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.
"I was very saddened by the death of Ingmar Bergman. He was a friend and certainly the greatest film artist of my lifetime," American film icon Woody Allen told AFP.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt hailed Bergman as "one of the great dramatists in this world," and French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to "one of the geniuses of modern cinema."
Bergman won three best foreign language film Oscars and, despite his preoccupation with dark themes such as death and sexual anguish, 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.
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.
A funeral for family and friends was being organised, the agency said.
Rumours about Bergman's declining health had been circulating for months.
He underwent a hip replacement operation last October.
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 not until 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 also 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. (*)
Copyright © 2007 ANTARA
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