Best Known As: Film Director

Gist:  Ernst Ingmar Bergman () (14 July 1918 ? 30 July 2007) was a Swedish director, writer and producer for film, stage and television. His influential body of work often dealt with themes such as bleakness and despair, as well as comedy and hope, in his cinematic exploration of the human condition. Described by Woody Allen as "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", he is recognized as one of the most accomplished and influential film-makers of modern cinema.

He directed sixty-two films, most of which he also wrote, and directed over one hundred and seventy plays. Among his company of actors were Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow. Most of his films were set in the landscape of Sweden, his major themes being death, illness, betrayal and insanity.

Bergman was active for more than six decades, but his career was seriously threatened in 1976 when he suspended a number of pending productions, closed his studios, and went into self-imposed exile in Germany for eight years following a botched criminal investigation for alleged income tax evasion.

Life Facts:  , pictured at Hedvig Eleonora Church in Stockholm]]

Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden to Karin (maiden name Åkerblom) Bergman, a nurse, and Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister and later chaplain to the King of Sweden. Ingmar grew up surrounded by religious imagery and discussion. His father was a conservative parish minister with certain extreme right political sympathy and strict parenting concepts. Ingmar was locked up in dark closets for infraction such as wetting the bed. "While father preached away in the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang, or listened," Ingmar wrote in his autobiography Laterna Magica,

:"I devoted my interest to the church?s mysterious world of low arches, thick walls, the smell of eternity, the colored sunlight quivering above the strangest vegetation of medieval paintings and carved figures on ceilings and walls. There was everything that one?s imagination could desire ? angels, saints, dragons, prophets, devils, humans."

Though he was raised in a devout Lutheran household, Bergman later stated that he lost his faith at age eight years, 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. He attended a Nazi rally in Weimar at which he saw Adolf Hitler. He later wrote in Laterna Magica (The Magic Lantern) about the visit to Germany, how the German family had put a portrait of Adolf Hitler on the wall by his bed, and that "for many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats". Bergman did two five-month stretches of mandatory military service.

In 1937, he entered Stockholm University College (later renamed to Stockholm University), 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 for years. Although he did not graduate, he wrote a number of plays, as well as an opera, and became an assistant director at a theater. In 1942, 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 Bergman position working on scripts. In 1943, he married Else Fisher.

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 televisual 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).

during the production of Through a Glass Darkly (1960)]]

' studios north of Stockholm.]]

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 lacking interruption or comment until postproduction discussion of the next day's work.

during the production of The Silence (1963)]]

When asked about his movies, Bergman said he held Winter Light, Persona, and Cries and Whispers in the highest regard, though in an interview in 2004, Bergman said that he was "depressed" by his own films and could not watch them anymore. In these films, he said, he managed to push the medium to its limit.

While he denounced the critical classification of three of his films (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence) as a predetermined trilogy, saying he had no intention of connecting them and could not see any common motifs in them , this contradicts the introduction Bergman himself wrote in 1964 when he had the three scripts published in a single volume: "These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly - conquered certainty. Winter Light - penetrated certainty. The Silence - God's silence - the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy". The Criterion Collection groups the films as a trilogy in a boxed set.

Bergman stated on numerous occasions (for example in the interview book Bergman on Bergman) that The Silence meant the end of the era in which religious questions were a major concern of his films.

1976 was one of the most traumatic years in the life of Ingmar Bergman. On 30 January 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 break-down 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 S.E.K. 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 23 March 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 expressed 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 any wrong.

Even though the charges were dropped, Bergman was for a while disconsolate, fearing he would never again return to directing. 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 S.E.K. ten million and hundreds of jobs lost.

* Cinema of Sweden

* List of directors

* List of film collaborations

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* [ Ingmar Bergman Face to Face]

* [ The Ingmar Bergman Foundation]

* [ Ingmar Bergman all posters]

* [ Bergmanorama: The magic works of Ingmar Bergman]

* [ The Guardian/NFT interview with Liv Ullmann by Shane Danielson, 23 January 2001]

* [ Bergman talks of his dreams and demons in rare interview, by Xan Brooks, The Guardian, 12 December 2001]

Career Facts:  Bergman's films usually deal with existential question of mortality, loneliness, and religious faith.

While these themes could seem cerebral, sexual desire found its way to the foreground of most of his movies, whether the setting was a medieval plague (The Seventh Seal), upper-class familiar activity in early twentieth century Uppsala (Fanny and Alexander) or contemporary alienation (The Silence). His female characters are usually more in touch with their sexuality than the men, and unafraid to proclaim it, with the occasively breath-taking overtness (e.g., Cries and Whispers) that defined the work of "the conjurer," as Bergman called himself in a 1960 Time magazine cover story. In an interview with Playboy in 1964, he said: "...the manifestation of sex is very important, and particularly to me, for above all, I don't want to make merely intellectual films. I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them." Film, Bergman said, was his demanding mistress. Some of his major actresses became his actual mistresses as his life overlapped with his movie-making.

Love ? twisted, thwarted, unexpressed, repulsed ? was the leitmotif of many of his movies, beginning perhaps with Winter Light, where the pastor's barren faith is contrasted with his former mistress's struggle, tinged with spite, to help him find spiritual justification through love.