Ingmar Bergman

Uppsala, the parsonage, and the magic lantern, 1918–1937

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden, on 14 July 1918, the second of three children of Erik Bergman, a Lutheran minister who later became chaplain to the King of Sweden, and Karin Åkerblom, a nurse. The household ran on his father's strict ideas of discipline. For infractions such as wetting himself, the boy was locked in a dark closet. Sitting through his father's sermons, he studied the church instead: the arches, the coloured light, the medieval paintings of angels, saints, dragons and devils.

At nine he traded a set of tin soldiers for a magic lantern, an early image projector, and built a private theatre around it. He made his own scenery, marionettes and lighting, and spoke every part in puppet productions of the plays of August Strindberg. The toy gave his autobiography its title. He said he lost his religious faith at eight, though he only came to terms with the loss thirty years later, while making Winter Light.

In the summer of 1934, aged sixteen, he was sent to Germany on a family exchange and attended a Nazi rally in Weimar, where he saw Adolf Hitler speak. The German host family hung a portrait of Hitler by his bed. Bergman wrote in The Magic Lantern that for many years he was on Hitler's side, delighted by his successes and saddened by his defeats. The newsreels from the opened concentration camps ended it. The truth, he said, was a hideous shock that ripped him of his innocence. He made the admission publicly and repeatedly in later life.

Student theatre, Torment, and the first films, 1937–1955

Bergman enrolled at Stockholm University College in 1937 to study art and literature, spent most of his time in student theatre, became by his own account a genuine movie addict, and never graduated. A romantic entanglement led to a physical fight with his father and a break between them that lasted years. In 1942 a production of his own play Caspar's Death was seen by people from Svensk Filmindustri, the country's main film company, and he was hired to work on scripts.

His screenplay for Torment, filmed by the director Alf Sjöberg in 1944, was the breakthrough. The film's account of a sadistic schoolmaster set off a national argument about Swedish schools. The principal of Bergman's own old school called him a former problem child. Bergman answered that he had hated school as a principle, as a system and as an institution. The film's success won him his first chance to direct a year later. At twenty-six he was also running the Helsingborg City Theatre, the youngest theatre manager in Europe, beginning a parallel stage career that continued for six decades.

Through the late 1940s and early 1950s he wrote and directed more than a dozen features, ran the Gothenburg and later the Malmö city theatres, and assembled the beginnings of his standing company of actors. Sawdust and Tinsel and Summer with Monika, both released in 1953, are the films of this period that lasted.

The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and world fame, 1955–1963

Smiles of a Summer Night, a comedy of country-house pairings released in 1955, brought the first international success when it won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival the following year. Then came 1957, when Bergman released two films ten months apart. The Seventh Seal sent a medieval knight, played by Max von Sydow, into a chess game with Death against a background of plague. Wild Strawberries put Victor Sjöström, the great director of Sweden's silent era, in a car to Lund as an old professor auditing his life. The first won a special jury prize at Cannes; the second won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival.

In March 1960 Time put him on its cover as "The Conjurer", the first foreign-language filmmaker on the magazine's cover since Leni Riefenstahl in 1936. In the early 1960s he made three chamber films on faith and its absence, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963). Critics read them as a trilogy; Bergman first rejected the idea and later half adopted it. Through a Glass Darkly won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, as The Virgin Spring had the year before.

Fårö, Persona, and the great chamber films, 1960–1975

From the early 1960s Bergman lived and worked mainly on Fårö, a small island off Gotland in the Baltic, whose bare shoreline appears in film after film. Persona (1966) put two women, an actress who has stopped speaking and the nurse who talks to her, alone in a house on the island until their identities blur. It starred Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, won few awards, and is widely considered his masterpiece. Bergman himself named it, with Winter Light and Cries and Whispers, among the works he held in highest regard, and said that with Persona and Cries and Whispers he had pushed the boundary of what film could do.

Cries and Whispers (1972), photographed by Sven Nykvist in rooms of saturated crimson, followed two sisters and a servant through a third sister's death from cancer. It was nominated for the Academy Award for best picture, a rarity for a Swedish-language film, and was finished for about $450,000. Scenes from a Marriage (1973), a six-part television study of a marriage coming apart, cost about $200,000, ran on Swedish television, and was later cut for cinemas worldwide. Bergman financed his work without international backers, on low budgets, and said he never had a problem with funding.

The theatre ran alongside throughout. Bergman led the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm as its chief director from 1960 to 1966, and produced for television and radio steadily. In 1971 he received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award at the Academy Awards ceremony.

The tax arrest and the Munich exile, 1976–1984

On 30 January 1976, two plainclothes police officers arrested Bergman at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, where he was rehearsing August Strindberg's The Dance of Death. The charge was tax evasion, over a transaction between his Swedish company and its Swiss subsidiary. The humiliation broke him. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalised with deep depression. On 23 March the special prosecutor dropped the charges entirely, saying the alleged crime had no legal basis and comparing it to charging a man with stealing his own car.

Cleared but disconsolate, Bergman vowed never to work in Sweden again, closed his Fårö studio, and moved to Munich in West Germany, despite public pleas from the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme. He ran Munich's Residenz Theatre from 1977 to 1984 and made films abroad: The Serpent's Egg (1977), Autumn Sonata (1978), which paired him with the actress Ingrid Bergman, no relation, and From the Life of the Marionettes (1980). He said later that the exile had effectively cost him eight years of his professional life.

He returned to Sweden to make Fanny and Alexander (1982), a family chronicle set in an Uppsala household like the one he was born into, and announced it as his last film for cinemas. It won four Academy Awards, including his third for best foreign-language film.

Fårö again, Saraband, and the end, 1984–2007

After Fanny and Alexander, Bergman kept writing and directing for television and the stage for another two decades. He wrote the scripts for The Best Intentions and Sunday's Children, filmed by Bille August and by his son Daniel Bergman. He published the autobiographies The Magic Lantern (1987) and Images: My Life in Film (1990). His last stage production was Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2003. The same year, at eighty-four, he directed Saraband, a television sequel to Scenes from a Marriage, and then retired.

He died in his sleep at his home on Fårö on 30 July 2007, aged 89, on the same day as the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni. He was buried privately in the Fårö churchyard on 18 August, beside his fifth wife, Ingrid von Rosen, who had died of stomach cancer in 1995. Late in life he said he was not afraid of dying: on the contrary, he thought it would be interesting.

How Bergman worked

Bergman built a repertory company and kept it. Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom and Gunnar Björnstrand each appeared in at least five of his features; Liv Ullmann, the last to join, appeared in ten. Many had started with him on stage in Helsingborg, Gothenburg or Malmö. The company let him write parts for known instruments and shoot fast.

With Sven Nykvist, his cinematographer from the early 1960s onward, the trust ran the other way. On the morning of a shoot Bergman described the mood and composition he wanted, then left Nykvist alone until the next day's discussion of rushes. Watching those rushes, Bergman asked one question only, not whether the work was great or terrible but whether it was sufficient or had to be reshot. In old age he said that if he missed one thing about filmmaking, it was working with Sven.

He wrote his own screenplays, carrying a film in his head for months or years before the writing, which he found tedious. In the later films he increasingly wrote only the ideas of a scene and let the actors find the exact words. The subjects stayed constant: mortality, loneliness, faith and desire, played out among a handful of people in closed rooms. He told Playboy in 1964 that he did not want to make merely intellectual films; he wanted audiences to feel his films, which mattered more to him than their understanding them.

Reception and changing reputation

Through the 1960s Bergman was treated as the last word in cinematic seriousness, the director around whom the idea of film as art was argued. Stanley Kubrick wrote to him in 1960 that his vision of life had moved him more deeply than any films had ever moved him, and called him the greatest filmmaker at work. Woody Allen's films quote and praise him repeatedly. The tide ran out somewhat after his death; the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum published a piece in 2007 titled "Scenes From an Overrated Career", and the argument it started is still cited.

Your vision of life has moved me deeply, much more deeply than I have ever been moved by any films. I believe you are the greatest film-maker at work today.

The standing measures have held. Four of his films, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona and Fanny and Alexander, appeared in the 2012 edition of Sight and Sound's greatest-films poll, and the magazine's 2002 directors' poll ranked him eighth among directors of all time. For his centenary in 2018 the Criterion Collection released a box set of thirty-nine features. James Baldwin, who spent an afternoon with him in Stockholm in 1959, published the encounter as "The Northern Protestant" in Nobody Knows My Name, the closest thing in that book to a straight profile.

After his death, his working papers went to the Swedish Film Institute: unproduced plays and scripts, a scenario abandoned as not alive enough, loose scenes set inside a womb, and an envelope marked, in his hand, "Complete disaster!". The Ingmar Bergman International Debut Award, given annually at the Gothenburg Film Festival, carries his name.