Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, who influenced a generation of filmmakers with his often stark works about mortality and sexual torment, died in his sleep July 30 at his home on Faro Island in the Baltic Sea. He was 89.
Sweden and the global film community lamented the death of an icon. "He was one of the great ones," said Jörn Donner, producer of Fanny and Alexander, Bergman's last work for the big screen, which won four Oscars.
"It's a very big loss today," said Cissi Elwin, chief executive of the Swedish Film Institute. "It's very, very strange and very unreal because Ingmar Bergman is so much [a part of] Swedish film."
Directors Guild of America president Michael Apted said in a statement, "Bergman was the epitome of a director's director—creating beautiful, complex, and smart films that imprinted permanently into the psyche—inspiring filmmakers all over the world to create their own movies with similar passion and brio."
Bergman was famed for films such as Wild Strawberries, Scenes From a Marriage, and Fanny and Alexander, which made him an acknowledged master of modern cinema. His work includes 54 films, 126 theatre productions, and 39 radio plays. Three of Bergman's works won Oscars for best foreign-language film; he earned eight nominations for his writing and directing. In 1971 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded him its Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. Last month a collection of his work was added to the UNESCO store of history's greatest archives.
His cinematic masterpieces often dwelt on sexual confusion, loneliness, and the vain search for the meaning of life—themes he ascribed to a traumatic childhood in which he was beaten by his father, a Lutheran minister.
Although he stepped away from the big screen after Fanny and Alexander, he subsequently directed a number of television productions up to 2003 when he made Saraband.
He told Reuters in a rare interview in 2001 that personal demons tormented and inspired him throughout his life.
"The demons are innumerable, appear at the most inconvenient times, and create panic and terror," he said at the time. "But I have learnt that if I can master the negative forces and harness them to my chariot, then they can work to my advantage."
Bergman gained international recognition with The Seventh Seal, his 1957 film in which a Crusader searching for God plays chess with a personified Death. Film directors all over the world have named him as an inspiration.
Woody Allen idolized him, paying homage to The Seventh Seal in his early comedy Love and Death. "He was a friend and truly the best director in my lifetime," Allen told Sweden's Aftonbladet newspaper. "I was very sad to hear that he has passed away."
Danish director Bille August, who won the 1992 Palme d'Or at Cannes for The Best Intentions, a movie based on a script Bergman wrote about his parents, said the Swede was a trusted friend who would listen to his doubts.
"It was a real shock to me because he was the last big director left," August said of Bergman's death. "He left a big vacuum behind."
Oscar-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda said it was Bergman's "absolute isolation" that impressed him. "He created great art, and for us—movie directors—he gave hope, a belief, that if we wanted to say something about ourselves, the world would notice," he told Polish news agency Pap.
In Sweden, government and cultural officials and the media also lined up to pay tribute to one of the most famous Swedes.
"His works are immortal," Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said.
Elwin said the Swedish Film Institute planned a memorial night in August and would invite film historians and colleagues from the acting world to pay tribute to Bergman's career.
—Additional reporting by Fredrika Bernadotte, Helena Soderpalm, Adam Cox, Terhi Kinnunen, David Cutler, and Lauren Horwitch