Woody Allen calls Bergman “the greatest filmmaker of my lifetime”

STOCKHOLM (Hollywood Today/AFP) 7/31/07 — Tributes poured in Monday for Ingmar Bergman, one of the most influential film directors of the 20th century, who died at his home on the Swedish island of Faaroe. He was 89.

His daughter Eva Bergman told the TT news agency her father had passed away “peacefully” on Monday but did not give the cause of death.

Max Von Sydow, who appeared in 11 Bergman films, spoke of his “infinite gratitude” not only for the professional opportunities but also “the immense privilege to have been his friend.”

As an actor, he said, “no one counted as much for me as Ingmar Bergman.”

Director Michael Apted, head of the Directors Guild of America, said in a statement: “Bergman was the epitome of a director’s director — creating beautiful, complex and smart films that imprinted permanently into the psyche.” He had inspired filmmakers all over the world to create their own movies with similar passion, Apted added. The DGA gave Bergman its highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990.

Filmmaker Woody Allen earlier paid tribute to Bergman, one of his biggest influences, by bidding him farewell with a final joke.

“I was very saddened by the death of Ingmar Bergman. He was a friend and certainly the greatest film artist of my lifetime,” Allen said in a statement.

“He told me that he was afraid that he would die on a very, very sunny day and I can only hope it was overcast and he got the weather he wanted,” he said.

Gilles Jacob, president of the Cannes film festival, said “modern cinema has lost one of its last pioneers, a pioneer of genius.”

Bergman was personally nominated for nine Oscars in his role as director and writer, including in 1960 for “Wild Strawberries,” and in 1980 for “Fanny and Alexander.”

Although he repeatedly missed out he was given an honorary Oscar in 1971. His films however, did better, picking up three best foreign language film Oscars.

Despite his preoccupation with dark themes such as death and sexual anguish, he was widely acclaimed for perennial arthouse favourites like “The Seventh Seal” (1957) and “Fanny and Alexander” (1982),

For many movie buffs, Bergman was the greatest of the authorial film-makers of the 1950s and 1960s, outranking such figures as Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel or Jean-Luc Godard.

Bergman, who never fully got over the 1995 death of his fifth and final wife, Ingrid von Rosen, had lived as a virtual recluse on Faaroe, a small island in the Baltic Ocean.

The demanding nature of his work was such that the general public found him remote, and he was accused in his homeland of presenting Sweden as a country of neurotics.

But he was enormously influential overseas.

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born in Uppsala, Sweden, on July 14, 1918, the second of three children.

His strict childhood — his father Erik was a clergyman — and family relationships influenced him profoundly and were reflected in all his work.

At Stockholm University he discovered his vocation when he chose the dramatic society over his literature and art history classes.

He directed his first film “Crisis” in 1945 but it was in 1956 that he won international acclaim when “Smiles of a Summer Night” was shown at the Cannes Festival. For more than three decades he produced an average of a movie a year.

Known in Sweden mainly as a dramatist, Bergman obtained poor reviews for work that was considered dark and incomprehensible, with its focus on love, loneliness, anguish and relations with God.

“I don’t watch my own films very often,” he admitted in a rare interview on Swedish television three years ago. “I become so jittery and ready to cry… and miserable. I think it’s awful.”

Women occupied a central role in his work, which often dwelt on the mysteries of the female soul. He had loved his mother intensely as a child, and when a doctor advised her to put some distance in their relationship to avoid damaging him, he felt the loss deeply.

Mother-son relationships featured prominently in his films, as did his experiences from five marriages. He had nine children, including a daughter by actress Liv Ullmann.

Bergman’s profoundly personal work followed his intellectual and spiritual preoccupations and traced his loss of faith in God.

“The Seventh Seal”, “The Virgin Spring” (1960), “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), “Winter Light” (1963) and “The Silence” (1963) all lead progressively to a rejection of religious belief.

With “Wild Strawberries” (1957), he turned increasingly to psychological dilemmas and ethical issues in human and social relations.

For many years Bergman declined attractive offers to work abroad. But in 1976, after being charged by the Swedish tax authorities, he fled to Germany where he remained for six years as director of the Munich Residenz Theater.

In his autobiography, Bergman recalled the trauma of the tax fraud allegations and his subsequent exile.

“My hand was trembling, I had trouble breathing,” he wrote. It was “a catastrophe, my life’s catastrophe.”

In 1979 a fiscal review exonerated him and he made “Fanny and Alexander” in Sweden three years later, after which he announced his retirement from feature films.

But he continued to direct television plays and write screenplays. One of them, the autobiographical saga “The Best Intentions”, won the 1992 Cannes Golden Palm for director Bille August in a reduced three-hour version.