Re: [xmca] Film Great Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89 | World Latest | Guardian Unlimited

And, with him, another brilliant piece of the last century is gone.
Tired of the sad spectacle and the fireworks of contemporary mass
media, I wonder if that kind of existential sensibility would ever
come back to touch our sensibility again.
David

On Jul 30, 2007, at 4:49 PM, Leif Strandberg wrote:

> Yes,
>
> Ingmar Bergman is dead and I am a bit astonished over my sadness.
> During my formative years (the sixties) - we, the young left in
> Sweden, hated Ingmar in every aspect we could find; "He was
> bourgeoise", "He was obsessed with God and Death", "He was very far
> from the Vietnam-movement", "His admiration for Germany and Hitler
> during WW2 was bad" etcetera etcetera
>
> AND
>
> we saw every film he made!!
>
> AND
>
> we were touched by what we saw!!
>
> How come?
>
> I think - it was THE METHOD of Bergman's work that was
> fascinating. When he worked it was really "emotion at work" (which
> also is one of our conversations on XMCA this summer).
>
> Bergman could really set the stage and create interactions that
> made it possible for the actors (and the rest of the staff) to
> perform a head taller than they were - (we who have seen the same
> actors in other movies not directed by Bergman can confirm that). I
> think Bergman was brilliant in creating Zones of Emtional
> Development (he was not an Intellectual director - he was a
> sensitive performer (though he was well prepared), he set the
> stage, the room, the colors, the music and then he invited the
> actors to feel and perform. His dialogic style with his actors
> (yes, they were HIS actors) was something special.
>
> Perhaps our conversation about emotions can learn something from
> Ingmar (he was BTW very exact when spelling his name 'Ingmar': in
> Sweden almost every Ingemar spells his name Ingemar, but Ingmar was
> Ingmar!)
>
> It is late here in Sweden, but I think I'll go and see some
> Bergman-DVD - I have them :-)
>
>
> Leif
> Sweden
> 2007-07-30 kl. 17.06 skrev David Preiss:
>
>>
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>> Film Great Ingmar Bergman Dies At 89
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>> From the Associated Press
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Film Great Ingmar Bergman Dies at 89
>>
>> Monday July 30, 2007 3:46 PM
>>
>>
>> By LOUISE NORDSTROM
>>
>> Associated Press Writer
>>
>> STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - Master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, one of
>> the greatest artists in cinema history, died Monday at his home on
>> an island off the coast of Sweden. He was 89.
>>
>> Bergman's dozens of 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.
>>
>> His vision encompassed the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the
>> claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, its glowing summer
>> evenings and the bleak magnificence of the Baltic islet of Faro,
>> where the reclusive artist spent his last years.
>>
>> Once described by Woody Allen as ``probably the greatest film
>> artist ... since the invention of the motion picture camera,''
>> 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.''
>>
>> His last work, of about 60, was ``Saraband,'' a made-for-
>> television movie that aired on Swedish public television in
>> December 2003, the year he retired.
>>
>> ``Sixty years have passed, nothing has changed, it's still the
>> same fever,'' he wrote of his passion for film in an 1987
>> autobiography.
>>
>> ``Saraband'' starred Liv Ullmann, the Norwegian actress and
>> director who appeared in nine Bergman films and had a five-year
>> affair, and a daughter, with the director.
>>
>> The other actor most closely associated with Bergman was Max von
>> Sydow, who appeared in 1957's ``The Seventh Seal,'' an allegorical
>> tale of the Black Plague years as a knight playing chess with the
>> shrouded figure of Death, one of cinema's most famous scenes.
>>
>> His 1982 film ``Fanny and Alexander'' won an Oscar for best
>> foreign film.
>>
>> ``The world has lost one of its very greatest filmmakers. He
>> taught us all so much throughout his life,'' said British actor
>> and director Richard Attenborough.
>>
>> Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman
>> Foundation, confirmed the death to The Associated Press, and
>> Swedish journalist Marie Nyrerod said the director died peacefully
>> during his sleep.
>>
>> Bergman never fully recovered after a hip surgery in October last
>> year, Nyrerod told Swedish broadcaster SVT.
>>
>> ``He was one of the world's biggest personalities. There were
>> (Japanese film director Akira) Kurosawa, (Italy's Federico)
>> Fellini and then Bergman. Now he is also gone,'' Danish director
>> Bille August told The Associated Press.
>>
>> ``It is a great loss. I am in shock,'' August said.
>>
>> Cannes Film Festival director Gilles Jacob called Bergman the
>> ``last of the greats, because he proved that cinema can be as
>> profound as literature.''
>>
>> The son of a Lutheran clergyman and a housewife, Ernst Ingmar
>> Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden on July 14, 1918, and grew up
>> with a brother and sister in a household of severe discipline that
>> he described in painful detail in the autobiography ``The Magic
>> Lantern.''
>>
>> The title comes from his childhood, when his brother got a ``magic
>> lantern'' - a precursor of the slide-projector - for Christmas.
>> Ingmar was consumed with jealousy, and he managed to acquire the
>> object of his desire by trading it for a hundred tin soldiers.
>>
>> The apparatus was a spot of joy in an often-cruel young life.
>> Bergman recounted the horror of being locked in a closet and the
>> humiliation of being made to wear a skirt as punishment for
>> wetting his pants.
>>
>> He broke with his parents at 19 and remained aloof from them, but
>> later in life sought to understand them. The story of their lives
>> was told in the television film ``Sunday's Child,'' directed by
>> his own son Daniel.
>>
>> The director said he had coped with the authoritarian environment
>> of his childhood by living in a world of fantasy. When he first
>> saw a movie he was greatly moved.
>>
>> But he said the escape into another world went so far that it took
>> him years to tell reality from fantasy, and Bergman repeatedly
>> described his life as a constant fight against demons, also
>> reflected in his work.
>>
>> The demons sometimes drove him to great art - as in ``Cries and
>> Whispers,'' the deathbed drama that climaxes when a dying woman
>> cries ``I am dead, but I can't leave you.'' Sometimes they drove
>> him over the top, as in ``Hour of the Wolf,'' where a nightmare-
>> plagued artist meets real-life demons on a lonely island.
>>
>> It was in the Swedish capital that Bergman broke into the world of
>> drama, starting with a menial job at the Royal Opera House after
>> dropping out of college.
>>
>> Bergman was hired by the script department of Swedish Film
>> Industry, the country's main production company, as an assistant
>> script writer in 1942.
>>
>> In 1944, his first original screenplay was filmed by Alf Sjoeberg,
>> the dominant Swedish film director of the time. ``Torment'' won
>> several awards including the Grand Prize of the 1946 Cannes Film
>> Festival, and soon Bergman was directing an average of two films a
>> year as well as working with stage production.
>>
>> After the acclaimed ``The Seventh Seal,'' he quickly came up with
>> another success in ``Wild Strawberries,'' in which an elderly
>> professor's car trip to pick up an award is interspersed with dreams.
>>
>> Other noted films include ``Persona,'' about an actress and her
>> nurse whose identities seem to merge, and ``The Autumn Sonata,''
>> about a concert pianist and her two daughters, one severely
>> handicapped and the other burdened by her child's drowning.
>>
>> 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 Theater 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.
>>
>> The influence of Strindberg's grueling and precise psychological
>> dissections could be seen in ``Scenes From a Marriage,'' an
>> intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage that was
>> released as a feature film in 1974.
>>
>> Bergman showed his lighter side in the following year's ``The
>> Magic Flute,'' again first produced for TV. It is a fairly
>> straight production of the Mozart opera, enlivened by touches such
>> as repeatedly showing the face of a young girl watching the opera
>> and comically clumsy props and costumes.
>>
>> Bergman remained active later in life with stage productions and
>> occasional TV shows. He said he still felt a need to direct,
>> although he had no plans to make another feature film.
>>
>> Bergman, at age 84, started production on ``Saraband'' - based on
>> the two main characters from ``Scenes From a Marriage'' - in the
>> fall of 2002.
>>
>> In a rare news conference, he said he wrote the story after
>> realizing he was ``pregnant with a play.''
>>
>> ``At first I felt sick, very sick. It was strange. Like Abraham
>> and Sarah, who suddenly realized she was pregnant,'' he said,
>> referring to biblical characters. ``It was lots of fun, suddenly
>> to feel this urge returning.''
>>
>> Bergman waged a fight against real-life tormentors: Sweden's
>> powerful tax authorities.
>>
>> In 1976, during a rehearsal at the Royal Dramatic Theater, police
>> came to take Bergman away for interrogation about tax evasion. The
>> director, who had left all finances to be handled by a lawyer, was
>> questioned for hours while his home was searched. When released,
>> he was forbidden to leave the country.
>>
>> The case caused an enormous uproar in the media and Bergman had a
>> mental breakdown that sent him to hospital for over a month. He
>> later was absolved of all accusations and in the end only had to
>> pay some extra taxes.
>>
>> In his autobiography he admitted to guilt in only one aspect: ``I
>> signed papers that I didn't read, even less understood.''
>>
>> The experience made him go into voluntary exile in Germany, to the
>> embarrassment of the Swedish authorities. After nine years, he
>> returned to Stockholm.
>>
>> The date of Bergman's funeral has not been set, but will be
>> attended by a close group of friends and family, the TT news
>> agency reported.
>>
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>>
>>
>> David Preiss, Ph.D.
>> Subdirector de Extensión y Comunicaciones
>> Escuela de Psicología
>> Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
>> Av Vicuña Mackenna 4860
>> Macul, Santiago
>> Chile
>>
>> Fono: 3544605
>> Fax: 3544844
>> e-mail: davidpreiss@uc.cl
>> web personal: http://web.mac.com/ddpreiss/
>> web institucional: http://www.uc.cl/psicologia
>>
>>
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David Preiss, Ph.D.
Subdirector de Extensión y Comunicaciones
Escuela de Psicología
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
Av Vicuña Mackenna 4860
Macul, Santiago
Chile

Fono: 3544605
Fax: 3544844
e-mail: davidpreiss@uc.cl
web personal: http://web.mac.com/ddpreiss/
web institucional: http://www.uc.cl/psicologia

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Received on Mon Jul 30 14:08 PDT 2007