July 31, 2007

SWEDISH director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, died yesterday. He was 89.

Bergman died at his home on the Swedish island of Faro.

Daughter Eva Bergman, one of his nine children, said her father had died "peacefully".

Bergman, whose 1982 film Fanny and Alexander won an Oscar for best foreign film, made about 60 movies before retiring in 2003.

His 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", filmmaker 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.

His last work was Saraband, a made-for-television movie that aired on Swedish public television in December 2003.

When it aired, nearly a million Swedes - or one in nine - watched the family drama, which was based on the two main characters from his previous TV series, Scenes From a Marriage.

The show starred Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson - two of Bergman's favourite actors - who reprised their roles from Scenes From a Marriage, which was edited and released as a feature film in 1974.

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 1957 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 humour and striking images.

In an interview in 2004 with Swedish broadcaster SVT, the reclusive filmmaker admitted 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.

Although 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 Theatre 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 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.

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 film, 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.

It was in Stockholm 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, as an assistant scriptwriter.

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.

AFP, AP in The Australian