Ingmar Bergman

Aug 1 2007 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

HE WAS almost entirely responsible for fixing in the minds of Britons the notion that Swedes are gloomy.

Lively chaps, who enjoyed Hammer vampire films on Friday nights, would mock their serious friends, who liked psychological dramas featuring marital tensions, suicides, heavy rain and miserable landscapes.

The name Ingmar Bergman was immediately associated with the latter group. This might be unfair. Indeed, experts said that many of his films were brushed by dark humour, though it rarely excited belly laughs.

But Bergman presented one view of Sweden when many young men, including Rod Stewart for a while at least, preferred Britt Eckland and members of both sexes sang along with Abba.

To others, however, he was a towering genius fed by his thoughts on God, sin, guilt and eternal chastisement.

Some of this came from his father Erik, a Lutheran minister of severe persuasion. In his autobiography, Berg- man recalled how he would be locked in closets for infrac- tions such as bed wetting.

Film and theatre became valleys of escape for the boy, who made films himself, before studying art and literature at the University of Stockholm. Although associated with film, Bergman also worked on the stage and in the 1960s was appointed chief director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm.

But his international reputation was as a film director. He made 43, writing the scripts for 32 of them.

He was a deeply imaginative man, tormented and haunted by the bleakness of his own thoughts. His early films touch the obsessive themes of his life, but lacked the emotional maturity of his later offerings.

He inspired great loyalty from his actors and used the same ones time and time again. These included Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin and Liv Ullman.

His work was rewarded with numerous prizes and the reverence of intellectual film critics, though it was also lampooned by Woody Allen and French and Saunders among others.

Bergman achieved international success with the Seventh Seal (1957) with Max von Sydow and Bengt Ekerot. Set in a world stricken by plague and corruption, it set the tone for his career.

Winter Light and The Silence (both 1963) were acclaimed, if depressing. His last Swedish Film Fanny and Alexander (1983) was a much warmer and more sympathetic work.

He married five times and had nine children.

Ingmar Bergman, film director; born July 14, 1918, died July 30, 2007.