R.I.P Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman Ingmar Bergman

BERGMAN: We artists represent the most serious things—life and death—but it is all a game.

A good intellectual, in my opinion, is one who has trouble with his emotions. He must doubt his intellect, have fantasies, and be powerfully emotional. I meet many fishermen and farmers on the island, who are completely free because their lives are so tough and close to them that they are extremely verbal. They are often crazy, but they are sure of themselves because they know their profession. And I always only work with actors who are—in a special way—self-possessed.

Film work is a powerfully erotic business; the proximity of actors is without reservations, the mutual exposure is total. The intimacy, devotion, dependency, love, confidence and credibility in front of the camera’s magical eye become a warm, possibly illusory security. The strain, the easing of tension, the mutual drawing of breath, the moment of triumph, followed by anticlimax: the atmosphere is irresistibly charged with sexuality.
It took me many years before I at last learnt that one day the camera would stop and the lights go out. (page 169 – 170, The Magic Lantern by Ingmar Bergman)

No one made film like him. (Rick Moody and others on guardian tribute.)

Obit from Greencine Daily

Bergman articles, photos from Times Topics (NYtimes)

“How I take my walk depends on the winds,” he says. “I have staked out four different routes. In May-June I cannot walk on the shore; the birds are breeding and then it’s pure Hitchcock if you go near them.”
A housekeeper comes in for three hours a day, cooking dinner according to a strict rotation. Bergman makes breakfast and lunch himself.
“At three o’clock in the afternoon I watch films,” he says. He has his own movie theatre stocked with 4,500 video cassettes. And every year he chooses between 150 and 200 reels—real film reels—at the Film Institute, which are driven by truck down to Fårö. From On Bergman, loneliness and time on his handless clock (Clock image from Alec Soth)

Francois Truffaut “His female characters are infinitely subtle, while his male characters are conventions.
Orson Wells “He’s far more foreign to me than the Japanese.”
Fellini called him a milk brother. Olivier Assayas “If I had to define where Bergman’s legacy is, I would say everywhere in French cinema.” From the view on Bergman

I would not have made any of my films or written scripts such as Taxi Driver had it not been for Ingmar Bergman – Paul Schrader

Imagine it! Bergman! Dead! Wasn’t he my first vision of what it was to be an artist? (Spurious)

Bergman saved his best work for the stage. Certainly everybody sitting in my row at the Edinburgh theater believed it, that night in the summer of 1986. (Michael Phillips)

Liv Ullman on youtube talks about Ingmar Bergman

“We Swedes are so often described through the eyes of Ingmar Bergman that we have to say, ‘no, we’re not like that.'”
From a recent article on Ingmar Bergman.

Magic, Wonder, And Even Ghosts: Fanny And Alexander’s Christmas by recently departed Teresa Duncan (Wit of the Staircase)

Ingmar was a Melancholic Workaholic (Cancer/Horse)

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