Ingmar Bergman dead at 89

SWEDISH director Ingmar Bergman, an iconoclastic filmmaker widely regarded as one of the great masters of modern cinema, has died. He was 89.
Bergman died at his home in Faro, Sweden, Swedish news agency TT said, citing his daughter Eva Bergman.
Through more than 50 films, Bergman's vision encompassed all the extremes of his beloved Sweden: the claustrophobic gloom of unending winter nights, the gentle merriment of glowing summer evenings and the bleak magnificence of the island where he spent his last years.
Bergman, who approached difficult subjects such as plague and madness with inventive technique and carefully honed writing, became one of the towering figures of serious filmmaking.
He was "probably the greatest film artist, all things considered, since the invention of the motion picture camera", fellow filmmaker Woody Allen said in a 70th birthday tribute in 1988.
Bergman first gained international attention with 1955's Smiles of a Summer Night, a romantic comedy that inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music.
The Seventh Seal (1957), an allegorical tale of the medieval Black Plague years, contains one of cinema's most famous scenes, a knight playing chess with the shrouded figure of Death.
"I was terribly scared of death," Bergman said of his state of mind when making the film, which was nominated for an Academy Award in the best picture category.
The film distilled the essence of Bergman's work — high seriousness, flashes of unexpected humour and striking images.
Though best known internationally for his films, Bergman was also a prominent stage director. He worked at several playhouses in Sweden from the mid-1940s, including the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, which he headed from 1963 to 1966. He staged many plays by the Swedish author August Strindberg, whom he cited as an inspiration.
The influence of Strindberg's gruelling and precise psychological dissections could be seen in the production that brought Bergman an even wider audience: 1973's Scenes from a Marriage. First produced as a six-part series for television, then released in a theatre version, it is an intense detailing of the disintegration of a marriage.