Ingmar Bergman, an Academy Award-winning Swedish writer-director whose name came to define an entire genre of stark movies about the human condition, such as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and Persona, has died at his home at the age of 89, Swedish media reported on Monday.

The Bergmanesque style of intensely personal cinema, in which desire and suffering dominated the character’s lives, first gained wide attention in the early 1950s—when many American filmmakers were making soapy dramas or promoting gimmicks like Smell-o-Vision.

In Europe, movie directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut helped break visual and narrative rules, but Bergman stood out for dreamy and often disturbingly psychological films that expressed emotional isolation and modern spiritual crisis.

Women were especially prominent in Bergman’s films. Confused by their doubts and desires, sometimes entirely driven by their passions, Bergman’s women usually stood on the brink of mental collapse. His men, on the other hand, were often hapless bystanders, incapable of understanding their own lives, much less those of anyone around them.

“The people in my films are exactly like myself—creatures of instinct, of rather poor intellectual capacity, who at best think while they’re talking,” Bergman once said. “Mostly they’re body, with a little hollow for the soul.”

To Bergman, solace was only possible through erotic and intellectual connections, but this was complicated when people cloak true emotions. He underscored this theme by focusing on characters involved in theatre, used to disguises and role playing.

Bergman won favourable comparisons with August Strindberg, the 19th-century playwright he admired, for his psychological insights and for addressing themes often ignored by contemporaries.

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