Legendary Swedish film director
Ingmar Bergman, who influenced a generation of film-makers with
his often stark works on themes of mortality and sexual
torment, died on Monday at the age of 89.
The self-taught film-maker and scriptwriter died in the
morning at his home on Faro Island in the Baltic Sea, Cissi
Elwin, chief executive of the Swedish Film Institute, said.
"It's a very big loss today," Elwin said. "It's very, very
strange and very unreal because Ingmar Bergman is so much (a
part of) Swedish film."
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Earlier this month, Bergman put in a brief appearance at
the annual celebration on Faro Island of his half-century
career but remained in a wheelchair and seemed very tired, she
said.
Bergman was famed for films such as "Wild Strawberries,"
"Scenes From a Marriage" and "Fanny and Alexander" -- a classic
that won four Oscars -- which brought Sweden a reputation for
melancholy but made him an acknowledged master of modern
cinema.
His work, in all, encompassed 54 films, 126 theatre
productions and 39 radio plays.
His cinematic masterpieces often dwelt on sexual confusion,
loneliness and the vain search for the meaning of life --
themes he ascribed to a traumatic childhood in which he was
beaten by his father, a Lutheran minister.
"He was one of the great ones," Jorn Donner, producer of
Bergman's "Fanny and Alexander," told Reuters.
"I knew him for more than 50 years."
"Fanny and Alexander," the director's last big screen
production which was heavily autobiographical, tells the story
of an upper-class Uppsala family before World War One.
The boy protagonist, Alexander, and his sister Fanny are
mentally and physically abused by their stepfather -- a bishop
modeled on Bergman's father. Alexander at last uses
supernatural powers to take a sinister revenge.
HOMAGE
News of Bergman's death prompted an outpouring in local
media while Swedish television interrupted regular broadcasting
to pay homage.
"I believe that it is hard to fully comprehend the
contribution that Ingmar Bergman made to Swedish film and
drama," Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said in a statement.
"His works are immortal."
Elwin said the Swedish Film Institute planned a memorial
night in August and would invite film historians and colleagues
from the acting world to pay tribute to Bergman.
Offstage, Bergman's private life often thrust him into the
limelight. He was married five times to beautiful and gifted
women and had liaisons with his leading actresses. Bergman had
nine children.
Bergman told Reuters in a rare interview in 2001 that
personal demons tormented and inspired him throughout his life.
"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most
inconvenient times and create panic and terror," he said at the
time. "But I have learnt that if I can master the negative
forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my
advantage."
He gained international recognition with the 1956 film "The
Seventh Seal," set in the Middle Ages, in which a crusader
searching for God and the meaning of life plays chess with
Death. It won the jury prize at the 1957 Cannes film festival.
He won Academy Awards for best foreign language film in
1960, 1961 and 1983, and a collection of his work was last
month added to the UNESCO store of history's greatest archives.
The director's self-proclaimed retirement from big screen
productions followed the making of "Fanny and Alexander"
although he subsequently directed a number of television
productions, including the celebrated "Saraband" in 2003.
Bergman settled on Faro -- or "sheep" -- island off the
southeast coast of Sweden after shooting seven films there.
Each summer the island has hosted a celebration of his life and
movies.
(Additional reporting by Fredrika Bernadotte, Helena
Soderpalm and Adam Cox in Stockholm, Terhi Kinnunen in Helsinki
and David Cutler in London)
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