Cinema Experts

“No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.”
Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden, to Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister and later chaplain to the King of Sweden, and his wife, Karin. He grew up surrounded by religious imagery and discussion. His father was a rather conservative parish minister and strict family father: Ingmar was locked up in dark closets for infractions such as wetting the bed. Despite growing up in this devout Lutheran household, Bergman stated that he lost his faith at age eight and only came to terms with this fact while making Winter Light.
Bergman's interest in theatre and film began early: "At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession that altered the course of his life. Within a year, he had created, by playing with this toy, a private world in which he felt completely at home, he recalled. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg plays in which he spoke all the parts."
In 1934, at the age of 16, Bergman was sent to spend the summer vacation with family friends in Germany. It is believed that he attended a Nazi rally in Weimar at which he saw Adolf Hitler. He performed two five-month stretches of mandatory military service.
In 1937 he entered Stockholm University College, to study art and literature. He spent most of his time involved in student theatre and became a "genuine movie addict". At the same time a romantic involvement led to a break with his father that lasted several years. Although he did not graduate, he wrote a number of plays, as well as an opera, and became an assistant director at a theatre. In 1942, while working for the theatre he was given the chance to direct one of his own scripts, Caspar's Death. The play was seen by members of Svensk Filmindustri who then offered him a position working on scripts.
Bergman first began working in film in 1941 rewriting scripts, but his first major accomplishment was in 1944 when he wrote the screenplay for Torment/Frenzy (Hets), a film directed by Alf Sjöberg. Along with writing the screenplay he was also given a position as assistant director to the film. In his second autobiography Images: My Life in Film, Bergman describes the filming of the exteriors as his actual film directorial debut. The international success of this film led to Bergman's first opportunity to direct a year later. During the next ten years he wrote and directed more than a dozen films including The Devil's Wanton/Prison (Fängelse) in 1949 and The Naked Night/Sawdust and Tinsel (Gycklarnas afton) in 1953.
Bergman first achieved international success with Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) (1955), which won for "Best poetic humor" and was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes the following year. This was followed two years later with two of Bergman's most well known films, The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet) and Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället). The Seventh Seal won a special jury prize and was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes and Wild Strawberries won numerous awards for Bergman and its star, Victor Sjöström.
Bergman continued to be productive for the next 20 years. In the early 60's he directed a trilogy that explored the theme of faith and doubt in God, Through a Glass Darkly (i en Spegel - 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgasterna - 1962), and The Silence (Tystnaden - 1963). In 1966 he directed Persona, a film that he himself considered one of his most important films. While the film won few awards many consider it his masterpiece and one of the best films ever produced. Bergman himself considers this film along with Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop - 1972) to be his two most important films. Other notable films of the period include The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan - 1960), Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen - 1968), Shame (Skammen - 1968) and A Passion/The Passion of Anna (En Passion - 1969). Bergman also produced extensively for Swedish TV at this time. Two works of note were Scenes from a Marriage (Scener ur ett äktenskap - 1973) and The Magic Flute (Trollflöjten - 1975).
1976 was one of the most traumatic years in the life of Ingmar Bergman. On January 30, 1976, while rehearsing August Strindberg's Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, he was arrested by two plainclothes police officers and charged with income-tax evasion. The impact of the event on Bergman was devastating. He suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of the humiliation and was hospitalized in a state of deep depression. The investigation was focused on an alleged 1970 transaction of SEK 500,000 between Bergman's Swedish company Cinematograf and its Swiss subsidiary Persona, an entity that was mainly used for the paying of salaries to foreign actors. Bergman dissolved Persona in 1974 after having been notified by the Swedish Central Bank and subsequently reported the income. On March 23, 1976, the special prosecutor Anders Nordenadler dropped the charges against Bergman, saying that the alleged "crime" had no legal basis, comparing the case to the bringing of "charges against a person who is stealing his own car". Director General Gösta Ekman, chief of the Swedish Internal Revenue Service, defended the failed investigation, saying that the investigation was dealing with important legal material and that Bergman was treated just like any other suspect. He offered some regret that Bergman had left the country, hoping that Bergman was a "stronger" person now when the investigation had shown that he had not done anything wrong.
Even though the charges were dropped, Bergman was for a while disconsolate, fearing he would never again return to directing. He eventually recovered from the shock, but despite pleas by the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, high public figures, and leaders of the film industry, he vowed never to work again in Sweden. He closed down his studio on the barren Baltic island of Fårö, suspended two announced film projects and went into self-imposed exile in Munich, Germany. Harry Schein, director of the Swedish Film Institute, estimated the immediate damage caused by Bergman's exile to SEK 10 million and hundreds of jobs lost.
He briefly considered the possibility of working in America and his next film, The Serpent's Egg (1977) was a German-American production and his first and only English language film. This was followed a year later with a British-Norwegian co-production of Autumn Sonata (Höstsonaten - 1978). The film starred Ingrid Bergman and was the one notable film of this period. The one other film he directed was From the Life of the Marionettes (Aus dem Leben der Marionetten - 1980) a British-German co-production.
In 1982, he temporarily returned to his homeland to direct Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander), a film that, unlike his previous productions, was aimed at a broader audience, but also critizised within the profession for being shallow and commercial. Bergman stated that the film would be his last, and that afterwards he would focus on directing theatre. Since then, he wrote several film scripts and directed a number of television specials. As with previous work for TV some of these productions were later released in theatres. The last such work was Saraband (2003), a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage and directed by Bergman when he was 84 years old.
Although he continued to operate from Munich, by mid-1978, Ingmar Bergman seemed to have overcome some of his bitterness toward his motherland. In July of that year he was back in Sweden, celebrating his 60th birthday at Fårö and partly resumed his work as a director at Royal Dramatic Theatre. To honor his return, the Swedish Film Institute launched a new Ingmar Bergman Prize to be awarded annually for excellence in film making.
Bergman developed a personal "repertory company" of Swedish actors whom he repeatedly cast in his films, including Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, and Gunnar Björnstrand, each of whom appeared in at least five Bergman features. Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann, who appeared in nine of Bergman's films and one TV movie (Saraband), was the last to join this group (in the 1966 film Persona), and ultimately became most closely associated with Bergman, both artistically and personally. They had a daughter together, Linn Ullmann (b. 1966).
Bergman began working with Sven Nykvist, his cinematographer, in 1953. The two of them developed and maintained a working relationship of sufficient rapport to allow Bergman not to worry about the composition of a shot until the day before it was filmed. On the morning of the shoot, he would briefly speak to Nykvist about the mood and composition he hoped for, and then leave Nykvist to work without interruption or comment until post-production discussion of the next day's work.
Bergman usually wrote his own screenplays, thinking about them for months or years before starting the actual process of writing, which he viewed as somewhat tedious. His earlier films are carefully structured, and are either based on his plays or written in collaboration with other authors. Bergman stated that in his later works, when on occasion his actors would want to do things differently from his own intentions, he would let them, noting that the results were often "disastrous" when he did not do so. As his career progressed, Bergman increasingly let his actors improvise their dialogue. In his latest films, he wrote just the ideas informing the scene and allowed his actors to determine the exact dialogue.
When viewing daily rushes, Bergman stressed the importance of being critical but unemotional, claiming that he asked himself not if the work is great or terrible, but if it is sufficient or if it needs to be reshot.
Bergman's films usually deal with existential questions of mortality, loneliness, and faith; they also tend to be direct and not overtly stylized. Persona, one of Bergman's most famous films, is unusual among Bergman's work in being both existentialist and avant-garde.
In one of the last major interviews with Bergman, done in 2005 at Fårö Island, Bergman said that despite being active during the exile, he had effectively lost eight years of his professional life. Bergman retired from film making in December 2003. He had hip surgery in October 2006 and was having a difficult recovery. He died peacefully in his sleep, at his home on Fårö, on July 30, 2007, age 89, the same day that another renowned film director, Michelangelo Antonioni, also died. He was buried August 18, 2007 on the island in a private ceremony.