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.

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