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.

Film critic and scholar David Sterritt said Bergman made it fashionable among American audiences to discuss movies as an art form. Previously, that distinction was largely reserved for adaptations of Shakespeare or other old masters.

With their abstract, sometimes allegorical storytelling technique, Bergman’s nearly 60 films found their greatest fans among viewers in small, “art-house” theatres. His most enthusiastic American champion was Woody Allen, who tried to mimic his themes with Interiors and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.

Three of Bergman’s movies received Oscars for best foreign language film: The Virgin Spring (1960), about a 14th-century Swede who avenges the rape and death of his daughter; Through a Glass Darkly (1961), about a crumbling modern family; and Fanny and Alexander (1982), a story of terrifying adolescence. In the last, an ascetic bishop canes his stepson for a minor infraction and makes the child beg for forgiveness. This mirrored Bergman’s upbringing as the son of a strict and unforgiving Lutheran minister.

Bergman created a stock company of performers, including Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand and Erland Josephson. He relied heavily on cinematographers Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nyvquist, who captured with unparalleled beauty, cruelty, sensuality and selfishness often colliding in the same scene.

The director worked closely with his cameramen to create some of the most memorable images in 20th-century cinema. One such moment was the finale of The Seventh Seal, in which a parade of characters dance to their doom with scythe-wielding Death leading the way.

Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden, and raised in Stockholm, where his father was chaplain to the Swedish royal family. He later said his mother wanted to leave her husband but stayed for the children. The filmmaker cynically thanked his parents for the unhappy environment in which he was raised, saying they “created a world for me to revolt against”.

BERGMAN ON CINEMA

Orson Welles: “For me, he’s just a hoax. It’s empty. It’s dead. Citizen Kane is all the critics’ darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it’s a total bore.”

Godard: “I’ve never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead.”

Michelangelo Antonioni: “He’s done two masterpieces, you don’t have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up and the other is La Notte.”

Newer directors: “Among today’s directors, I’m impressed by Steven Spielberg, Scorsese and Coppola.”

Ingmar Bergman sought to exorcise a traumatic childhood through cinematic masterpieces whose major themes were sexual torment and the vain search for the meaning of life. His work encompassed 54 films, 126 theatre productions and 39 radio plays.

NOTABLE FILMS

Smiles of a Summer Night won prize for best comedy at the 1956 Cannes film festival.

He gained international recognition with the 1956 film The Seventh Seal, set in the Middle Ages, in which a crusader searching for God and the meaning of life plays chess with death. It won the jury prize at the 1957 Cannes film festival. An allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, it contains one of cinema’s most famous scenes — a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.

The Virgin Spring (1961), Through a Glass Darkly (1961) and Fanny and Alexander (1984) won Oscars for best foreign film.

In 1971, he received The Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award at the Academy Awards ceremony.

He directed three films abroad, one of them, The Autumn Sonata (1978), bringing together Liv Ullmann and the late Ingrid Bergman.

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

In a 2004 interview, the legendary filmmaker said that among his works, he held Winter Light (1962), Persona (1966) and Cries and Whispers (1973) in high regard.

BERGMAN, THE PERSON

Offstage, Bergman’s private life was often thrust into the limelight. He was married five times to beautiful and gifted women and was known for liaisons with his leading actresses.

25 March, 1943-1945 to Else Fisher (divorced)

22 July, 1945-1950 to Ellen Lundström (divorced)

1951-1959 to Gun Grut (divorced)

1959-1969 to Käbi Laretei (divorced)

11 November, 1971-20 May, 1995 to Ingrid von Rosen (widowered).