Ingmar Bergman dies

[Breogan]

Dark arthouse director Ingmar Bergman dies


Ingmar Bergman, the dark arthouse director considered by many fans to have been the greatest film-maker ever, has died at the age of 89. Bergman died early this morning at his home on the tiny Baltic island of Faaro. near Gotland. No cause of death was immediately given, but his daughter, Eva, said that he had passed away "peacefully".
Bergman made about 60 movies before retiring from film-making in 2003, including The Seventh Seal (1957), Winter Light (1963) and Fanny and Alexander (1982), which won four Oscars, including for Best Foreign Language Film.
In his films, Bergman’s vision was said to encompass all the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, the gentle merriment of glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the island where he spent his last years.


He was one of the great masters and one of the great humanists of cinema. There are very few people of that kind of stature today. He proved that cinema could be an art form," said Nick James, editor of Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute.
Bergman approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness with inventive technique and carefully honed writing, and became one of the towering figures of serious film-making. For many movie buffs, he was the greatest of the authorial film-makers of the 1950s and 1960s, outranking even such figures as Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel or Jean-Luc Godard.
One of his most devoted fans, the American director Woody Allen, said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988 that he was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera".
Marcus Oscarsson, Times Correspondent in Stockholm, said that the entire country "kind of stopped for a minute". Normal television programming was interrupted and flags were quickly lowered to half-mast on many public buildings around Sweden.
"His pieces are immortal," said Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Prime Minister. "Ingmar Bergman was one of the greatest dramatists in the world – for many he was the absolute greatest."
Bergman first gained international attention with 1955’s Smiles of a Summer Night, a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music - although he had made his first film ten years earlier.
But it was The Seventh Seal, released two years later, that riveted critics and audiences and marked him out as a cinema great. An allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, it contains one of cinema’s most famous scenes - a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.
"I was terribly scared of death," Bergman said of his state of mind when making the 1957 film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the best picture category. The film was acclaimed for distilling the essence of Bergman’s work - high seriousness, flashes of unexpected humor and striking images.


He had his detractors, too. The demanding nature of his work, in particular the gravity of his themes, was such that the general public found him remote, and he was accused in his homeland of being partly responsible for Sweden being presented as a country of neurotics.
He was also a harsh self-critic. In an interview in 2004 with Swedish broadcaster SVT, the reclusive filmmaker admitted that he was reluctant to view his work. "I don’t watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry ... and miserable. I think it’s awful," he said.
Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also a prominent stage director. He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm which he headed from 1963 to 1966. He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg, whom he cited as an inspiration.
Known in Sweden mainly as a dramatist, Bergman obtained poor reviews for work that was considered dark and incomprehensible, with its focus on love, loneliness, anguish and relations with God.


Women also occupied a central role in his work, which often dwelt on the mysteries of the female soul. He had loved his mother intensely as a child, and when a doctor advised her to set her son aside or risk damaging him for life, he felt the loss deeply.
Mother-son relationships featured prominently in his work, as did his experiences from five marriages. He had nine children, including a daughter by the actress Liv Ullmann.
Bergman made profoundly personal films following his intellectual and spiritual preoccupations and tracing his loss of faith in God.
The Seventh Seal, The Virgin Spring (1960), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963) and The Silence (1963) all lead progressively to a rejection of religious belief, leaving only the conviction that human life is haunted by"a virulent, active evil".
With Wild Strawberries (1957), Bergman turned increasingly to psychological dilemmas and ethical issues in human and social relations once religion proved a failure.
For many years Bergman declined attractive offers to work abroad. But in 1976, after being charged by the Swedish tax authorities, he moved to Germany and worked as the director of Munich Residenz Theater.
After a six-year exile he returned to Sweden and remained there until his death. Officially "retired", he continued to work tirelessly, directing television plays, and writing screenplays such as the autobiographical saga The Best Intentions, which, reduced to three-hour film length, won the 1992 Cannes Golden Palm for director Bille August.





Dark arthouse director Ingmar Bergman dies - Times Online

[Gavril]

A great artist. May he rest in peace.

For those interested in his life, works and his struggle, here is a good biography.

[Silas]

A real tragedy for Sweden and for the world. One of the greatest has passed on. As someone said "Ingemar did more for the filmindustry than the filmcamera". Rest in peace Ingemar Bergman!

[Savorgnan]

Originally Posted by Breogan

Dark arthouse director Ingmar Bergman dies

AGAIN??? Michel Serrault also died today. Sad day for European cinema.

[svin]

Film Legend Michelangelo Antonioni Dies

Italian film legend Michelangelo Antonioni died peacefully in his home in Rome on Monday evening. The director was famous for groundbreaking films like "Blow-Up" and "L'avventura". He was 94.

Italian film legend Michelangelo Antonioni died peacefully in his home in Rome on Monday evening. Antonioni's family reported the death of the director Tuesday morning, according to the Italian news agency Ansa.

The director achieved legendary status in the 1960s with movies that broke new ground in terms of aesthetics, including his trilogy, "L'avventura" in 1960, "La Notte" in 1961 and "L'eclisse" in 1962.

"Every movement of the head, every gesture, every camera movement became something necessary, irrevocable and unmistakable in his eyes," said the German film director Wim Wenders, who helped Antonioni publish his directorial memoirs, "That Bowling Alley on the Tiber." Hollywood gave him a life achievement Oscar in 1995 for his 25 films and several screenplays.

Together with Federico Fellini, Antonioni helped move Italian film away from the neorealist movement. His 1966 film "Blow-Up," about a fashion photographer in swinging sixties London, was an aesthetic criticism of the media and pop culture and won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival. He followed it up with "Zabriskie Point", an homage to the 1968 political movement, filmed in California's Death Valley.

Antonioni had been confined to a wheelchair since suffering a stroke in 1985. Severely weakened by the stroke, he was looked after by his wife, Enrica Fico, 41 years his junior. She was with him when he passed away peacefully in his chair Monday evening, according to Ansa. He died on the same day as another highly influential director, Ingmar Bergman.

Antonioni will be buried Thursday in Ferrara, the northern Italian city where he was born.

ap/reuters

[Marcus Marulus]

This is the filmmakers' black summer, obviously...