Demons, 100 years on
head of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.
“We now have this director reminding us that we can also be anxious, that we can divorce, or maintain difficult relationships with our parents, that we’re godless, and that we do not want to hear about it,” he added.
Bergman repeatedly created symbolist compositions, first in black and white and then in color.
“The Seventh Seal,” “Summer with Monika,” “Scenes from a Marriage,” “Autumn Sonata,” “Cries and Whispers” and “Fanny and Alexander” are classical examples next to “Persona” which, to this day, remains one of the masterpieces of cinema.
He also wrote dozens of plays and adaptations of Moliere, William Shakespeare, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and Swedish author August Strindberg.
From 1963 to 1966, Bergman was the director of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, which this year announced an exceptional program to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth.
An impassioned music listener who once humbly claimed he wasn’t very gifted in the art, Bergman united the stage and cinema when he directed Mozart’s comedy opera “The Magic Flute” in 1975.
The opera’s LP record remains in his pine-shaded home in Faro.
Described by Woody Allen as the “best director” in film history, Bergman won an Oscar in the best foreign language film category for “The Virgin Spring” (1960), “Through A Glass Darkly” the following year and for “Fanny and Alexander” (1983).
In 1997, he became the only filmmaker to be honored with the “Palmes des Palmes” in Cannes.
Bergman himself had role models. “(Russian filmmaker Andrei) Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream,” Bergman once said.
And he said other filmmakers, among them Italy’s Federico Fellini, Japan’s Akira Kurosawa and Spain’s Luis Bunuel, all “sail in the same waters” as Tarkovsky.
Bergman selected Swedish actress Harriet Andersson and his Norwegian muse Liv Ullmann — whom he called a “Stradivarius” — for his most profound characters. He married five times and had nine children.