Here Today... Gone To Hell!

Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman died today aged 89, his sister Eva told the TT news agency.

Bergman was widely acclaimed for films such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Fanny and Alexander (1982), which won four Oscars, including for Best Foreign Language Film.

Eva Bergman said that her father had passed away "peacefully.''

For many movie buffs, Bergman was the greatest of the authorial film-makers of the 1950s and 1960s, outranking even such figures as Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel or Jean-Luc Godard.

The demanding nature of his work, in particular the gravity of his themes, was such that the general public found him remote, and he was accused in his homeland of being partly responsible for Sweden being presented as a country of neurotics.

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.

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 set him aside or he would be damaged for life, he felt the loss deeply.

Mother-son relationships featured prominently in his work, as did his experiences from five marriages. He had nine children, including a daughter by actress Liv Ullmann.

Bergman made profoundly personal films following his intellectual and spiritual preoccupations and tracing his loss of faith in God.

source: The Advertiser
http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,22159937-5005962,00.html

we lost two immense french talents these past weeks, one only last night.

And " arthur fowler" ( for brits who watch eastenders) has died two nights ago.

How great it would be if we had a single director working in Hollywood with even a fraction of the abilities of any one of those four guys. Winter Light, 8 1/2, Diary Of A Chambermaid, and Les Mepris easily get my $20 before Star Wars 6, Indy 4, Pirates 3, or Transformers 1. Though Les Mepris could benefit from giant transmogrifying androids.

darling, it's LE mepris...

 ;D

 :crying:

I love WILD STRAWBERRIES


A lot of people in hollywood were as good... BILLY WILDER & CHARLES CHAPLIN... c'mon...those guys are gods...

WILLIAM WYLER... FRANK CAPRA... DAVID FINCHER (i know he's new but he's damn good), STEVEN SPIELBERG...

Scorcese is still making films!

Lynch.

Either way, more robots.

See, remove the padding and your argument no longer holds up.  :'(
Obviously we aren't going to agree on this but. . . you seriously think that David "Alien 3" Fincher  is comparable in any way to Ingmar Bergman? You forsee a Panic Room/Satyricon double bill in our future?
I am sure there are a handful of american directors from the last 60 years who are the equal of Fellini, Godard et al - but the guys who made Minority Report, Lost Horizon, The Game, Funny Girl aren't in the running - notably, four of your six choices were born outside of america which is an irrelevant but interesting anomaly. 

I'd put John Ford, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman and Orson Welles above your choices and I think they'd come a lot closer to equaling the european auteurs in their contributions to cinema. In contributions to the wallets of studio execs, your guys win hands-down. 

Is Lynch ever going to get a vote from the Academy?

Does he care? He has awards from just about everyone else and four nominations for Oscars (which is probably better than winning one, given the trash he'd be associated  with on the winners list.) As long as he gets to keep making movies he's already won. They'll probably throw him a life-time achievement award once he's too old and crazy to benefit from it.

i loved Personna and Scenes of Mariage .... only saw 4 or 5 movies from bergman, including its "enchanted flute"  .... great director, i'm going to hunt for more.

please lets not cite lynch when talking about great directors ... it's another class.

Damn shame that he passed . The man was insanely talented .


RIP

nigga' please ...

Okay.. Are you saying EVERY single Bergman film is great?

Fincher -- Alien 3, I don't like it... but sometimes you gotta do a shitty first movie to get somewhere... Fight Club, Se7en & Zodiac are phenomenal... The Game is pretty damn good, too...

I forgot Scorsese in there... Taxi Driver - Amazing movie... Casino, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Mean Streets, Gangs of New York, The Departed, etc... all really good...

Minority Report is a damn good movie. Spielberg has some great movies, too, Raiders, Catch me if you can, ET, Close encounters, Jaws, SCHINDLER'S LIST... John Ford & Orson welles are great, I forgot about them... but I think Robert Altman is a little overrated... he's made from real scrubs, as well...


How about Stanley Kubrick? Tell me he's not as good as Bergman... C'mon... The worst movie he's made is EYES WIDE SHUT and I thought it was pretty darn good... Full Metal Jacket, Dr. strangelove, The Killing, Barry Lyndon, Clockword Orange, The Shining, Paths of Glory, etc....

WOODY ALLEN... ANNIE HALL is THE BEST and most intellectual comedy ever... He's up in the running, I should think... Manhattan is great, too... Match Point is pretty good....

oh, and as far as CHARLES CHAPLIN goes... I think he's the single most talented writer and director ever... and despite his british ancestry, he did work for hollywood...?

Look at billy wilder's hollywood repertoire too: Some like it Hot, the Apartment, Stalag 17, Double Indemnity, Witness for the proscution, Sunset Blvd, Ace in the hole, etc....

And here's where I'm going take a real bashing: ROBERT RODRIGUEZ... yeah, all his movies aren't great. That's because he likes cheezy action and horror movies, etc... But take a look at Sin City... tell me the direction in that movie isn't fucking great... Most of the time only 1 actor was being shot at a time when 2 ended up being on the final product... (MARV & KEVIN fighting... each actor shot separately, etc...)

I'm saying that every Bergman film is greater than the George Michael video Fincher did. He may turn out to be a good director but so far he's made only a handful of films, hardly enough to make a case for his being one of the greats, especially as most of his work so far is mediocre.

Spielberg has some decent movies and a whole lot of pap. He makes solid mainstream entertainment, that's the best and worst you can say about him.

Kubrick was great. End of story. Woody Allen has his niche, he's made some fantastic films and some utter abortions (and that's my opinion as a slavish Allen fan), Manhattan is easily one of the best movies ever committed to film while Hollywood Ending and Anything Else are complete travesties. But he fits more easily in the auteur mold than say, for example, Spielberg or . . . my god, Robert Rodriguez?! Really?! Rodriguez is a bag of popcorn and a fanboy hard-on wired to an Avid bay. Nothing wrong with that but he is what he is, give the guy a break.

Yes, Lynch is more like the portal into another world.

and Antonioni died today ... so i watched zabriski point.

Great film!  :rofl:

^Theda Bara, HA!!!

Yeah, I was watching "Eros" the other day and Antonioni did one of the three segments in it...

He is also mentioned in a song from Hair  :peace:

i saw that milos forman film version of Hair it was on Tv at my parents house ... it's kinda cool. they go hard on black people tho !! i guess it was ok to say racist comments at the time :)

I know what you mean!  ::)

sure do' sista