home to attend university in Stockholm. There he interested himself chiefly in the university theatre, for which he wrote his early plays, including Death of Punch, which brought him an offer to re-model scripts for Svensk Filmindustri (the Swedish film company). He also was fortunate to make lifelong friends of the great actor Erland Josephson and the future film director Vilgot Sjöman. Josephson was to appear in many of Bergman's stage productions and in his films, from the very first, Det regnar på vår kärlek (It Rains on our Love), in 1946 to his last, Saraband, in 2003.

By this time, Bergman was creating his own highly literary scripts. The first made under his own direction was Fängelse (Prison) in 1949. From the start, his themes were expressive of his personal traumas, his aversions and aspirations, and above all conflict with authority - family, morals, religion. So it is odd that in this early period he was an ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler, an adolescent idealist divagation he had never sought to hide or excuse, and that he talked about freely in a 1999 television interview, as well as in an anthology of essays about the ambiguous attitude to Nazism his country took during the Thirties and Forties. In his new-found freedom, his hero-worship of Hitler was possibly a form of homesickness, a perverse nostalgia for the rigours of parental control. It was a theme some critics have seen underlying Tystnaden (The Silence, 1963). But his "confession" evoked few reactions in the Swedes, for whom it was by then ancient history.

The following decades mark the progressive stages in Bergman's art in the theatre and on film. He was director from 1944 to 1966 of theatres in Helsingborg, Gothenburg and Malmö, and the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, presenting the whole range of classical and contemporary drama, specialising in the work of Strindberg and his combatant couples.

This subject fascinated Bergman: his parents were perpetually at war with one another, and his mother even committed the unthinkable sin for a pastor's wife by having an affair with a young trainee priest. Bergman's early films Torst (Thirst) and Till Gladje (To Joy), both 1949, were both on the traumatic theme of the embattled couple engaged in merciless civil domestic war.

The Fifties brought Bergman international acknowledgement. He spent his summers making films on his hideaway island of Fårö, where he fostered his own kind of family: actors including Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand and Erland Josephson, along with his favourite cameramen Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer.

These works celebrated the resplendent Swedish summer and the pleasures of pagan sexuality or the tortures of ephemeral passion, as in Sommaren med Monika (Summer With Monika, 1953), with the gorgeously flowering erotic charms of Harriet Andersson, or Gycklarnas Afton (Summer's Eve) in the same year, an analysis of sexual desire and its accompanying griefs of guilt, despair and human vulnerability. The 1955 masterpiece Sommernattens Leende (Smiles of a Summer Night), a rococo comedy of ferocious charm starring Eva Dahlbeck and Ulla Jacobsson, won the Jury Prize at Cannes.

Another masterpiece, Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal) is a worried allegory on life and death set in the Middle Ages and symbolised by a game of chess. There is an intuition of eventual nuclear holocaust, with a medieval plague representing the Cold War. It is one of the most typical of all Bergman's major films.

It was followed by four important successes: Smulltronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957), with the old director Viktor Sjöstrom as its unforgettable star, with his old-age regrets and resentments, a role in which Bergman saw his future self. Nära livet ("Threshold of Life", 1958) is an almost surgical documentary about three pregnant women in a maternity ward. In the same year, Ansiktet ("The Face"), with a great performance from Max von Sydow, is about a 19th-century magician who is obviously a portrait of Bergman as an entertainer who earns his living by putting audiences under his hypnotic charm.

The Sixties was a more austere decade, in which Bergman displayed more refined techniques and used profounder, less flamboyant themes as settings for spiritual doubt and torments. This was the period of the great trilogy ending with The Silence, followed by the sublime Persona (1965) with Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow, a mingling of dream and imagination filmed with rare virtuosity, and deeply marked by Jungian analysis. The Seventies produced another masterpiece, Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers, 1972), a hallucinatory study of the female psyche miraculous for its insight into tenderness and cruelty in human relationships, and arguably Bergman's greatest work. The same kind of domestic conflict can be seen in Scener ur ett äktenskap (Scenes from a Marriage, 1973) which was originally made as a six-episode television serial. Its deflation of Swedish bourgeois standards of morality is both tragic and ridiculous, and it was an immense success in Sweden.

The 1980 film Aus dem Leben der Marionetten (From the Life of the Marionettes), influenced by Heinrich von Kleist's short prose study, was made in Germany, where Bergman had taken refuge after an unjustified income-tax scandal; the film expresses his feelings of paranoia, helplessness and sense of failure at being persecuted in his own land. One of his last works for the big screen was Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander, 1982), an immense family portrait spanning the generations, which won four Oscars.

Bergman was also a considerable writer, and his autobiography Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern, 1987) is a classic of its kind. His Söndagsbarn (Sunday's Child, 1984) was made into a documentary by his son Daniel, who follows in his father's film footsteps.

James Kirkup

Interesting? Click here to explore further