Ingmar Bergman, 1918-2007

Checkmate. Death has finally taken the great Swedish master, Ingmar Bergman, as he always knew it must.

No filmmaker wrestled longer and more painfully with the knowledge of his own mortality. His father was a severe Lutheran minister, and a figure who cast a long shadow over Bergman's films, including his premature swansong, Fanny And Alexander (1982), and perhaps his purest masterpiece, Winter Light (1962), a portrait of a pastor who has lost his Faith in God.

Bergman's anguished introspection permeated his films, the great majority of which he wrote himself. When they weren't directly concerned with religion, the films were still preoccupied with existential doubt that gnawed at strained family relationships, bitter marriages and passionate but ultimately unfulfilling love affairs. (Bergman himself had nine children, and five wives.) The playwright August Strindberg was probably the most important artistic influence on his work, and he directed many of Strindberg's plays on stage.

In the popular imagination Bergman was the epitome of the gloomy Swede. What's remarkable today is the extent to which this austere and uncompromising artist made such a deep imprint on late twentieth century western culture, to the point where his work was confidently parodied by everyone from Bill And Ted to French and Saunders. Virtually everything he made is available on DVD in Britain - and he made a lot.

Woody Allen was perhaps his most devoted acolyte: in their various ways, Love And Death, Stardust Memories, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, Interiors, and Deconstructing Harry all acknowledge the debt. Wes Craven's horror movie The Last House on the Left was inspired by The Virgin Spring (1960); John Cassavetes name-checked him in Faces (1967), while Robert Altman's Images and 3 Women were influenced by the experimental, modernist Persona (1966). Liv Ullmann, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin and Max von Sydow all became well known through their regular appearances in his films.

Arguably Rossellini and Renoir had a more enduring impact on the way films are made, but in his lifetime only Kurosawa and Fellini spoke so directly to international audiences and filmmakers. Among his many honours, Bergman was nominated for nine Academy Awards. In 1997 at a special ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival he was awarded 'the Palm of Palms', a reflection of his unique standing in world cinema.

Although his career stretches back to 1946, he hit his stride with Summer With Monika in 1953, and came to international attention with the uncharacteristically charming sex comedy Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955. This was succeeded, in a remarkable run, by the recently re-released medieval allegory The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957) and The Magician (1958).

A couple of years later his loosely grouped 'Silence of God' Trilogy cemented his standing as the most philosophically rigorous of European art house directors. In 1972, when Sight and Sound magazine polled critics for the best films ever made, Bergman had two in the top ten. A year later, he made two more intense psychological masterpieces, Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage (both starring his sometime lover, Liv Ullmann).

Bergman suffered a nervous breakdown after being arrested for tax evasion and retired from cinema in 1982, although he continued to write scripts for TV and proved he hadn't mellowed when he was persuaded to direct Saraband in 2003. The high Seriousness for which he stands is no longer fashionable in the age of irony, post-modernism, or what some call 'post-Art', and some of his later work is painfully self-conscious, torpid and joyless.

But Bergman was more than his caricature. As a director, his collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist ran the gamut from searing expressionism to scenes of graceful, limpid natural light. He was a searching, fearless dramatist who held himself to the highest standards as an artist. Bergman did more than anyone to drag cinema in the modern age. He never flinched from confronting the human condition, and that exacting determination will endure.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com

See the entire LOVEFiLM Bergman Collection here

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