As an artist, Ingmar Bergman drew not just on the cinematic tradition, but on the great traditions of European art and philosophy. People such as Ibsen and Chekhov, Thomas Mann and Nietzsche are all there as influences. He drew on three centuries of European literature. Nobody else in the history of cinema was temperamentally capable of doing that. He was unflinching in his need to talk about the fundamental questions of life in a way that cinema didn't do before him and has hardly done since. That is why he was, to me, the most significant person ever to make movies.There was a moment when he seemed to me among that grand European tradition of directors like Godard, Truffaut and Fellini. In retrospect, we can see that he was singular and unyielding. His work is so incredibly bleak. He made just one Hollywood film [1971's Beröringen, also known as The Touch, starring Elliott Gould, Bibi Andersson, Sheila Reid and Max von Sydow], and that was a disaster because he tried to play it light. It was as if he just didn't have a muscle for comedy.
I'm not noted for my joy as a writer, and so Bergman's films spoke to my sensibilities. I like the darkness of his films and the spectacular performances of hatred and resentment. There is a TV version of Scenes from a Marriage in which Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson are beating each other up and screaming at each other for what seemed like six hours [the 1974 cinematic release was 167 minutes long; the Swedish TV version on DVD has a running time of 299 minutes]. I couldn't look away for a second. I found it absolutely riveting, but I have that constitution.
I first experienced Bergman at Brown University when I was thinking of working in the cinema. I did a course in which I saw great films by Godard and Douglas Sirk, and The Seventh Seal. Bergman's work immediately seemed empowering to me. It's hard to cite a direct Bergman influence in my writing, but the ambition he manifested in his films to tackle the big issues of God, spirituality, alienation and estrangement really did blaze a path. He was fearless in discussing these questions in cinema even though he ran the risk of being called pretentious. That doggedness, that daring is so rare.
I still have a great regard for Fanny and Alexander, which is a bit lighter than his bleakest films, such as Cries and Whispers or Persona. It combines the rigours of realism - thanks to the cinematography of Sven Nykvist and the costumes - with the register of dreams and fantasies that come to us from folkloric narratives, all in the service of revealing how a young boy comes of age. It's almost magic realism. In that, it sits alongside Thomas Mann, Heinrich von Kleist, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and August Strindberg.
There is no one who can compare to him now. Scorsese has a consistency of vision, so even if Gangs of New York isn't perfect, it still contributes to an overall canon of Scorsese. It's the same with Bergman: even his earlier, lesser films constitute part of a great canon. Other film-makers - Truffaut, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski - dealt with great themes, but none with the same consistency of ambition as Bergman.
Beeban KidronFilm director
I'm a huge fan. I've just asked someone to rent me Wild Strawberries so I can watch it tonight and have my own private wake. It's one of my favourite films and it's so evocative about time and mortality, how it's fast when you're old and slow when you're young. It says so much in so few words.
He deals in metaphor. It's all very sparse in the dialogue so there's a lot of room for reflection and imagination in the audience. I recently watched Fanny and Alexander on a long train journey, and the man is a master. Extraordinary that cinema was his hobby and theatre was his profession. I was very sad to hear he had died, although he more than most had prepared for mortality, given that he'd made so many films about it.
Thomas VinterbergFilm director
I watched Fanny and Alexander three hours ago. I think it's the best film ever made. I showed it to a person a lot younger than me, and she was in tears, and said it was the best film she'd ever seen. She's 19 and I was curious to see if it was too slow for her, if it was outdated, but apparently not.
I talked to him some years ago. He was very, very uplifting, a happy man, actually. He was fooling around, very light-spirited, playful. He gave me a lot of good advice, such as how to handle success, and how to handle failure. I remember every word of it. He asked me if I'd decided what to do after my film, and when I said no, he said, "Well you're fucked," and I said, "Why?" and he said, "One thing that can happen is that you fail, and it won't be good for your self-confidence. It's much worse if you have success - you're absolutely paralysed by it. So you always have to decide your next movie before the opening of the present one." And he was so right. You don't turn into a career pilot, trying to navigate by success or failure, instead of deciding from your heart.
The thing that interests me as a film-maker, having trouble deciding whether I'm supposed to make Danish movies or English-language movies, is that Bergman stuck to his own project - he made films in Sweden, in Swedish, with his own actors, and instead of trying to become someone by leaving his country, he stayed and made his country something, which is a very proud thing to do. Of course, the world was bigger back then: London and New York were further away. But still, it's inspirational. I think he's definitely the biggest inspiration in Scandinavia, ever, in film-making.
Fanny and Alexander was the film that had the biggest emotional impact on me. I saw his first eight or nine movies at film school, and I was a bit bored, because I was restless, and too young. I also think he grew better and better. And then, when I saw Fanny and Alexander a couple of years after film school, I fell completely in love. My main inspiration for Festen was Fanny and Alexander. I admitted to him that I stole a scene from it, and he laughed. And either he or someone else told me that he stole it from The Leopard - the one where they're dancing round the house. It's a common tradition in both Denmark and Sweden, so it's like stealing a tradition, really. But still, it was definitely a robbery.
The thing I liked about Fanny and Alexander is that I got to know a whole family as if they really existed. Those are people I'll never forget. I'll always relate to them. I'll always remember the weird uncle farting. It's a piece of life, really, and that's what I adore.
Hari KunzruNovelist
One afternoon a teacher decided to use double general studies to show us The Seventh Seal. I saw Max von Sydow playing chess with Death on the beach (the most heavy metal image ever committed to film) and knew I'd try to see everything this director had made. I haven't yet, but Bergman has popped up at several key moments in my life, always as a revelation. I saw Scenes from a Marriage in a stifling flat and asked myself what I was doing with the woman beside me. Von Sydow, playing the tormented artist in Hour of the Wolf (more compact, more threatening, the name, in Swedish, as Vargtimmen), said: "A minute can seem like an eternity - it's beginning now," and I realised something was being taught to me about making art: here was a minute of screen time, an experience shared between the characters and the audience. Bergman was good because he was so literal, able to put things down so precisely.
Michael WinnerFilm director
I was brought up on Ingmar Bergman during my days in Cambridge. He was the god of original cinema, of thoughtful cinema, of creative cinema, and he was an enormous influence on my life. He was not only a film genius but he was unique. No one made films like him, before or since. The brooding intensity, coupled with a fantastic visual style - it was mesmerising.
I remember when Smiles of a Summer Night was on at a small cinema on the outskirts of Cambridge. The owner said: "No one's going to come to see it." But there was a queue around the cinema because there was a scene with a naked woman running along a beach for 15 seconds. In those days [1955] it was revolutionary. A lot of people who would never otherwise see an Ingmar Bergman film were standing in line.
My favourite of his films is The Seventh Seal - it has this wonderful Gothic symbolism. It was not one of my main influences, but it definitely went into my memory bank.
You would never get anyone like him today. We have moved into a more mechanistic, flash-bang-wallop type of cinema and art cinema is very difficult to get made.
Sheila ReidActor
I had been playing Mrs Elvsted in his Hedda Gabler at the National Theatre. His PA rang to say he wanted me in his film. When I realised she wasn't joking, I was thrilled: I'd have gone anywhere to work with him again. I think I'm the only Briton to have been in a Bergman film. It was a small part in Ingmar's first English-language film, The Touch, with Bibi Andersson, Max von Sydow and Elliott Gould. Oddly, I played Elliott's sister: she was tall, dark and Jewish; I'm small, Scottish and fair.
I had one scene, in which Andersson visits me. I'm an alcoholic and I have a problem with my hands. On set Ingmar asked me: "What would an English apartment look like when you're about to move house?" I said: "I might have somewhere to put the bottle, a chair, some curtains I've only half removed." He said: "Yes. That's what we've done. What would you say if somebody rang the doorbell?" I said: "Come in. I can't make you a cup of tea." We improvised the scene like that."
I have a photo of him just before he said "Action." He has his hands on my shoulders and intense concentration in his eyes. You can see he's putting his energy into my body and I'm receiving it. Six months earlier I met him for dinner. I asked if he wanted to talk about my part. He said: "No. You know her already." I did - he had written the part for me because he had observed me when I auditioned. I was rather unhappy then and he noticed that.
On set everybody from the prop boys upwards paid attention when a scene was being shot - unusual for film. There was incredible energy on the set. He was the same on Hedda Gabler. We rehearsed from 11am to 4pm with only a 20-minute lunch break so no concentration drop after lunch. He really stretched us. He gave me very helpful notes that said things like "She is a candle that never goes out" and "She has a screen inside her up to her neck." I was extremely fortunate to have worked with Ingmar in both theatre and cinema.
David ThomsonFilm critic
Long before the end, Ingmar Bergman elected to live on a small island off the coast of Sweden. It was a way of saying he was alone with his work and his lovers - and probably no one knew the loneliness better than the lovers, and the children, who saw how he put their smiles, their eyes, their meals, their untidy beds on the screen. They had to live with his ruthless and obsessive use of their smiles, their faces and their youth. It was not unkind, but it was not kind either, in the way of reassurance or loyalty. It told everyone that everything changes, yet remains the same. So he would live on an island and then perhaps the foolish film festivals would stop asking him to come and be honoured. Didn't they know that making the films was the only thing that kept him alive or anywhere near calm?
The way Bergman's work and Bergman's pain were in equation struck me early on and almost by chance. In 1957, he made Wild Strawberries, in which a great man, a professor, is going to a kind of film festival to be honoured for his career. He is Isak Borg, played by Victor Sjostrom (the pioneering figure in the Swedish film industry and Bergman's mentor). But as he travels toward his honorary degree, so Borg dreams and remembers and feels shocked by his private failures. We can see that he is a cold man attracted to the warmth of others - and I think Bergman saw himself the same way.
Wild Strawberries is a great film, struggling to reconcile inward failure and outward success. I realised that it was the same "story" as a film I had seen two years earlier - Citizen Kane, in which an old man dies and has his last thoughts filled by the same grim debate: was I wretched in all my glory? Maybe all great films say the same thing.
Bergman saw the resemblance between the medieval dance of death and the modern waiting for apocalypse. But that tension was only the larger projection of a small, ordinary anxiety: will love last or betray itself? The director who strikes me most as a direct descendant is Andrei Tarkovsky - the latter's The Sacrifice is as true a Bergman film as Liv Ullmann's Faithless. But every great director, every one committed to the work, and prepared to live on an island as opposed to the Beverly Hills Hotel, has surely found themselves making their own variant of a Bergman film.
Cast an eye back over the great Bergman pictures, from Sawdust and Tinsel to Fanny and Alexander, from Cries and Whispers to Smiles of a Summer Night, and this is how you know them - there is hardly a special effect in the canon. Save one: the human face in joy and terror, lost or in flux. For Bergman, the face was always the same: always constant and always fresh.
· Interviews by Aida Edemariam, Stuart Jeffries and Tim Lusher.
