By Frank Powley Jul 30, 2007, 17:48 GMT
Stockholm - Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, who has died at the age of 89, was one of the 20th century's most renowned, influential and experimental film directors who achieved world fame in the 1950s and 1960s with such films as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, Hour of the Wolf, and Shame.
A file photo dated 09 May 1998 shows Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman (L) during a press conference on his film 'Troloesa', in Stockholm, Sweden. Ingmar Bergman has died, Swedish news agency TT reported 30 July 2007. He was 89 years old. EPA/SEIJBOLD GUNNAR
In his unmistakeable individual style, Bergman in his writing and directing of films tackled moral questions through an examination of man's relationship to himself, to others and to God.
His anguished appraisal of the human condition lost nothing of its intensity in his later years.
Along with a handful of European colleagues and contemporaries, Bergman introduced the idea of the total filmmaker, the writer- director who uses the modern medium to express himself in the same way that artists had done for generations in the novel, the symphony, the fresco and other established forms.
The films Bergman wrote or directed, or both, in the early part of his career were autobiographical, dealing with the kinds of problems he himself was encountering at the time - the role of youth in a changing society, ill-fated young love, and military service.
An early biographer, Marianne Hoek, wrote that, 'Bergman's production is intimately autobiographical, one big first-person narrative drama, a monologue for many voices.'
Some Bergman scholars claim they can detect an autobiographical 'life curve' in the chronology of his films.
This curve starts with the vulnerable youth in an uncomprehending adult world in his early films, progresses to sex and marriage in his more mature films of the early 1950s and the religious and artistic struggles depicted in most of the 1960s and, finally, the psychoanalytical films up through the 1970s.
Bergman's film trilogy - Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence - dealing with the borderline between sanity and madness, is considered by many critics and movie buffs alike as his crowning achievement.
Even as a child, Bergman was immersed in theatre and cinema when he owned a laterna magica or cinematograph.
Bergman described the device as a 'clattering tin box with a chimney, a kerosene lamp and endless films that went around and round in a strip,' a magic machine whose flickering light was projected against his mother's laundry room.
He named his memoirs Laterna Magica (1987) after this childhood toy, which he found so 'secretive and provocative'.
Bergman's childhood proved to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for his later work.
'I can still roam through the landscape of my childhood and again experience lights, odours, people, rooms, moments, gestures, tones of voice and objects,' he wrote in Laterna Magica.
In Sweden, Bergman is revered as much for his lifelong work as a stage director across the country as he is for his films.
Bergman has referred to the theatre as his 'loyal wife' and the cinema as his 'expensive mistress.'
Born in the university town of Uppsala north of Stockholm on July 14, 1918, Bergman was brought up in a strictly religious home. His father was a Lutheran pastor who later became the king's chaplain.
At Stockholm University, where he studied art, history and literature, Bergman first became deeply involved in the theatre and began writing plays and directing student productions.
In 1944, he was appointed artistic director of Helsingborg's municipal theatre, and a year later was given the chance to write and direct his first film, Crisis.
Bergman is a 'person for whom art and life are one,' said Maaret Koskinen, an associate professor at the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University.
'Nevertheless, there is reason to be cautious about interpreting his works on the basis of narrow biographical facts,' Koskinen said.
Koskinen pointed out that from one film to another, from one decade to another, Bergman's films have undergone transformations in both theme and content.
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