RIP Ingmar Bergman

The Cinema has lost one of its all-time greats, perhaps the best European filmmaker ever:
Death and demons haunted the anguished works that made Ingmar Bergman a film-making legend. But the Swedish director — one of the greatest artists in cinema history — had overcome his intense fear of death by the time it finally found him.
Bergman died Monday at age 89, at home on the Swedish islet of Faro, the Ingmar Bergman Foundation said. The cause of death was not immediately known.

"The world has lost one of its very greatest film makers. He taught us all so much throughout his life," said British actor and director Richard Attenborough.

Bergman's movies won numerous awards and international acclaim, including Oscars for best foreign film for "The Virgin Spring," "Through a Glass Darkly" and "Fanny and Alexander." The 1973 "Cries and Whispers" was nominated for Best Picture.
Bergman, who retired from films in 2003 after making more than 50 movies, 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."
Bergman's works combined deep seriousness, indelible imagery and unexpected flashes of humor in finely written, inventively shot explorations of difficult subjects such as plague and madness.

More info on a legend for the unacquianted (an unacceptable status you should rectify post-haste should it apply to you):
The history of the cinema has seen directors whose works have been more "original" or "groundbreaking" (such as Eisenstein, Ozu or Godard). And there are plenty of directors who have made as many, if not more films (Griffith, Hitchcock or Chabrol). Yet the question remains: is there anyone who so epitomises the concept of the auteur – a filmmaker with full control over his medium, whose work has a clear and inimitable signature – as Ingmar Bergman?

One of the reasons one immediately recognises a Bergman film is that he is one of those rare filmmakers who has created his own cinematic world. (This is also the reason that we have a section on this website under the heading Universe.) Through recurring environments, themes, characters, stylistic devices, actors and film crews, Bergman has created his own kind of film, almost a genre in itself.
If Alfred Hitchcock is the epitome of the psychological thriller (despite the fact that he also made films in other genres), Bergman has become the hallmark for the existential/philosophical relationship drama (although he, too, has made other kinds of films). His films often use the narrative techniques of "classic" cinema with the addition of "modern" stylistic devices. Quite simply, Bergman fitted in perfectly with the ideal they wished to promote: the auteur who uses the film camera as a writer uses his pen.

In this mould Bergman's films rapidly came to typify the concept of "art house cinema". In a period when film was once again striving for legitimacy, Bergman demonstrated that film could be something more than entertainment: it could indeed be art. As such, it is important to remember that Bergman immediately preceded the other "modern" European directors with whom he is often mentioned: Antonioni, Buñuel, Fellini, Godard and others. The fact that film studies emerged at the end of the 1960s as an academic discipline in its own right is in many respects down to Bergman, whose films of existential exploration naturally lend themselves to systematic analysis.

To a large extent, Bergman's themes laid the foundation for his fame. His Strindberg-like conviction that marriage is hell on earth, and his recurring doubts about God were, ironically enough, and to put it crassly, not much more than a summary of the Scandinavian cultural tradition at the time, with its budding sexual freedom and its already far-reaching secularisation. Yet abroad at the time, not least in the catholic European and South American countries, or in the morally conservative United States and Eastern Europe, Bergman's films appeared revolutionary.

Neither can one totally ignore the contribution to Bergman's success of what were, for the time, quite daring depictions of nudity and "natural" sexuality. Bergman' films, with their unfathomable language, scenes of unspoilt natural beauty and blonde women, were widely regarded as the embodiment of a Scandinavian kind of exoticism.

A highly important director, Ingmar Bergman today seems ironically to have been virtually forgotten. His impact has been so all-pervasive, his influence so great and his films such obvious benchmarks, that his work has almost become invisible. Yet just as one occasionally has to revisit the Bible to understand something of western culture, one needs to see Bergman's films anew. For many it was a long time ago; for others it will be for the first time. Whichever it is, the films will feel familiar.