Ernst Ingmar Bergman was a Swedish director, writer, and producer who worked in film, television, theatre and radio. He is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential filmmakers of all time.
Background
Ingmar Bergman was born on 14 July 1918 in Uppsala, Sweden, the son of Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister and later chaplain to the King of Sweden, and Karin (née Åkerblom), a nurse who also had Walloon ancestors. He was brought up with his elder brother Dag and sister Margareta in a religious family. Ingmar had a strict father, who locked him up in the dark closet for "violations" like wetting the bed. Being 9 years old, Ingmar sold a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern, a possession that changed his further life. He created his own scenery, puppets, and lighting effects and performed puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he dubbed all the parts.
Education
Bergman studied in the secondary Palmgrenska school. He then entered Stockholm University College (later renamed Stockholm University) in 1937, to study art and literature. He spent most of his time involved in student theater and became a "genuine movie addict". Although he did not graduate, he wrote a number of plays and an opera, and became an assistant director at a theater.
After university Bergman became a trainee director at the Mäster Olofsgärden Theater and the Sagas Theater, where he produced a spectacularly unconventional and disastrous production of the Swedish playwright August Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata.
In 1944 he was given his first full-time job as a director, at Helsingborg’s municipal theatre. Also, and more importantly, he met Carl-Anders Dymling, the head of the Svensk Filmindustri. Dymling was sufficiently impressed by him to commission an original screenplay, Hets (1944; Frenzy, or Torment). This was directed by Alf Sjöberg, then Sweden’s leading film director, and had an enormous success, both at home and abroad. Largely as a result of this success, Bergman was, in 1945, given a chance to write and direct a film of his own, Kris (1946; Crisis), and from this point on his career was under way.
The films that Bergman wrote or directed, or both, in the next five years were, if not directly autobiographical, at least very much concerned with the sort of problems that he himself was encountering at that time: the role of the young in a changing society, ill-fated young love, and military service. At the end of 1948 he directed his first film based on an original screenplay of his own, Fängelse (1949; Prison, or The Devil’s Wanton). It recapitulated all the themes of his previous films in a complex, perhaps overambitious story, built around the romantic and professional problems of a young film director who considers making a film based on the idea that the Devil rules the world. While this is not to be taken without qualification as Bergman’s message in his early work, it may at least be said that his imaginative world is divided very sharply between the worlds of good and evil, the latter always overshadowing the former, the Devil lying in wait at the end of each idyll.
In 1951 Bergman’s career in films, like nearly the whole of Swedish filmmaking, came to an abrupt halt as the result of a major economic crisis in Sweden. But in 1952 he returned with the film Kvinnors väntan (Waiting Women, or Secrets of Women), which was followed by Sommaren med Monika (Summer with Monika, or Monika) the following year. These movies marked the beginning of his mature work. In 1952 he also was appointed director of the Malmö municipal theatre, where he remained until 1959. This new phase introduced two markedly new characteristics in his work. In subject matter, Bergman, now himself married, returned again and again to the question of marriage. Viewing it from many angles, he examined the ways by which two people adjust to living together, their motives for being faithful or unfaithful to each other, and their reactions to bringing children into the world. At this time Bergman began to gather around him, in his film and stage productions, a faithful “stock company” of actors - including Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, and Max von Sydow - with whom he worked regularly to give his work and their interpretation of it a manifest consistency and style.
In 1955 Bergman had his first great international success with Sommernattens leende (Smiles of a Summer Night), a bittersweet romantic comedy-drama in a period setting. In the next few years, a kind of Bergman fever swept over the international film scene: concurrently with the succession of his new films, which included two masterpieces - The Seventh Seal, a medieval morality play, and Wild Strawberries, a meditation on old age - all of his early work was shown, and Bergman was universally recognized as one of the most important figures in cinema. Indeed, a far wider section of the cultured public became aware of his work than of that of any previous filmmaker. For the first time, a filmmaker was as widely and as highly regarded as artists in any of the more traditional media. Inevitably, a reaction set in, though Bergman continued to make films and direct plays with undiminished activity. His trilogy of films, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence, dealing with the borderline between sanity and madness and that between human contact and total withdrawal, was regarded by many as his crowning achievement. Through a Glass Darkly won an Academy Award for best foreign film.
About this time, Bergman acquired a country home on the bleak island of Fårö, Sweden, and the island provided a characteristic stage for the dramas of a whole series of films that included Persona (1966), Vargtimmen (1968; Hour of the Wolf), Skammen (1968; Shame), and En passion (1969; The Passion, or The Passion of Anna), all dramas of inner conflicts involving a small, closely knit group of characters. With Beröringen (1971; The Touch), his first English-language film, Bergman returned to an urban setting and more romantic subject matter, though fundamentally the characters in the film’s marital triangle are no less mixed up than any in the Fårö cycle of films. And then Viskningar och rop (1972; Cries and Whispers), Scener ur ett äktenskap (1974; Scenes from a Marriage), and Höstsonaten (1978; Autumn Sonata), all dealing compassionately with intimate family relationships, won popular as well as critical fame.
Through the years, Bergman continued to direct for the stage, most notably at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater. Fanny och Alexander (1982; Fanny and Alexander), in which the fortunes and misfortunes of a wealthy theatrical family in turn-of-the-century Sweden are portrayed through the eyes of a young boy, earned an Academy Award for best foreign film. Bergman also directed a number of television movies, notably the critically acclaimed Saraband (2003), which featured the main characters from Scenes from a Marriage, and the movie received a theatrical release. In addition, he wrote several novels, including Söndagsbarn (1993; Sunday’s Children) and Enskilda samtal (1996; Private Confessions), that were made into films. His memoir, Laterna magica (The Magic Lantern), was published in 1987.
Bergman retired from filmmaking in December 2003. He had hip surgery in October 2006 and was making a difficult recovery. He died peacefully in his sleep, at his home on Fårö, on 30 July 2007, at the age of 89.
Bergman established a worldwide reputation for writing and directing films that, in an unmistakably individual style, examine the issues of morality by exploring human relationships, with others and with God.
In 1977 he received the Swedish Academy of Letters Great Gold Medal, and in the following year the Swedish Film Institute established a prize for excellence in filmmaking in his name.
In 1991 Bergman received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for theater/film.
Although raised in a devout Lutheran household, Bergman later stated that he lost his faith when aged eight, and only came to terms with this fact while making Winter Light in 1962.
Views
Quotations:
"People ask what are my intentions with my films - my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it."
"Our social relationships are limited, most of the time, to gossip and criticizing people's behavior. This observation slowly pushed me to isolate from the so-called social life."
Membership
In 1961 he became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Woody Allen has referred to Bergman as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera". He said, "For me it was Wild Strawberries. Then The Seventh Seal and The Magician. That whole group of films that came out then told us that Bergman was a magical filmmaker. There had never been anything like it, this combination of intellectual artist and film technician. His technique was sensational. " Allen has credited Bergman with inventing "a film vocabulary that suited what he wanted to say, that had never really been done before. He'd put the camera on one person's face close and leave it there, and just leave it there and leave it there. It was the opposite of what you learned to do in film school, but it was enormously effective and entertaining. "
Ang Lee stated: "For me the filmmaker Bergman is the greatest actor of all. .. "
Stanley Kubrick stated: "I believe Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica and Federico Fellini are the only three filmmakers in the world who are not just artistic opportunists. By this I mean they don’t just sit and wait for a good story to come along and then make it. They have a point of view which is expressed over and over and over again in their films, and they themselves write or have original material written for them. "
Connections
Bergman was married five times. On 25 March 1943 he married Else Fisher, choreographer and dancer. They had one daughter. On 22 July 1945 he married Ellen Lundström, with whom he had 4 children. The third marriage was to Gun Grut, a journalist. Their daughter were ngmar Bergman Jr. ,an airline captain. After divorce with Grut he fall in love with Käbi Laretei. They had one daughter. The last his wife was Ingrid von Rosen. The first four marriages ended in divorce, while the last ended when his wife Ingrid died of stomach cancer in 1995, aged 65. Aside from his marriages, Bergman had romantic relationships with actresses Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, and Liv Ullmann (1965-1970).
