Film director Bergman dies at 89 (4 Viewers)

Zé Tahir

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According to the TT news agency, Bergman died peacefully on Faro Island - or Sheep Island - in the Baltic Sea. The director had settled there after using it as a location for several films.

Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said: "It's an unbelievable loss for Sweden, but even more so internationally."

And British film director Ken Russell told the BBC: "He was probably the greatest film maker," describing him as a "very gloomy Swede".

"He could hardly bear to watch his own movies, apparently they made him so miserable," he said. "To have done 50 films with such a variety of misery is quite an achievement."

Bergman had five marriages and eight children, and his work often explored the tensions between married couples.

He once said: "My pictures are always part of my thinking, and my emotions, tensions, dreams, desires. Sometimes they appear from the past, sometimes they grow up from my present life."

In a 70th birthday tribute in 1988, Woody Allen said Bergman was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera".

But Bergman confessed in 2004 that he could not bear to watch his own films because they made him depressed.

"I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable," he said. "I think it's awful," he said in a rare interview on Swedish TV.

Nick James, editor of cinema magazine Sight & Sound, paid tribute to Bergman as "one of the great masters and one of the great humanists of cinema".

"There are very few people of that kind of stature today," he said. "He proved that cinema could be an artform."

And UK Culture Secretary James Purnell described Bergman as "undoubtedly one of the most important and influential film-makers of all time".

"His contribution to world cinema across a 60-year career is unsurpassed," he said. "With his lifetime's work he has changed the face of film, but also proved that complex and challenging art can engage a wide audience."

Danish director Bille August said Bergman's death was "a real shock to me because he was the last big director left".

August, who described Bergman as an "incredible, unusually bright person", won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1988 and '92.

Bergman wrote the script for one of the winning films, The Best Intentions, basing it on his memories of his parents.

"The three big directors for me were Kurosawa, Fellini and Bergman," August said. "The two others had already passed and now Ingmar has also left us. He leaves a big vacuum behind."

'He gave hope'

These views were shared by Istvan Szabo, the Oscar-winning Hungarian director who worked with Bergman at the European Film Academy.

He told news agency MTI: "The Bergman films are to viewers like the novels of a great novelist, the poems of a great poet or the works of a great drama writer. "

Oscar-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda described Bergman as creating "great art" and said that for film directors, "he gave hope, a belief, that if we wanted to say something about ourselves, the world would notice that".

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

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/6921960.stm

Published: 2007/07/30 16:50:40 GMT
 

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Zé Tahir

Zé Tahir

JhoolayLaaaal!
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Dec 10, 2004
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  • Thread Starter #3
    Why Bergman was an artistic giant

    Film historian Geoffrey Macnab reflects on the surprisingly versatile career of director Ingmar Bergman, who has died aged 89.


    Internationally, Ingmar Bergman is known almost exclusively for his films, but in Sweden he's a huge cultural figure.

    He may have made more than 50 films, but he was also extremely active in writing and directing radio plays, he did a lot of work for television, he wrote novels, he wrote scripts.

    You could say he has covered every base. On that level alone, that's why he is important.

    Bergman's theatre career and film career ran more or less in tandem, and there was a period in the 1950s where he'd be doing theatre work in the winter months, and he would go off in the summer to make films.

    It seems as though he had an extraordinary work ethic.

    'Death and doom'


    Outside Sweden, people have a vision of Bergman as a very austere figure who made melancholic Scandinavian films about death and doom.

    But ironically, his breakthrough film internationally was a comedy - Smiles of a Summer Night.

    That was a quintessential summer house farce, which directly influenced Woody Allen's Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy.

    You could loosely describe something like The Hour of the Wolf as a horror film - with an artist going mad on an island as he's preyed upon by weird, grotesque aristocratic figures who live in a castle.

    And, because of his messy private life, he had to direct a whole bunch of soap advertisements in the 1950s to support his ex-wives and children.

    So he was much more versatile than his reputation would suggest.

    Divorce debate

    In Sweden, he found his audience with two films.

    There was Scenes From a Marriage, which apparently almost every Swedish couple watched, and which fomented a huge debate on marriage and divorce in Sweden.

    It appealed to an older generation who maybe thought his films were too experimental and avant-garde.

    For younger viewers, his production of The Magic Flute was the film they loved.

    It was shown on Swedish television in the mid-'70s and around half the population watched it.

    But, to my mind, he did some of his absolute best work in the 1960s.

    Persona is an extraordinary film. It's really an experimental film. It has a lot of weird silent cinema imagery and a distressing montage before the main action begins.

    But his reputation was such that even an avant-garde film like that was able to get a mainstream reception.

    He made 54 films and it would be more or less impossible for a European director today to work anything as like as quickly - because the finance isn't there.

    In that sense, he's the last of a breed.

    Geoffrey Macnab writes for Screen International, Sight and Sound and The Independent. He is currently writing a biography of Ingmar Bergman, which is due for publication later in the year.

    Story from BBC NEWS:
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/6922552.stm
     
    Jul 24, 2006
    381
    #6
    never seen his movies, but RIP! :sad:
    Hey man, with absolute respect you have to see this guy's movies. They are heady, but just check out The Seventh Seal to start..

    Absolutely enormous films even though they are all around 90 mins long a Bergman movie feels like a lifetime (but in a good way..)

    If you have ever seen What Dreams May Come or read a Garcia Marquez novel or even just if you enjoyed Citizen Kane see Bergman and discover what it's all about in the purest sense..
     

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