EncyclopediaBergman, Ingmar
Bergman, Ingmar (Ernst Ingmar Bergman) (ing'mär ber'yumän) [key], 1918–, Swedish film and stage writer, director, and producer. Bergman achieved an impressive degree of freedom early in his career and used it to create and develop a highly individual approach. Working with many of the same actors and technicians from film to film, Bergman's work is filled with arresting images and displays an unusual degree of unity and continuity. Bergman reached his creative zenith as a director in the 1950s and 60s. His 50s films include The Seventh Seal (1956), Wild Strawberries (1957), and The Virgin Spring (1959). In the 60s he made two successive trilogies that charted his growing disillusion with humanity's search for God. The first trilogy consists of Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962), and The Silence (1963); the second of Persona (1965), Hour of the Wolf (1968), and Shame (1968).
In the 1970s, Bergman focused his work on domestic issues, dramatized through traumatic, usually unworkable personal relationships, as in the stormy Scenes from a Marriage (1974). Bergman briefly exiled himself from Sweden after a dispute with tax authorities, but returned to make his self-proclaimed final, and surprisingly optimistic, film about family and childhood, Fanny and Alexander (1983, Academy Award). He has continued to work in television, theater, and opera. He has written autobiographical screenplays for the films The Best Intentions (1992), directed by Bille August; Sunday's Children (1993), from his autobiographical novel and directed by his son, Daniel Bergman; and for Private Confessions (1998) and Faithless (2000), both directed by Liv Ullmann. Bergman has also directed a number of classic plays for the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden, e.g., Strindberg's The Ghost Sonata (2001); many of these productions have appeared in the U.S. His made-for-television drama, Saraband (2004), a bleak epilogue to Scenes from a Marriage, was proclaimed by Bergman to be his final statement on film.
See his autobiographies, The Magic Lantern (1987) and Images: My Life in Film (1994); Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (tr. 1960); S. Björkman, T. Manns, and J. Sima, Bergman on Bergman: Interviews with Ingmar Bergman (1973, tr. 1975, repr. 1993); biographies by B. Steene (1967) and P. Cowie (upd. ed. 1992); studies by V. Young (1971), F. Marker and L.-L. Marker (1982, repr. 1992), F. Gado (1986), R. E. Long (1994), R. W. Oliver, ed. (1995), and J. Vermilye (1998); M. Nyrerod, dir. Bergman Island (documentary film, 2006).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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