Ingmar Bergman, Dead at 89

[OCBuckWife]

Film loses a grand "ancestor" with this passing on. RIP

Ingmar Bergman, the master filmmaker who found bleakness and despair as well as comedy and hope in his indelible explorations of the human condition, died today at his home on the island of Faro, off the Baltic coast of Sweden. He was 89.



His death was announced by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.
Mr. Bergman was widely considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history. For much of the second half of the 20th century, he stood with directors like Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa at the pinnacle of serious filmmaking.

 

[sandgk]

That is all.

 

[Taosman]

For you artsey fartsey types........

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he Seventh Seal, made the following year, would establish Bergman as cinema's prime movie metaphysician; Wild Strawberries and The Virgin Spring would stamp his pure, dour philosophy on a generation of filmmakers and viewers. As much as anyone, he convinced the world that film was an art, and that handsome faces suffering in closeup could be the visual equivalent of literature. Yet it was this comedy that earned "the solemn Swede" his first international eminence. On the long night of the summer solstice, ten people from the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the servant class stumble through brief trysts until they find their proper mates. Indefatigable lover of women's wisdom, remorseless anatomizer of men's insecurities, Bergman would make sterner, possibly more profound works, but never again one so blithely understanding of the mischief humans commit on one another?the folly they know is sex and fleetingly convince themselves is love. ?R.C.